The iCheckMovies Blog

During the last one and a half year, we have been totally flabbergasted by the number of fans totally devoted to iCheckMovies. One of the best fans has been Larry Wymer, which help in improving the website has been invaluable.

Not so long ago, Larry contacted me with a simple question: would there be an official iCheckMovies discussion page? Unfortunately, we do not have time for something like that at the moment. Larry was not easily discouraged, and suggested he'd create an unofficial discussion page. We felt this was a great idea! The end result is an all-new Facebook group where you can discuss everything related to iCheckMovies. Here is the link to the
iCheckMovies facebook group. There you can discuss anything from specific top lists (like the IMDb top 250), to how to improve the website (there is a discussion on how to detect cheaters). As you probably know, we take our user's feedback extremely serious so let that encourage you to really participate in the group.

Please note that although we support this Facebook group page, it is not an official iCheckMovies page. Therefore, ideas posted there might are not necessarily our views. However, don't let that deter you from joining as we will be hanging around there too. So go ahead, go join the iCheckMovies facebook group!

Despite the tropic-like weather over here, we have made great progress last week. One 2.0 part that is nearing completion is the new 'groups' feature.

Our lead developer Erik will walk you trough this iCM 2.0 addition in our new video blog: Groups.

Yeah we know you really want us to put iCheckMovies 2.0 online, but we're still working on it unfortunately. But as you guys and girls have all been so patient with us (aside from the occasional encouraging email), we wanted to reward you. What better way to do that than by adding two, much requested, new lists?

First of all there is the new list issued by the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They website: Ain't Nobody's Blues But My Own. It is a list dedicated solely to those little, not well-known gems. Lots of new films to discover we'd say!

The second list is Empire Magazine's The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema, containing great films which spoken language is not English.

We hope you like the new lists. Expect another video blog on a new iCheckMovies 2.0 feature soon!

Cheers,

The iCheckMovies team

One of the most requested features for version 2.0 is the 'add your own list' feature. Our designer Piet will give you a sneak preview in our first video blog: Adding your own movie lists .

We know you guys really want iCheckMovies 2.0 to be released. We are working our proverbial asses off, but to ease the waiting we will be posting a series of iCM 2.0 preview blog posts. In these posts, we will be highlighting a particular feature of iCM 2.0 to give you a taste of what is to come. Today, we start with a feature requested in about two gazillion emails: the ability to check any movie you'd like.

On iCM, you can check a lot of movies. However, you are limited to those movies that are (or have been) in at least one top list. iCM 2.0 will let you check any movie. This is achieved by letting you, our much-valued users, add movies to our database. The only resctriction is that the movie must have its own page on IMDb.com.

How does this work? Well, there are actually two scenarios: you add individual movies or you add a list of movies at once. For adding individual movies, you only need one piece of information: the movie's IMDb page. Suppose we want to add the following two movies: Cloaca (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0165832/) and Interstate 60: Episodes of the Road (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0165832/). Having found their IMDb pages, we now have all the information needed to add them. The first step is to go to the (new) movie add page. There you will see three different input fields:

• IMDb MyMovies list URL: add a list of movies at once by adding the contents of an IMDb MyMovies list.
• IMDb movie URLs: add individual movies by specifying their IMDb pages.
• Upload file: upload a plaintext (.txt) or comma-separated (.csv) file that can contain any combination of IMDb MyMovies list URLs and IMDb movie URLs.

Let's return to our example. As we wanted to add two individual movies, we add their IMDb URLs to the IMDb movie URLs textarea. Note that each entry must be on a separate line. The end result would thus look like this:



Now the last step is, surprise surprise, to click the "Import movies" button. You will then be redirected to a page that will show you the result of the import:



You might note that it says movie import queue. What this means is that movies are not added instantaneously to the database, but are first placed in a queue that will be steadily processed in the background. To ensure that you do know when your movies have been added, you can opt to receive a notification when they have been processed (and consequently removed from the queue).

