A New Replacement for TV Tome

Randall311 writes to tell us about, what the creators hope will be, a new replacement for the old TV Tome website, the TV IV Wiki. The once popular TV Tome website was absorbed by CNET in April of this year and most of the content was added to their TV.com website. Many users dislike the new format with vast amounts of flash, obnoxious ads, and missing content. So, if you liked the old TV Tome website perhaps this will allow the community to rebuild what it has lost.

Comments

Poor resource

[ReformedExCon]

There are only 116 programs listed in the tviv database. Contrast this with 3500 programs in the TV Tome website.

The only appeal that this may have is that it is a wiki so users can update as they see fit. Unfortunately, most of the time, you get what you pay for.

Re:Poor resource

[amodm]

As TFA mentions, its a _new_ replacement. Thanks to the wiki approach, it should be able to reach the popularity and coverage that the original TV Tome once had.

Re:Poor resource

[/ASCII]

TV Tome didn't always have thousands of programs, hopefully tviv will start catching up quickly. This is a bit like what happened with CDDB and FreeDB. Sure CDDB was a much better source for a while, but FreeDB quickly caught on and is new a perfectly viable source of CD information.

And since both sites are free, your comment about getting what you pay for makes no sense whatsoever.

Re:Poor resource

[tabkey12]

The only appeal that this may have is that it is a wiki so users can update as they see fit. Unfortunately, most of the time, you get what you pay for.

TV.com is free to use, and you can edit most of the information as if it was a wiki. It's the advertising and interface that sucks...

Re:Poor resource

[Metatron]

Its because its new ?

"what the creators hope will be a new replacement for the old TV Tome website"

give it a chance before you right it off so easily !

Re:Poor resource

[Metatron]

s/right/write/ - thats what you get for not drinking coffee and engaging brain before posting.

Re:Poor resource

[Anonymous Coward]

if you like 30 versions of Briteny Speers "oops i did it agian", then FreeDB is viable option. Aside from the quality of the information, though, the information they do have is inadequate (ie, year, genre, etc. is only stored for the CD as a whole, not individual tracks, which may not be the same.)

Re:Poor resource

[rudy_wayne]

"TV.com is free to use, and you can edit most of the information as if it was a wiki."

Not entirely true. All editing has to be approved by moderators who seem to reject everything. I've submitted numerous things to correct articles that are poorly written and/or just plain wrong, and they've all been rejected.

Re:Poor resource

[/ASCII]

I mostly listen to EBM and industrial music, and I've found that FreeDB has very good coverage. As to the inadequate information, that could be improved yes. But it is the same format that CDDB used to use, so at least it's not a question of the new, free service beeing worse.

Re:Poor resource

[Carraway]

You know where wikis fail? Cross-referencing. On TVTome, if I wanted to know what television shows X has written, I could click on his name and they'd be listed. Any one of thousands of writers had their own page with their credits on it, generated automatically based on the info provided for individual television episodes. Now while TVIV seems like a good resource for information about specific shows, it's simply an impossible task to have a purely human edited database succeed at something that requires such a vast amount of cross-referencing as this would.

It's one thing that only 116 shows are listed, but consider the fact that Aaron Sorkin, Joss Whedon, J.J Abrams and any number of other television big shots have no pages whatsoever. Individual credits are just as important to a television database as episode listings, airdates, summaries, etc., and if those guys don't even have pages of their own yet, I don't like the odds of smaller tv writers who only have one or two episodes to their credit ever being included. And unfortunately that's a necessity for a database like this, and also unlikely ever to be included in a pure wiki.

Re:Poor resource

[brokenarmsgordon]

Yes, it's true that there are 3500 hundred (or so) shows listed on the TV Tome website, but they are sorely lacking in information. If I want to find out who was on the recent episode of... Battlestar Galactica, example, I'm better off looking on IMDB. That's sad.

The only foreseeable problem is a mass of misinformation. The old TV Tome -- which was moderated -- had a problem with redundant, erroneous, and outright false submitions.

Re:Poor resource

[LegionX]

Well.. people have written bots to put pages on wikipedia (one for all the cities in america etc.)

Why shouldn't you be able to do something like that on tviv?

Re:Poor resource

[mhearne]

Well, he's right. The old passwords don't work anymore, and the new site isn't very entertaining. I hate it when a great idea is commercialized.

I'm not a communist or anything, but flash ads give me a serious headache, and if I can't scroll them out of sight, then I will leave the page.

I have also heard that flash ads can cause epileptic seizures, much like a faulty mecury vapor lamp.

I may be incorrect. Anyone?

Michael

Re:Poor resource

[Xesdeeni]

Firefox with FlashBlock or AdBlock is your friend.

Xesdeeni

Re:Poor resource

[wiredlogic]

I agree that it can be annoying when the same disc has multiple entries in the database. Sometimes this is the fault of the record companies as there can be multiple pressings of an ambum that have slight differences in their TOCs and consequently their CDDB IDs differ. The servers are able to match up records based on artist and title and will return entries for IDs different from the one you submitted, hence the duplicates.

the information they do have is inadequate (ie, year, genre, etc. is only stored for the CD as a whole

Both FreeDB and CDDB store disc information using the fields available in the XMCD format which doesn't provide for track dates. Frankly, that is too much information to expect people to voluntarily enter whether it be your own XMCD database or contributed to FreeDB.

You should be happy that FreeDB took the initiative to add some new genres that aren't supported by CDDB/XMCD.

Re:Poor resource

[Snaller]

And since you don't pay for TV Tome...

