2019/2020 Improvement Mission

Yes and no. Our Top 100 is full of great spags, however, once you leave our Top 100 and move down the list, things start to get pretty spotty and dicey. Besides, the list doesn’t mention a lot of good spags that deserve some attention too despite not being Top 20 material. It surely makes sense for the more well-known entries, but user ratings would make a lot more sense specifically in case of lesser-known outings and this is also where IMDb ratings tend to fail miserably and start to get really random IMHO: it’s because of the low number of votes skewing the ratings in all kinds of unpredictable ways. In such instances, I choose to browse our forum in order to gauge what sort of movie I’m in for.

IMDb has popularity rankings or something like it, it would make some more sense, but that has its downsides too I guess.

I’m aware of that. It’s just that I believe that at the beginning of the 2010s, there were more polls with a 5-star rating system tied specifically to film’s dedicated threads. Those are gone and they were quite nice.

Yeah, it definitely needs a more conspicuous name so that it can stand out from other topics, I’ll think of something in a minute. We can also use it as a sort of sketchbook for our overall thoughts, general user feedback, spitballing ideas and that sort of stuff. It would be helpful if the thread was either permanently pinned on SWDb’s main page or at the top of our forum’s main page.

For instance, we could perhaps dedicate one small window on the SWDb main page (perhaps somewhere at the bottom of it), asking visitors to notify the staff of possible issues with the database. We could link the forum thread after a short preface in the likes of “Any trouble browsing the database? Any broken links? Any thoughts as to how you’d improve the browsing experience? Join our forums and share your thoughts and findings”. One could also leave some links to films’ pages there, asking for more development and quick fixes and whatnot, yada yada yada. It would be both for forum users as well as people working on the database.

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I would even go a step further and put such a note on every page on the SWDb, a bit like the newsletter banner at the bottom of all the pages on the GCDb

Makes even more sense. Working on a thread right now.

It’d would make the site even more interactive and it would encourage more people to participate in the development, which would in turn make things easier for everybody I imagine. Sometimes, it’s not even a question of time, it’s more about being aware of what issues are at the moment and these can be sometimes hard to pick out. Maybe we could even have some kind of contact form that allows unregistered users of the database to inform the staff of possible issues with the site.

Yes my plan for the upcoming database upgrade (under the hood) is to also put the contact form back, even though it is a pain in the ass to make those spam proof.

Yeah, that’s a major PITA. If there was a way to sift out spam, maybe all SWDb members could then get notified of any issues through the contact form and then it would make refining and correcting the database very swift and easy I imagine.

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Gracias amigo

I am mulling a complete redesign/relaunch of the SWDb to drastically improve the way it can be used by anyone more intuitively. I may just try it out at some point, but I still haven’t implemented the new search, which is actually more crucial. Sorry about that, but just haven’t been touched by the hacker-muse… might be something for my winter vacation :slight_smile:

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So I did… and I am making some progress. Unfortunately the new search will still take a while longer, I looked into it and it exceeds my tech skills, so might have to either dig deeper or hire someone to do it. Now, the good news is that with the redesign the end result won’t look drastically different, it’ll be more refined in a lot of the details and possibly be more future proof. The bad news is that it will trigger site wide overhauls of movie pages, reviews and other content. But then again, that was way overdue anyhow…
I will post a before and after screenshot shortly just as a teaser.

So I am aware it’s been a while since a lot of people care about the ins and outs of the database (which is great, because for the most part it’s there and it works), but still, I am never satisfied, and at least I hope some of you can chime in with some feedback.
If you scroll up some to December 2019, I have toyed around a bit with making the movie pages better. And they really need to become better.
So here’s a screenshot of something I put together today. What you don’t see here is further down (reviews), the rest is just displayed a bit more intuitively maybe, instead of a long menu beneath the poster that most people don’t look at:

I think the poster could even be a bit bigger and the little box “I called it file, could be the ‘wanted’-handbill of the movie” maybe more compact and possibly getting a light gray shade…

Further down on the page I am trying some things out as to standardized icons for external film sites

Seb, is editing still disabled in the Db or is it just me? I notice no one has an edit for a couple of days except you. I’ve taken care of my cache.

It is, will re enable in an hour or so. It was a precaution

:+1:

OK try now

It works! :clap:

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no reactions to this? :wink:

A main stumbling block is that some unresolved technical issues still stand in the way of a decision to move forward with a small scale SWDb redesign. Once resolved, the way film entries will look like is something I want to implement along with it. Other tweaks will include introductory text on all pages (“This is a sub page that lists pictures of movie XYZ”) to make things more self explanatory and human friendly.

I need to know what all the possible info is (or items, cateogires, aspects) that a movie entry in the SWDb could theatrically cover. Of course we don’t have all that stuff for all movies, but for a few maybe. For some movie entries we may have some latest news and screening info, for others we may have extensive censorship notes, others we may barely have the essentials. So now I am drawing up a template that first of all includes the maximum kind of information. You can see it rudimentarily at https://www.spaghetti-western.net/index.php/Main_Page/filmseite
Please ignore the optics for now, but let me know what we are missing, what you would add, change, structurally and in terms of content. thanks!

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I was thinking about “script” and “info from the dvd/blu ray”.
Let me explain; I have the Vengeance dvd with the Spanish subtitles. I had the idea to translate all the subtitles, so I can follow the movie. But that is a lot of work.
And I have a few Explosive Media Mediabooks. The booklets are great, but I don’t speak German. It would be nice to read the info from these booklets on SWDb, but I don’t know if that’s okay by Koch. And again, somebody has to translate all the information.

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Not a bad idea. I too have German mediabooks that I have thought about translating in order to read, but I haven’t done so as yet - and I doubt if I will tbh because its a lot of work and I don’t necessarily buy them for that purpose anyway.

Funny coincidence, today I was using Google Translate on my phone to understand the text included in the German edition of The Hellbenders.

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