Once the queued item has been processed, you can start checking the movie(s) just like any other movie! That means you can now finally keep track of all movies you have seen on iCM (which will save us a lot of time not having to answer all those emails ;) ). The import queue is of course clever enough to not add items that have already been added and will tell you this on the import results screen. To further ease things, importing your IMDb vote history will automatically add any missing movies to the database.

The second option is to put the movies you want to import on an IMDb MyMovies list. This option has one very big advantage: all the movies on the list are added at once when the list is processed. Consequently, your movies will be added to iCM much faster if you put them on an IMDb MyMovies list instead of adding each movie individually. I could have added the two aforementioned movies by using the following IMDb MyMovies list: http://www.imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=45157094.

The third option kinda speaks for itself. You can upload a plaintext (.txt) or comma-separated (.csv) file that can contain any combination of IMDb MyMovies list URLs and IMDb movie URLs.

We hope you will like this functionality! So go on, start creating those IMDb MyMovies lists!

edit:
There were some misunderstandings on how this feature fits into the current iCheckMovies structure. First of all, the focus of the website does not change, this is just an additional feature. Top lists will remain the heart of the website, the top users, neighbors and recommendations will all be calculated the exact same way in iCM 2.0. That means that only movies in the top lists created by us will be taken into account for those algorithms. New movies will not be taken into account, unless they make their appearance in one of the top lists.

Furthermore, this is an essential feature to allow you guys to create personal top lists. We have very limited time and there have been dozens and dozens of top lists suggested that we would love to add to the website, but for which we cannot find the time. Allowing users to create personal lists only makes sense when new movies can be added, as one otherwise ends up with the same lists over and over again.

The personal top lists are also an optional feature, if you do not want to they will not be shown.

And yes, the number of checked movies will only take into account those movies that belong to one or more top lists, just like it is now. The competitive aspect of the website is thus left unchanged.

As some of you noted, the search functionality was kinda broken so we fixed it. Furthermore, we updated the Top 100 Spiritually Significant Films and National Film Registry top lists.

Not so long ago, the Doubling the Canon list was updated so a lot of people requested us to update the list. Well, we did. We also updated the ordering of the German list as it was off. Go check out both lists:

• Doubling the Canon
• The 100 Most Significant German Films

Furthermore, there was no explanation of how your rank was calculated so here it is.

Finally, a bug was fixed that ensured that the United States were not shown on the user map.

Cheers.

Although we received a lot of positive feedback on the new top lists, some of you felt we really missed out on some countries. This release rectifies some of those concerns, in particular the lack of a list for la bella italia. Besides the Italian list, you guys can now immerse yourself in more foreign languages with the addition of African, Norwegian and Latin-American movies lists. The fifth list is one for the Grindhouse lovers (with input from Quentin Tarantino). These are the lists that have been added:

• The Deuce Top 20
• Amanda Award - Best Film
• One hundred film and one country, Italy
• Cinema Tropical - Top Ten Latin American Films of the Decade (2000-2009)
• FESPACO - Étalon de Yennenga

Finally, we added new functionality that allows you to compare yourself to another user and see what movies you have seen and the other user has not (hey, everyone likes to brag a bit, don't they?). This also works the other way around (too help you get even with that pesky movie-buff friend of yours). This functionality can be accessed through the user context-menu, which can be found on pages such as your neighbors and friends pages.

Ciao!

p.s. that spelling error in the Italian list's title is also in the original, don't blame the messenger! ;)

We got a lot of positive feedback on the country-specific top lists, so we decided to add another six of them! You can now explore the wonderful cinemas of Sweden, Hollande, Spain, Mexico, Germany and Russia. Furthermore, we added the much requested, inflation-corrected, all time box office list. Here are the new lists:

• All Time Box Office (inflation corrected)
• Russian Guild Of Film Critics - Best Russian Films
• The 100 Most Significant German Films
• Nederlands Film Festival - Gouden Kalf
• Guldbagge Award
• Goya Award
• Ariel Award

Although we enthusiastically announced that we fixed a bug in the IMDb import (which we did), we inadvertently introduced another bug (regression testing anyone?). But hey, since we are such nice guys we fixed the bug. Hope everything works okay now.