Re:Poor resource

[mhearne]

Well, I may try it. I'm not using Firefox, because I like the original Mozilla the best.

Thanks,

Michael

Re:Poor resource

[Xesdeeni]

Isn't the Mozilla browser now Firefox?

Xesdeeni

Re:Poor resource

[Anonymous Coward]

Flashblock works fine with Mozilla too.

Re:Poor resource

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeDB a viable source of information? Really?

Over half the results I get from the FreeDB are filled with spelling errors and outright incorrect track information. I mean really--HOW HARD is it to read the damned liner on the CD and get it right? I have to double-check all the results I get from FreeDB.

Re:Poor resource

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't the Mozilla browser now Firefox?

No. http://www.mozilla.org/products/mozilla1.x/

Re:Poor resource

[arodland]

No, the Mozilla Browser is now the Mozilla browser, and Firefox is now Firefox (and not Firebird or Phoenix). Meanwhile, Internet Explorer is "The Internet". I hope this clears things up for you.

Re:Poor resource

[Xesdeeni]

Well, excuse me. Apparently it was only a dream where I read where the browser in Mozilla was going to be replaced with Firefox, since I can't seem to locate the reference. In case you didn't notice, I ASKED whether that was the case, specifically because I only (apparently incorrectly) vaguely recall reading this. There's no need to be asinine about it.

Xesdeeni

Re:Poor resource

[ncc74656]

It's one thing that only 116 shows are listed, but consider the fact that Aaron Sorkin, Joss Whedon, J.J Abrams and any number of other television big shots have no pages whatsoever. Individual credits are just as important to a television database as episode listings, airdates, summaries, etc., and if those guys don't even have pages of their own yet, I don't like the odds of smaller tv writers who only have one or two episodes to their credit ever being included. And unfortunately that's a necessity for a database like this, and also unlikely ever to be included in a pure wiki.

It seems to me that a relatively minor alteration could handle that. Provide a way to tag things like names and titles, so that instead of writing "William Shatner" in the content for a page, you'd write something like "<actor>William Shatner</actor>", or "<episode series='Star Trek'>City on the Edge of Forever</episode>" instead of "City on the Edge of Forever" (or whatever kind of tag format a wiki would use). Every once in a while, a robot scans the people-edited parts of the wiki to automatically assemble filmographies from the actor tags, episode lists from the episode tags, etc. Links to these auto-generated pages are then served up in the people-edited areas, so that "<actor>William Shatner</actor>" is sent out as "<a href='/Actors/William%20Shatner/'>William Shatner</a>", and that page would then have links to pages on Star Trek (as an entire series and/or as its episodes) and whatever else has been entered. If someone then comes along and adds other Star Trek episodes (or adds another series, like T.J. Hooker), the relevant filmography/episdode list/etc. pages would be updated automatically. The auto-generated pages would also need an editable area (for things like biographical info for actors), but that should be trivial to implement.

Re:Poor resource

[mhearne]

In a way, I suppose it is. The Mozilla suite was an all in one browser, mail program/news reader, html editor and had an IRC chat program (I don't know anyone who used the IRC component).

Firefox is a stripped-down version of the Mozilla browser; without all the options, it's supposed to be faster. What they've done is divide the Mozilla suite into the Firefox browser and the Thunderbird mail/newsreader.

This is good if you want to choose a different mail program, but you could always justs ignore Mozilla's mail component and use something else.

Mozilla development stopped (last april?) with version 1.78. We were waiting for 1.8, but didn't quite get there. I think all the Linux distros have already switched to Firefox/Thunderbird.

Michael

Re:Sit at the PC to talk about TV.

[RensteStar]

http://www.postbankkaraoke.nl/player/player.php?sn ame=rec1125841747630&slength=80.384&rtrackid=1&uni ck=Renske+ listen to this!! it's really great, you'll enjoy it!

Mirroring TV.com?

[rteunissen]

What would be the legal status of mirroring most of the tv.com content to the new wiki? Considering that the content on tvtome.com was submitted by people from all over the world, could a former tvtome editor place his own text (now part of tv.com) on the wiki? Or can we just outright copy everything over and get a major headstart, the info on tv.com comes (mostly) from tv network's websites/public communication.

Re:Mirroring TV.com?

[tabkey12]

Probably not, as I'd be willing to bet that when you submitted that information you signed your copyright over to TVTome, agreed by you in the Terms & Conditions of the site. Sorry...

Re:Mirroring TV.com?

[Tatarize]

Depends on if you signed over your copyright with submitting or if you simply gave permission to TVtome.com to use the work in anyway they see fit. It could easily be either. I tried to check on archive.org but couldn't find the copyright info. Although, I think from a legal stance you have to have your own copy.

Re:Mirroring TV.com?

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

But can you really have copyright on the cast list for a show you took no part in? More importantly, what legal ramifications can tv.com take against a third party for mass mirroring data thats available from multiple sources? Obviously you'd have to leave out a lot of the real good info (spoilers, reviews, anything detailed), but atleast to get a nice eplist going I'd say atleast manual mirror/rewording would be great. Especially of the more complex shows that have a lot of info (Trek, Buffy, anything that would attract the type of nerd that would keep a site like this updated)

Re:Mirroring TV.com?

[jacoplane]

Archive.org cache of TV-tome:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.tvtome.com

I think there's no problem in transferring most of that content to the new wiki.

Re:Mirroring TV.com?

