I find myself declining profile updates if it removes the birth year of one of the cast members 

I would like a lock on "Birth Year", please 

I see, thanks 8BallMax.

I guess I should have asked in the Tech forum on this one!

pauls42

It is possible you picked these up like a lot of us when the initial headsot profiles where created. The only thing I can suggest is going through your local DB and removing the ones you don't want, once removed they should not re-propergate unless in the main DB.

Goodguy's excel plugin (I think that's the one?) may help you find any BY rather than scan every actor profile.

But yes they where as pest to start with until the implication that documentation was required to justify inclusion into the main DB.

Steve

If the profile downloads with an actor with a BY, it's safe to leave those there.  Those are good and valid BY's.

I really don't understand the problem with the BY that people seem to be seeing. If you have 1 actor named John Doe in your database and he's in 10 profiles, they will all link to each other, and people don't seem to have an issue or problem with that. But if you download a new profile, or even an existing one that John Doe has a birthyear, guess what? They will all still link together. As all your John Doe profiles that had 0 as a birthyear will now have a real life birthyear. If the name is exactly the same, nothing will change, if you didn't check to see if John Doe without a birthyear was correctly linked to all the other John Does without a birthyear, why do you now have to check to see if all the birthyears are correct for each profile? If there was 2 different John Doe's the only way to separate them out is to use birthyears anyway. As long as the birthyear is correct for that person, it's good data, no harm will come of it.

Actually there are 3 Harrison Ford's, one with a BY of 1890, 1942 and one with zero. So that's a situation that needs to be corrected for a different reason.

Quoting tlevel:

Quote:
I really don't understand the problem with the BY that people seem to be seeing. If you have 1 actor named John Doe in your database and he's in 10 profiles, they will all link to each other, and people don't seem to have an issue or problem with that. But if you download a new profile, or even an existing one that John Doe has a birthyear, guess what? They will all still link together. As all your John Doe profiles that had 0 as a birthyear will now have a real life birthyear. If the name is exactly the same, nothing will change, if you didn't check to see if John Doe without a birthyear was correctly linked to all the other John Does without a birthyear, why do you now have to check to see if all the birthyears are correct for each profile? If there was 2 different John Doe's the only way to separate them out is to use birthyears anyway. As long as the birthyear is correct for that person, it's good data, no harm will come of it.

Not quite. Say I have Harrison Ford (1890), Harrison Ford (blank). I download a profile with Harrison Ford (1890) - all the ones with blank are changed to 1890.

Quoting pauls42:

Quote:

Not quite. Say I have Harrison Ford (1890), Harrison Ford (blank). I download a profile with Harrison Ford (1890) - all the ones with blank are changed to 1890.

Like I said before, Harrison Ford (because there are 3 of them, not because of Harrison Ford per se) is a different situtation.

You are thinking a blank BY as a separate person. DVDp is looking at a blank BY as simply missing data and will try to correct it the first chance it gets.