We’ve been working hard the past few months, and are happy to finally announce the release of the long-awaited Collections functionality at Criticker!

The concept of Criticker Collections is pretty straight-forward: they allow you to gather groups of films together. But there are some things about them which deserve highlighting.

You can choose to create collections that are public, private or hidden.

Public: Any user may add films to your collection. You retain the ability to moderate the collection, and ban specific users from it.
Private: Other users may view this collection, but not add to it.
Hidden: Collections which are for your eyes only.

You can change the type of your collections whenever you see fit.

You will receive a daily update of all the films other users have added to your public collections. You can opt out of this update, if you’d like.

We started work on Collections immediately after releasing the recent Tag functionality at Criticker, because that revealed the huge demand for the ability to group films together. Most of the current tags will be converted to Public Collections, owned by whoever originally created the tag. This process has already started, and should be done within a week or so. If you’ve created tags that have been converted, you’ll receive an email. Likewise if you’ve created a tag that you’d like to have converted, please email us and let us know.

All the filtering and browsing options available from our Film List are available at the collections level, too. You can also see a list of any user’s collections, if you go to their list of rankings.

As we convert tags into collections, we’re also restricting what the term “tag” means at Criticker, to one of three things: Central Theme, Setting or Subgenre. More information can be found here.

We’ve introduced a new forum, to concentrate on Collections. Users will likely need a place to trumpet the awesome, bizarre, or thoughtful collections they’ve made, and this will be where they can do it.

If we didn’t despise the overuse of the term “Beta” so much, we’d call this release: Criticker Collections Beta. That is to say, despite the hours of testing we’ve logged, we expect a few problems to be uncovered in the first few days. Please let us know about any you find via email, or the Forums. Likewise, suggestions or comments are always welcome.

That’s it for now! We hope you all like the new changes, and thank you again for using Criticker! Now, let’s start building some collections!