[tony1343]

I imagine the information itself is not copyrighted. The numbers in a phonebook itself are not copyrighted. This is information freely available. How it is arranged, and the design, that is copyrighted. So if you are just taking name of episode, tv cast, etc that is not copyrighted by CNET, since that is information freely available, at places such as the shows actual website. Miscellaneous commentary might be copyrighted though. This is probably a question best left for an intellectual property attorney.

Re:Mirroring TV.com?

[YowzaTheYuzzum]

Probably not... but there's a lot of information over at Wikipedia which is probably ok to copy.

Re:Mirroring TV.com?

[TheoMurpse]

At one point, I was working on a Python program that would act as a proxy, and would parse TV.com pages and make them look like TV Tome pages (I was using the Wayback Machine as reference). It was going to cache the pages from TV.com as I went to different shows' areas, and present them as one page if that was the way it looked at TV Tome. It would also remove all the flash ads that slow my browser down.

However, I realized I was wasting my time and that it would not be a good idea, as I'd basically have to be running a proxy all the time to notice a benefit. I gave up writing it, and have since moved on to http://www.epguides.com/.

Re:Mirroring TV.com?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably not, as I'd be willing to bet that when you submitted that information you signed your copyright over to TVTome, agreed by you in the Terms & Conditions of the site. Sorry.

And you would be wrong (at least according to the agreement that I signed). In fact, I am currently preparing a legal action against C/NET, which is illegally using my content from tvtome.

Re:Mirroring TV.com?

[bjbyrne]

How can you sue Cnet becuase they bough tvtome and continued to use that informaton? Did /. posters sue OSTG after the sale? After all, comments are owned by the poster, right? I don't think you have a case.

Re:Mirroring TV.com?

[mdecarle]

As the TVTome.com is sold to TV.com, you would be advised not to copy the information.

CNet bought the information, I am sure they do not want people to dig out an archive, and resurrect the original site under a new name. IOW: the fastest way to get a C&D letter from them.

Re:Mirroring TV.com?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can sue them because I signed a contract with them that was very specific as to the conditions and uses of the content that they were licensing from me, and they breached that contract. It's a pretty straightforward copyright infringement case.

Did you read the contract? What's your theory?

Re:Mirroring TV.com?

[bjbyrne]

I admit I did not read the contract and I can't find a copy now. Can you post one?

What I don't understand is what is cnet doing differntly with your content then tvtome did that it now violates the terms in your contract with them?

And one other question, what did they say when you asked them to remove your content?

Re:Mirroring TV.com?

[Anonymous Coward]

The contract said, among other things, that my content was licensed only for use on tvtome.com (not any other web site or other place they might try to sell it to). CNET has refused to respond to my polite messages ordering them to cease and desist. That's why the next message to them will be a court summons.

What exactly is

[phantomfive]

What exactly is TV Tome and why is it interesting?

Re:What exactly is

[amodm]

That's exactly what the wikipedia link is for.

Re:What exactly is

[Anonymous Coward]

Bible Edict IV, Para X

"Thou shall Google before accidently opening thou's backside and quote thus whereever thou farts"

TV Tome

Re:What exactly is

[Valiss]

TV Tome is to t.v. what IMDB is to movies.

Possible Problems with Wiki Medium?

[Scoria]

This seems as though it would be an absolute haven for trolls looking to provide "unsolicited" spoilers. Have the individuals responsible for the TV IV Wiki taken any precautions against this?

Re:Possible Problems with Wiki Medium?

[amodm]

IMHO in the long term, the positives of the wiki approach far outweigh the negatives.

Look at wikipedia: some or the other time a page is spoiled, but its recovered very quickly and I believe its one of the most reliably informative sites on the net.

The warning is there, because of the _potential_ of spoilers.

One of the mechanisms in place is that no anonymous editing is allowed. People need to register to edit. That way, a spolier's account can be locked. For every spolier, a person would need to create an account. Its tedious in the least.

Re:Possible Problems with Wiki Medium?

[commodoresloat]

One of the mechanisms in place is that no anonymous editing is allowed.

I really wish wikipedia would do that. Your right that spoiled pages get fixed quickly but that's only because a lot of people spend a lot of time doing nothing but fixing such crap. Including editors who are watching pages because they care about the topics rather than because they like fixing vandalism. Of course it wouldn't solve all wikipedia's problems but it would definitely take a chunk out of the amount of busywork created for editors (who could better spend their time improving articles). Of course, anon editors do add some great stuff to wikipedia too, but I don't think it's too much to ask that someone fill out a simple username/password combo (iirc, wikipedia login doesn't ask you for anything else to create a new account) before editing. I am not sure - my tendency would be to err on the side of allowing anonymity, but it is not clear that anonymity is really sacrificed by enforced pseudonymity. And the benefits of disallowing anon posting seem to outweigh the disadvantages...

Re:Possible Problems with Wiki Medium?

[Anonymous Coward]

This seems as though it would be an absolute haven for trolls looking to provide "unsolicited" spoilers. Have the individuals responsible for the TV IV Wiki taken any precautions against this?

In WIKI everyone can moderate and therefore the many outweight the few (trolls).

There is no need for control freaks :-p

Re:Possible Problems with Wiki Medium?

[randm.ca]

LOL -1 Redundant. Does that mean the moderators are agreeing with jhol, and saying it is common knowledge that Scoria is going to die alone? BURN!

Re:Possible Problems with Wiki Medium?

