If only we had finished this new feature up, before welcoming so many new members from the great Lifehacker article, which put Criticker on its list of top movie recommendation sites!
A resource to automatically upload ratings has been long clamored for by the Critcker community, and we’ve finally had a chance to work on it. Now, using this tool, you can easily and quickly transfer your ratings from IMDb to Criticker. The tool keeps tiers intact — a rating of “8″ on IMDb will translate to a “Tier 8″ ranking on Criticker. So, if your tier 8 ranges from 70-75, the tool would store the ranking as “73″.
Importing will also create a special collection of all the ratings imported, so that you can easily tweak and batch edit the scores as you see fit. If you’ve already ranked a film at Criticker, the import ignores it.
Cool? We’re going to be expanding this tool, so that Criticker can import ratings from other websites. Let us know in the comments which you’d like to see!
This is great news.
How will it assign ratings to people who have new accounts and don’t have tiers yet?
How will it deal with films not in the database?
The collection idea is a good one, though maybe allowing users to designate what the imdb rating should convert to before the import is an option that would be worth implementing in the future. I know my own imdb scores do not correspond to my tiers and I doubt most people’s do.
For new users (or those with less than 10 rankings), it simply multiplies the IMDB score by 10. 1 = 10, 2 = 20, and so on. And it skips films which aren’t in the database (actually, providing a link to the Submit Film page, in case the importer is so inclined).
That’s an interesting idea about allowing users to pre-map the rating conversion. We’ll think about that.
Just imported my rankings, a couple of quick notes.
The list is great, but it’d be nice to bea able to sort it by the third column so all the new rankings get bunched together and the films not in the database get bunched together. Ctrl-F makes this not a big deal but it’d be nice.
For the submit film link, I think that the tt number should be converted to a link to imdb, so people can easily identify what the film is.
Before you do that, though, there are two issues that will come up.
One is that some imdb entries have two entries on Criticker. Apocalypse Now and The Exorcist are the two I noticed. I think right now those both map to the redux versions, which may not be the best behaviour.
The second is that some films have changed imdb ids from those on criticker. I’m not sure how server intensive fixing that would be or how many films it affects, but I found five in my ratings. My thought would be to query all the imdb and check if imdb redirects them, and fix those that are redirected. In the meantime I’ll submit the changes for those films I’ve found.
Those are pretty minor things and it seems to work great. Wish this had been here when I joined. Good job.
Oh, and the import collection seems to be set to private but not hidden. It should probably be hidden.
Thanks for those notes — we also realized that we’ll need to better handle imports of giant numbers of rankings. So, a few tweaks will be coming over the next few days.
this is a very useful and great tool.
if other personal lists(those were not rated yet) at imdb could be imported, it would be greater. then, our old imdb lists can be converted to criticker collections easily.
Wow, that timing was just barely off wasn’t it?
Thanks for posting in the import imdb.com ratings feature request thread too, as when you do a google search for “criticker IMDB vote import” that page is the number one result.
This was definitely what was holding me back from checking you guys out, but no more!
Tried it, it has overwritten some of my ratings, so the already ranked/ignore function doesn’t seem to work perfectly yet.