Display release year on FanFare front page?

November 11, 2022 11:50 PM

When you click into them, FanFare posts show the release year for the movie or show being discussed. ("The 4th Man (1983)"). Can the year also be visible after the title on the Fanfare front page? As the focus of FanFare seems to have shifted away from new releases, this could be helpful in sorting through the posts.
posted by Clustercuss to Feature Requests at 11:50 PM (11 comments total)

Adding the point that it would also be helpful to someone who wants to read about the 1935 KING KONG, but not the 1976 one.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:23 AM on November 12, 2022 [3 favorites]

Yeah I like this. And even more generally, I am pretty enthused about movies from the 70s to the present day but not so interested in movies from like the 30s. This would be a good way for me to not have my heart broken by reading an interesting introduction to find out it was a silent film from 1924, or whatever.
posted by Literaryhero at 4:18 AM on November 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

I have one more FanFare pony request to consider for the list! When you look to add a movie, that search is so good. It lets you see a list of movies at a glance, and which ones are already posted, with a link to that post! Less good is the search at the start of the page to simply look for a post that's already posted. Maybe the good search could be utilized more?

I also support this year change idea, quite a bit.
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:21 AM on November 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

I am casting my vote for years on the front page!
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 8:43 AM on November 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

I also wonder if there might be value in adding a field where we could enter an availability listing. JustWatch is commonly used, but I wouldn't necessarily want to see us set up for that, as it may get surpassed, and FF should stay as future proof as it can.

It would also be cool if FF could auto link the Rotten Tomatoes listing as it does the iMDB one.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:24 AM on November 13, 2022 [3 favorites]

I really like all of these ideas. One of the things I know the SC is looking at post-fundraiser is what does a road map look like for making changes, adding features and otherwise building out some of the subsites. FanFare was basically mathowie's last real thing and has had a few changes and additions lately but really has a lot of potential.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 2:58 PM on November 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

Sounds like adding the year to the title on the front page is uncontroversial and positive, so I'll put that on the pile of things to do. I expect it should be pretty simple, although for somewhat arcane reasons the bit of code that generates the title on the front page isn't something I have access to, so I'm not 100% sure.

The other suggestions here sound positive, but realistically will not be things we're likely to work on until we have more people able to effectively work on the codebase.

Rotten Tomatoes specifically I don't expect to be very doable, since we currently only have the IMDB ID for each movie, and I can't find any way to correlate that with the Rotten Tomatoes ID. If anyone knows of a easy way to do that correlation, please do tell. OMDb provides the Rotten Tomatoes score by IMDB ID, so clearly it's possible, but I have no idea how they do the correlation — my guess is by scraping the Rotten Tomatoes website, which seems like a huge pain, but if they've already done the work they might be open to providing that correlation via their API.

It looks like JustWatch has an API, although you need to talk to them to get access — not sure how $$$ that would be, or what the privacy concerns there look like, but it would probably be worth reaching out to them once we have the capacity to do more development on FanFare.
posted by wesleyac at 6:10 AM on November 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

Even if there were just fields for "availability listing" (with a note that a person could use JustWatch, ReelGood, or even just direct link to the sole provider), that would be cool.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:00 AM on November 14, 2022

Currently there's a field for "URL: A link to stream or purchase" — where does that link end up getting put?

I guess my thought is that if we're concerned about a specific service becoming defunct/supplanted, it's better to automatically provide the data from the IMDB ID if that's possible, since that means that we can change the provider for all posts at once, and also makes less work for the person doing the posting. Obviously if that's not doable, then something is better than perfect, though :)
posted by wesleyac at 7:27 AM on November 14, 2022

Similarly if possible, it would be great to be able to see the year when you’re typing a title in to the “Find a Show, Movie, Book or Podcast” search box. Given the prevalence of remakes, it’s nice to be able to go right to the one you’re looking for.
posted by skycrashesdown at 9:40 AM on November 14, 2022

Currently there's a field for "URL: A link to stream or purchase" — where does that link end up getting put?

AFAICT... nowhere.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 11:35 AM on November 15, 2022