[Shaper_pmp]

The old TVTome also had this problem, and it had (I believe) a bunch of full-time editors. The Stargate SG-1 section was especially bad - some episode descriptions were a one- or two-line description, and some were a full three-paragraph blow-by-blow retelling of the episode, complete with ending.

I always treated TVTome as a useful resource for episode names (for renaming, erm, backups of DVDs that I own and had, erm, lost the box for, honest)... Avoid the descriptions for episodes you haven't seen yet and it was fine.

Mind you, that said I don't get overly bothered by spoilers, so maybe it was a bigger problem for others.

Either way, if you tolerated the spoilers and used TVTome before it became TV.com, I doubt this new Wiki version will upset you any more. And now it's a Wiki the spoiler-haters can at least directly edit the pages to remove them.

Re:Possible Problems with Wiki Medium?

[InfiniteWisdom]

The other side of the coin is that casual visitors who notice a small error or have a small snippet of information to contribute are likely to contribute if they can just hit edit and be done with it. If they have to go through a lengthy registration process, they're pretty likely to say "ah screw this" and move on. If the registration process isn't lengthy it doesn't provide much protection from trolls anyway.

Re:Possible Problems with Wiki Medium?

[Xesdeeni]

Or they could differentiate between anonymous and registered. Registered users would be allowed free editing. Anonymous editors would require some validation, either explicit moderation, or perhaps peer moderation--the proposed edit could be posted and a registered editor could be allowed the option of validating it.

Or some such...

Xesdeeni

Something Awful project

[Idimmu Xul]

The TV IV stems from a forum on Something Awful so with all that goon power behind it I'm sure it will snowball shortly in to a quite concise database.

The cookery forum offshoot, GBS Food is doing wonderfully since it's conception!

Re:Something Awful project

[Rufus211]

Ahh, I was wondering why they stole the logo.

It's been 11 seconds since you hit 'reply'.

Re:Something Awful project

[Anonymous Coward]

Well that explains the logo, I was wondering about that.

Re:Something Awful project

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you should learn to shut the fuck up about goon projects. We're not all interested in having the slashdot people polluting our satellite sites.

Re:Something Awful project

[Anonymous Coward]

it's the internet faggot. everything gets discovered sooner or later. just like the last offshoots.

Re:Something Awful project

[Anonymous Coward]

What a fucking terrible website. No pictures included with the instructions? Fark sucks and so does their food.

Re:Something Awful project

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah because slashdot people viewing a read only site that they cant add to is so fucking the end of the world.........

Re:Something Awful project

[Anonymous Coward]

or it'll go nowhere like greenlighting, fauxtesting, and gbstv

Re:bahh..

[smithberry]

Yet here you are posting to /.

Ahh, the witty responses and insightful humor; if only we had some ;-)

Re:bahh..

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't waste my time at all.

And yet here you are, on slashdot.

tv.com bites

[Anonymous Coward]

I am really pissed about the tv.com thing too, tvtome was an invaluable tool for me..... very sad to seen this happen (like 2 months ago)

Re:tv.com bites

[Punto]

I hope this catches on too.. It's not that tv.com has imcomplete information (actually it seems to be as complete as tvtom was), but they way they just squashed tvtome to put their sell-out portal, and the fact that I can actually feel my CPU making an extra effort every time I try to scroll the page were just too annoying... And it really sucked to have to go to IMDB to look stuff up, they're just not prepared for TV shows. This is great news.

Re:tv.com bites

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a great idea but their implementation is *hugely* flawed. I would know i've been coding my own tvtome replacement for a few days so imagine my suprise at this!
Problem with using mediawiki (unaltered) is that all data is stored as text ( try editing the cast list for example - it is simply an html table. The only information that is stored in proper dedicated database fields are (by the looks of it with bsg):

Premiere January 14, 2005
Finale --
Airs Fridays at 10PM
Creator Glen Larson
Network Sci-Fi
Style 1 hour sci-fi drama
Company
Episodes 18
Seasons 2 (currently)
Origin

That's good, but the whole thing needs to be like that.

Problem with having media wiki is that it was designed for wikipedia which stores information about anything and everything ==> no structure. Tv episodes are quite structured and so we need dedicated fields. This will allow stuff like the old tv tome did such as clicking on an vast member's name and getting a list of all his/her appearances (auto generated, *not* being tediously hardlinked by some poor chap).

What the devs have done is a step in the right direction, but the content will be stuck forever in html! So please beware the inherent limitations, this will never match tvtome. I am in the process of modifying mambo for this and am working on a nice ajaxy interface too.

On a side note, is the WHOLE FUCKING UAE banned from creating an account on /. ? The crap i had to do to post.. even as AC, lets just say tunnels were involved.

MythTV Integration

[Anonymous Coward]

The MythVideo plugin for MythTV has an integrated search of IMDB to look up information on movies. It'd be great if TV IV could provide easy to parse episode guide information for third party apps like MythVideo.

Wiki mostly US-based?

[rklrkl]

I'm wondering if we're going to get coverage of non-US TV shows (TV Tome used to do so and tv.com doesn't seem to [or if it does, it's barely any])? For example, on the home page of the Wiki it says "Catch every episode of the longest-running sci-fi show on television on Sci-Fi". Nope, we're not talking about Doctor Who (which is the world record holder), but apparently Stargate SG-1!

Re:Wiki mostly US-based?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a wiki. It's what you make it.

Re:Wiki mostly US-based?

[Anonymous Coward]

Longest running on Sci-Fi, the US tv-channel.

Re:Wiki mostly US-based?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doctor Who did take a 16-year break though.

