Quoting tlevel:

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Just wondering how people envision this working.

You lock a name like John Doe, then what? Someone changes the name to Jane Doe what would you expect to happen? The new cast member Jane Doe would not get added to the local?

Correct. To the local version of the one profile in which you've locked that name down. Or to all the profiles, if you've done more than one.

In addition to the benefits of managing uncredited cast as kdh1949 has pointed out, it would also help in instances where actors are credited with different spellings or initials. I know that this is what "credited as" was designed to fix, but it's not as simple as all that and there's a fair bit of ping-ponging going on.

Right now, if I go through and make all my credits of Robert Downey, Jr. be uniformly formatted, that would be eventually end up getting messed up because others have differing opinions as to whether he should be credited with the comma or whether he shouldn't.

If we could lock down individual entries on a profile level we could manage those kinds of things ourselves.

The "custom filmography" feature of DVD Profiler is one of my primary uses of the program, and I'd love to be able to fix certain cast links permanently without locking the entire cast list of a profile.

KM

Quoting goodguy:

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Well, good luck with implementing that. I have written a Diff engine for Profile Comparison Plus and I can tell you that it isn't a piece of cake to determine if something is intended to be an insertion or a replacement. The algorithm can only guess, and sometimes it will be wrong.

For example:
If you have "locked" John Doe, how do you no for sure Jane Doe is a replacement that you don't want to have? Maybe it is a completely new entry that should be added.

And don't forget complex complex cast/crew lists for TV shows, where names appear multiple times. A cast/crew update may contain reordered entries, removed entries, replaced entries, changed dividers etc.

Again. a good algorithm will guess right quite often, but it never will be 100% correct. Bottom line: that lock idea is moot.

I agree - it seems doomed to failure - as you have said how would it know a change was a change and not an addition. Especially if any of the names are moved..    I can see the list of the cast growing and growing..

Quoting widescreenforever:

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If you have the entire DVD locked,, how can cast and crew be changed?  it is locked too, You allow the changes manually.  When You go to 'refresh' a locked DVD  it will not allow any changes unless you your self allow the individually checked changes INCLUDING  crew and cast..

Well, yeah. That's the point of this request. You could then keep parts of the cast list locked without missing out on other updates to the cast list.

But if goodguy's right that it'd be hard or impossible to implement, I suppose there's not much point in having this discussion. Although I definitely would like to hear Ken's official word on the possibility of doing it before forgetting all about it.

KM

Quoting northbloke:

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Maybe instead of a lock we could have a more detailed accept/decline process for cast and crew where, if they want to, a user can accept or decline individual changes rather than the whole list.

Absolutely. This is especially interesting now that the new types of crew will be added. That doesn't mean any other changes need to be accepted. Especially since many contributors don't even check if what they have is correct. I have noticed several already that did not use the checkbox for voice, but have something like "(voi"