New Emails, An Improved DB Ratings View, and More Updates - 17 Aug 2026
We're pleased to announce another new batch of changes and improvements to Criticker, including a more cohesive way to peruse your ratings (and those of other users), and a new layout for system emails. Plus, all sorts of bug fixes! Thanks as always to everyone who's been pointing out problems they discover!
Enhancements
Ratings: Database View
A few months ago, we introduced new ways to view your ratings, including poster and grid views. We also kept the Database View, though it led to the old style of the page.
We’ve now brought the database view into the new style, which makes switching between the views much more seamless. All the filters and sorting are still there, and the overall style of the DB view is very similar to the way it looked before. But if you notice any problems, please make sure to let us know!
Modernized emails
We’ve completely revamped the way Criticker’s system emails look, when delivered to your inbox, improving the style and formatting.
What, you don’t get any emails from Criticker? Well then, now is a great time to sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter!
Oh no, my sponsorship has expired?! That won't do!
Allow Seasons in Manual Import
The ability to rate the individual seasons of TV series is a relatively new addition to Criticker, and those seasons are included in an export. However, until now, you weren’t able to import season rating data into the system.
Now you can! For the import types “Manual” and “Criticker”, season ratings can be imported. The requirement is for the ID to be in the format “{imdb_id}_s{season_number}”. So, for example, if the IMDB for Batwoman is tt8712204, Batwoman Season 2 is tt8712204_s2.
Bug Fixes
New Episodes don't auto-create seasons - During the submission process, we weren't refreshing the Title object after updating each piece of information. This led the utility to think the title wasn't a TV Episode (because that bit of data was not refreshed), so it never tried to fix the seasons.
Charts selection not showing - On sponsor features, when you’re looking at a particular chart, the sidebar on the left is meant to subtly indicate which chart you’re looking at. That wasn’t working, but a sharp-eyed sponsor pointed it out and we’ve fixed the issue!
Films in common missing on TCI List - A recent change caused the Films in Common to be hidden, on the TCI List, making it more difficult to see how many titles you shared with your top TCIs. We’ve found and fixed the error.
Collection counts don't include system colls - There was an issue with the "Collection Count" when one of the collections being shown was a special system collection (such as Ignored Films). Now those counts should be showing correctly.
Sort by stars should show all reviews on top - Previously, when you sorted a list of ratings on “Stars”, Criticker properly showed you the reviews with the most stars at the top, in order. But the problem was, when you got down to the “0 Stars” territory, the list intermixed ratings with no reviews (that thus have 0 stars), and ratings with reviews that happen to have 0 stars.
The expected behavior was to have all the ratings with reviews listed first, from most to least (including 0) stars. And then under those, the ratings without reviews.
Changing Quip Colors on Mobile - We've changed the form where you can set custom colors and quips, so that it looks a lot better on mobile, and no longer loses focus while typing the final quip.
White bars on more long review widget - There were both vertical and horizontal scrollbars on the section of Long Reviews, which shows “More Reviews” of the title. This was actually two different style fixes, one for each scrollbar. Looking much better now!
Clicking "Short" category leads to invalid URL - When you clicked on the header for the “Short” title type, it led to an invalid URL, but we’ve fixed that up so that it leads to the proper spot. This one: https://www.criticker.com/films/?titletype=2
Yikes, I don't care how short this is, I'm not watching it.
Mini Reviews cut short - Minireviews that contained multibyte characters (such as ’) were reporting their length properly while typing, but still being concatenated at storage time. That is, if you typed a minireview of exactly 500 characters, but the review contained one or more multibyte characters, it was still getting cut off. We’ve corrected this oversight to properly account for multibyte characters.
Movies shown twice in filmmaker search - Search results for some filmmakers, such as Claire Danes, were showing the same movie multiple times in the summary.
Farscape Franchise using Games - This was an fix from an earlier release, but it was still causing problems on the DB View. I think we’ve fixed it for real this time.. There was still something on the DB view causing it to use whichever came first – the Film Franchise (or in Farscape’s case) the Game Franchise. We’ve removed that assumption from the code and it now works properly.