Re:Wiki mostly US-based?

[theorbtwo]

I would hardly say that Doctor Who is the world's longest-running TV series. Indeed, I'd say that it's currently just about to start it's second season. Even the BBC seperates the classic series from this one.

(Yes, you did catch my lingo changing from American to British series/season -- I'm an American newly moved to England, and I'm looking forward to being able to see the Doctor on broadcast television instead of via bittorrent.)

Re:Wiki mostly US-based?

[CygnusTM]

We would love it if the site became a multi-national resource. We just need multi-national editors.

Re:Wiki mostly US-based?

[Anonymous Coward]

So why don't you go add non-US shows? It's a wiki, slapnuts.

Wow, thought it was just me!

[N8F8]

I used TVTome to regularly is was downright painfull when TV.com bought them out. Things that used to take three or four clicks were taking thirty clicks. Especially annoying is that their listings are alphabetic and paginated. So if you eant to find say, "lost" you have to page through a ton of pages to find it. Not to mention the cooler TVTome consent is gone - Bloopers and highlights.

Re:Wow, thought it was just me!

[Anonymous Coward]

Anything to increase the number of ads you get to see on your way to the information.

Re:Wow, thought it was just me!

[RupW]

So if you eant to find say, "lost" you have to page through a ton of pages to find it.

Uh, no, you type "Lost" in the search box at the top and click the first result.

Look, it's not that big a deal is it? When Amazon bought imdb we all thought they'd ruined it but actually it's still pretty good. I get the feeling tv.com have held back a lot of the tvtome content until they've had a chance to review it - they're a better target to sue than tvtome - but there's still plenty there.

Re:Wow, thought it was just me!

[N8F8]

Actually, IMDB is starting to suck too. Already you have to be a member to do stuff you could do for free. But I di like the little icons in search box though.

Re:Wow, thought it was just me!

[trezor]

Look, it's not that big a deal is it? When Amazon bought imdb we all thought they'd ruined it but actually it's still pretty good.

Yes and no. It's moving towards suckiness for sure. Now you have to register just to view the forums. Not that I usually don't register at forums I visit frequently, but that's still just plain stupid.

IMDB as a whole works, but it's getting worse.

TV.com on the other hand. First time I saw TV.com I thought I've mispelled tvtome and gotten to a some hijacked domain. When I realized tvtome was gone and sold out, I honest to god tried to use TV.com as I would had it been tvtome. I tried, but the new site just "doesn't work".

I never came back. The site sucks now. I'm glad the goons showed some initiative and a started a new tvtome. Ofcourse it doesn't matter if not enough people contribute to the site.

Re:Wow, thought it was just me!

[1u3hr]

Look, it's not that big a deal is it?

For me it is. I'm not in the US, and many of the US series are shown here a year or two later. So I could read the reviews and such about episodes immediately after watching. However, TV.com apparently didn't carry over these reviews, written by editors who knew the shows and added to the experience with their insights. As these shows are "old", they're probably not going to be reviewed at all again, and unlikely to be of the same quality; in any case they have none when I want to read them. Unfortunately, the Wayback Archive doesn't help, every time I try after I get a few pages in I get bounced to the new TV.com site with nothing but ads.

Re:Wow, thought it was just me!

[FlopEJoe]

Look, it's not that big a deal is it?

I think it is. To me, TVTome was like Google... simple, clean, very few images. Now it's flash, bubbly tabbed buttons, and what was once simple lists are now tables. The Episode List has less info and (I personally think) wastes two columns on user reviews. I can't remember the TVTome layout but I think a quarter to a third of the right column was NOT flash, ratings, and (so called) "shows like this."

I cringe everytime I have to look something up on the new TVTome. It is straight to IMDB first for cast lists and anything else I can get before I drink the TV.com koolaid.

Simple is better. Don't use images when text will do. A TV episode does not need tons of space for user ratings.

Re:Wow, thought it was just me!

[Jammet]

I'm really happy some alternative shows up. TV.com is overloaded crap compared to TV-Tome. And it never uses the screen width available to it, just like GameSpot. I can put up with GameSpot alright, but the TVTome design is better. By far.

Re:Wow, thought it was just me!

[drsquare]

You're joking. These days the imdb comments section is full of paid reviews. For example when you look up a computer game, there's a cut-and-paste glowing review. Every single game, a review that's exactly the same.

Not to mention money-spinning but low-quality films given artificially high ratings to sell DVDs (i.e. the new Star Wars films).

Re:Wow, thought it was just me!

[Maestro4k]

Look, it's not that big a deal is it? When Amazon bought imdb we all thought they'd ruined it but actually it's still pretty good. I get the feeling tv.com have held back a lot of the tvtome content until they've had a chance to review it - they're a better target to sue than tvtome - but there's still plenty there. It's still a big deal. A lot of the content missing are goofs/nitpicks/cultural reference items (at least for the shows I used TVTome for, namely all the Star Trek series). Not all the notes made it intact either, none of those had any potential to create a lawsuit unless it's now against the law to note that such and such actor has now played a character in so many different Star Trek series. (Some of the missing notes are exactly like that along with other equally innocent stuff.)

Overlooking the lack of content the site has Fancy Widget Syndrome. Apparently TV.com thinks people are far, far more interested in the average viewer rating for a show/season of that show/episode than anything else about it. The rating bars are all graphical and fucking huge! The also seem to think that everyone wants lots of fancy, flashy graphics and widgets on every page. All of this makes it difficult to get the information you actually came there for, unless you visit to look at flashy graphics and viewer ratings. You also can no longer pull up a complete episode listing on one page. At best you can get one season at a time per page. With all the fancy widgets/graphics/flash/crap on the pages now it takes a good 10 times as long just to view the entire episode listing of a series.

I gave the site a chance when the transition occurred but the number of things they did wrong far outnumbered they things they did right (not hard seeing as I haven't noticed anything they did right to be frank) and I refuse to go back to it. Frankly I wouldn't mind seeing the venture fail and cost CNet a lot of money in the process. CNet took the absolute best TV resource out there and utterly destroyed it.

Also as another person noted, TVTome had a nice light, unobtrusive interface with very few graphics. Pages loaded nice and quickly, you could view entire episode lists on one page, etc. All of that's long gone now and the new site suffers tremendously for it.

Re:Wow, thought it was just me!

[Anonymous Coward]

TV.com consistently crashes Firefox when I try to view it on W2k from work. Every single time. I have to crank up IE to view the site and that adds more pain to the already painful new site design.

Perhaps if the new design didn't give me a headache and cause the bile to rise in my throat, I'd actually spend some time trying to figure out WHY it crashes Firefox. As it stands, though, I'm content to use TV.com less and less. I think I'll be spending a lot of time updating the TVIV wiki in the future.

Re:Wow, thought it was just me!

[Aeiri]

I agree with RupW, this is not a big deal, yet everything thinks it is. This is coming from someone who used to use TVTome almost daily to look up TV information.

The only "big deal takeover" that CNET has done in my opinion was Mp3.com, lots of my favorite indy artists disappeared off the face of the Earth after that happened...

It's still a big deal. A lot of the content missing are goofs/nitpicks/cultural reference items (at least for the shows I used TVTome for, namely all the Star Trek series). Not all the notes made it intact either, none of those had any potential to create a lawsuit unless it's now against the law to note that such and such actor has now played a character in so many different Star Trek series. (Some of the missing notes are exactly like that along with other equally innocent stuff.)

I have a feeling that if data wasn't successfully transferred over, there was just a problem trying to convert all/some of the data into the new format. If you've ever actually tried to convert databases that are COMPLETELY (not just somewhat) different, you would realize how hard it can be to get it to work properly. Also, as far as I'm concerned, goofs/nitpicks/cultural references aren't exactly infomation that is a necessity to run a TV information site, just interesting tid bits.

Completely disregarding that fact though, I believe there is plenty of that information available. I read through goofs for Red Dwarf for a day straight before just because I was bored. Just a week or two ago I looked up the Peacekeeper Wars (Farscape Miniseries):
http://www.tv.com/farscape/the-peacekeeper-wars-pa rt-2/episode/367768/summary.html

Under Episode Allusions it seems that it has three, when I actually only spotted one while watching it. Seems more than adequate to me.

As far as "such and such now plays this person", I don't quite understand. Click Cast on any show page and it has a list of the cast members, click a cast member and you can see what shows he's been in.

You also can no longer pull up a complete episode listing on one page. At best you can get one season at a time per page. With all the fancy widgets/graphics/flash/crap on the pages now it takes a good 10 times as long just to view the entire episode listing of a series.

What?
http://www.tv.com/the-black-adder/show/4747/episod e_listings.html&season=0

The also seem to think that everyone wants lots of fancy, flashy graphics and widgets on every page. All of this makes it difficult to get the information you actually came there for, unless you visit to look at flashy graphics and viewer ratings.

So what, they are supposed to know exactly what YOU want to know about the show immediately when clicking a show? It's difficult to type "farscape", "star trek next generation", or whatever then click "episodes", "cast", or "reviews"?

And what do you mean it has "fancy widgets"? Gradients on a tab to make it look a bit nicer doesn't make it "fancy" or "bloated", it's when you have animations for every action and Flash for everything (having a flash menu thing on the front page is not "everything") when you get bloat and fanciness. Also, most modern web browsers cache images, they don't download them on every page. Lynx is an exception to that.

The split columns are just fine, and yes I do care about similar shows, otherwise half of the shows I'm watching right now I wouldn't have known existed. You are complaining about how little of the screen it uses, well, I'm using a widescreen laptop and it still looks just fine to me.

This is coming from someone who absolutely despises Mac, Windows, KDE, and GNOME for their overuse of graphics and hard to use menus. I don't have a problem with graphical interfaces when they make sense, like TV.com does. All your "major problems" are non-existant or very minor.

Re:Wow, thought it was just me!

[Aeiri]

For me it is. I'm not in the US, and many of the US series are shown here a year or two later. So I could read the reviews and such about episodes immediately after watching. However, TV.com apparently didn't carry over these reviews, written by editors who knew the shows and added to the experience with their insights. As these shows are "old", they're probably not going to be reviewed at all again, and unlikely to be of the same quality; in any case they have none when I want to read them. Unfortunately, the Wayback Archive doesn't help, every time I try after I get a few pages in I get bounced to the new TV.com site with nothing but ads.

It sounds like you are making a lot of assumptions in that, "As these shows are 'old', they're probably not going to be reviewed at all again".

Let's take 24 for instance, that show started in 2001 (old enough for you?). Now let's take a random episode from season 1, but not too close to the beginning, and especially not close to the end, because those are the episodes that are supposed to get you into the show, and keep you on it, so there are probably a lot of reviews for those. Here's season 1 episode 8, aired on 01/15/02:
http://www.tv.com/24/700-a.m.-800-a.m./episode/854 03/reviews.html

So, we have one very long review, one good sized review, and one somewhat small review. That should be plenty to gauge how good the episode is, especially with 61 people rating it an average of 9.3.

Re:Wow, thought it was just me!

[Rysc]

Let's take 24 for instance, that show started in 2001 (old enough for you?).

No. Find a review of Blake's 7 episode 3.

Now, tell me which episodes of Dr. Who have been lost in entirity, and also list which Hartnell episodes are only partly available.

Both of these things wre dead easy on TV tome and cannot be done on TV.com.

What if I want to check continuity between episodes of Thundercats? Show me that on tv.com.

Now, qyuickly! You will be timed: What was the significant event in Buffy season 6 episode 12?! Go go go! With tvtome I could have looked this up (given my broadband) in under 60 seconds. TV.com /does not know/! What;s more, I found that half the links in the Buffy articles linked to Charmed. WTF?

Re:Wow, thought it was just me!

[SirWinston]

> Let's take 24 for instance, that show started in 2001 (old enough for you?).

*24* is your example of an "old" show? If you're a 10-year-old, sure that's an "old" show--but it's so "new" from an objective standpoint that it's still a TV current event and not TV history.

What was special about TV Tome is that it covered the shows of two decades ago as thoroughly as those of two seasons ago. You could ask yourself "Hmm, what was that early 90's show about a college campus, where the first episode had snow everywhere and one of the professors sleeping with a student?" And then you could find the answer [1993's one-season-wonder *Class of '96*] on TV Tome, with synopses of the episodes you remember and a forum where you might even run across someone with tapes to share.

It was a huge resource composed by TV lovers for TV lovers, and its loss is painful.

Re:Wow, thought it was just me!

[Aeiri]

"*24* is your example of an "old" show? If you're a 10-year-old, sure that's an "old" show--but it's so "new" from an objective standpoint that it's still a TV current event and not TV history."

"For me it is. I'm not in the US, and many of the US series are shown here a year or two later."

I was creating an example of an American show that is older than a YEAR OR TWO. It's been awhile since kindergarten but I believe 2001 was 4 years ago, which is over twice as old as the shows he was wanting reviews for. How about people here learn how to read comments in context, rather than skip halfway down the page and read half of a response to a random comment?

Re:Wow, thought it was just me!

[Aeiri]

No. Find a review of Blake's 7 episode 3.

Now, tell me which episodes of Dr. Who have been lost in entirity, and also list which Hartnell episodes are only partly available.

Both of these things wre dead easy on TV tome and cannot be done on TV.com.

What if I want to check continuity between episodes of Thundercats? Show me that on tv.com.

I don't think that is at all relevant to this conversation. "I watch shows 1-2 years late and I want reviews of it" has nothing to do with old shows. I agree that this information should be available on this site, but we aren't talking about you, we are talking about him. It should be more than sufficient for him.

Also, the information you are looking up is not very representative of the common person. If 90% of people hate TV.com, and 50% still have all the information they would need on the site, then why does it matter to them? Obviously it should still gather that information you are talking about, but it's still a new site. This TVIV site has even less, so how could it possibly be "better" in your opinion (which I know you never stated).

The site is more than sufficient for me, and should be for the great grandparent. That's all I was arguing. Even the older shows I watch (Black Adder and Yes, Minister to name a couple) have plenty of information on it, at least what I want to know, I haven't looked for what I don't want to know.

As far as Buffy goes, that's a bit more on topic. That is about 4 years old (that episode), so I looked it up. Apparently Buffy was, well, I didn't look up the previous episodes so I didn't see what happened, but in S06E02 she dug herself out of a grave and was back and ready to kill more vampires. Also regarding the Charmed thing, TV.com's code is still new, so there are probably bugs in it still.

http://www.tv.com/buffy-the-vampire-slayer/bargain ing-2/episode/70472/summary.html

Re:Wow, thought it was just me!

[1u3hr]

It sounds like you are making a lot of assumptions in that, "As these shows are 'old', they're probably not going to be reviewed at all again".

An assumption, based on my observation that none of the shows I'm interested in have any reviews (beyond the worthless one-liners people do now) at all in the several months since TV.com took over.

Let's take 24 for instance, that show started in 2001 (old enough for you?).

It's easy to find out stuff about big shows like 24; it's the less popular ones that TVtome was the only source of any critiques at all for that I miss.

Re:Wow, thought it was just me!

[Rysc]

That's fine, except that I said episode 12.

As it happens I misread the OP so my comments are off base.

But nevertheless, the objections stand. WRT why the other site is implicitly better... it's the same reason I'd call a the GIMP better than Photoshop. It may not actually surupass it yet, but the openness makes it all worthwhile.

that was the best domain name you could get?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a tip, don't register a .info name unless you also own the .com

Does the name even mean anything?
"TvTome" was at least catchy!

Re:that was the best domain name you could get?

[Komarosu]

Accordingly the name does have meaning, but i think its a SA in-joke.

Why Creative Commons?

[deminisma]

Seriously, could they have at least considered dual-licensing with the GFDL, so text could be borrowed from Wikipedia and vice-versa? This is a seriously counter-productive move considering that Wikipedia already has a wealth of information on television shows (see their pages on South Park for an excellent example).

Re:Why Creative Commons?

[CygnusTM]

I'm one of the site admins, and I wouldn't say the license is set in stone. We would welcome any discussions like this that may improve the site.

Re:Why Creative Commons?

[teslatug]

If you intend to dual license, better do it while you don't have hundred of thousands of pages, from thousands of editors, most of whom dissapear over time.

Re:Mirroring TV.com? Oops...

[tabkey12]

Actually, looking at the terms, I may have made a mistake. TV.com is now part of the CNET network and so is governed by the CNET Networks Terms of Use.

The Terms and Conditions states that you grant CNET Networks a licence to use your information any way they see fit, but the licence is nonexclusive. Therefore, the users who contributed the information at TVTome (or TV.com) could add that information to the TVIV Wiki too. However, proving who was the copyright holder of a paragraph, which was originally written by one person, then modified by, say three others, would probably make this too complicated to work on a large scale.

Help spread the word

[jacoplane]

As this is a wiki, the more people know about it, the faster it should grow. Help spread the word on digg:

http://digg.com/links/Miss_TVTome_Check_out_The_TV _IV_Wiki.

Re:Help spread the word

[jacoplane]

Slashdot mangled the link. This is the correct link.

Like the idea...

[Mike Peel]

... so much that I started something similar off a short while ago, but it never got off the ground. Several reasons for that, the main one being that I could never figure out how to get it from being a small one-person-editing site into a huge million-people-editing site. Now I know: I should have posted it to slashdot! (serious side-note: if the site does become a success, I'd be interested to hear the complete tale of how it became a success) Another major problem I had: there's already some content on TV episodes on the wikipedia? Wouldn't it have been best just to work on those, rather than having a whole new site? As a side-note: anyone have use for the wikiepguide.com domain I registered?

Re:Like the idea...

[CygnusTM]

As a side-note: anyone have use for the wikiepguide.com domain I registered?

We've had some early discussion about changing the name of the site, so we might have a use for that URL. We recognize that affiliation with SA might scare some people away.

Re:Like the idea...

[Randall311]

Well I think the main reason we didn't just add to the wikipedia episodes is that we wanted a source that was specialized in dealing with just TV shows. Wikipedia is a melting pot for anything and everything, while the TV wiki will specalize in just TV shows. I'm not sure about domain names, as I am not one of the three mods, just a user.

Re:Like the idea...

[bookemdano63]

Wikipedia should be the aggregator of all knowledge. Who wants to go to a bunch of different sites? Wikipedia already has the infrastructure and mass of other articles to link to.

Re:Like the idea...

[Mike Peel]

You're welcome to it if you have a use for it.

epguides.com

[Morinaka]

If your just looking for episode listings and the episode names, http://www.epguides.com/ is pretty good. No flash ads or anything. It also links straight to the TV.com page when you click on the episode link. So that option is still available.

Still features neither have...

[Tatarize]

TV.com is going to fall, they don't provide proper functionality. I miss my great list new shows on tonight. Without that function (which wikis do a sorry job at automatically creating) I don't see any sight holding my interest.

TV.com has a what's on tonight thing, but it doesn't tell what is new and what's just on.

Re:Still features neither have...

[Matizha]

Yeah, I hate the fact that they just put what's on and not what's new too... So to find out what's new, I check out this section on The Futon Critic. I miss TVTome. It was simple and clean, and yet, it provided everything I needed.

Re:Still features neither have...

[tchueh]

The list of new shows on tonight is what i missed the most as well.

What's wierd is I can't even really put my finger on it, but everything about TV Tome fit my needs and worked well, and none of the other sites seems to serve the same purpose TV Tome did.

I now use a combination of Epguides.com for history and tv.zap2it.com for whats on tonight (Their "Tonight's Best Bet" section).

So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia was split again!

We will see how good that turns out to be.

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia was split again!

We will see how good that turns out to be.

What is free information worth if it is spread over different representations with inconsistencies? So people will have to waste time by looking in two places to get information that is free in both places.

TOS at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Origin al_Series

TOS at WikiTV: http://tviv.info/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Original_Seri es

Of course WikiTV is newer. But is this really necessary?

Re:So...

[KingSkippus]

The Wikipedia and a TV Wiki serve two different purposes. Wikipedia is for general purpose information with some degree of detail. The TV Wiki is for all the gory details as related specifically to television.

Using the first replier's example, in the Wikipedia, there is a lot of information about stuff like the cultural phenomenon of Star Trek, its history and background, etc.

In the TV Wiki, the entry is currently kind of skimpy and needs editing for now, but I would expect it to have detailed information about the series specifically as it relates to television, such as episode airdates, where and when it was on the schedule, the actors, production crew, writers, guest stars, set locations, and so on.

At least, that's what I would have in mind. I don't see the TV wiki as a "split" of Wikipedia; I see it as a separate special-purpose wiki. Some of the information will necessarily be the same, but it serves different purposes.

Re:So...

[Maestro4k]

To give a good example of what you're talking about, first the Wikipedia entry on Star Trek. Compare that to Memory Alpha, a Star Trek Wiki. There's detailed information on every series, races, ships, technology, you name it.

Another wiki?

[baadger]

I loved the old TV Tome website. Being absorbed and ruined was bad, and revival is good. But why turn it into yet another wiki?

<negativity>
I'm not hard out against blogs or wiki's (and everything else thats popped up and become popular recently). But do other slashdotters think these things are making the web more bland, or making otherwise awkward sites easier to produce and more useful to surfers?

My concern is, although a wiki formats are great for user contribution, they all look the same and this will stint the growth and popularity of the site.
</negativity>

Good luck with TV IV.

Re:Another wiki?

[hool5400]

They don't have to look the same, but you are correct anyway, because most of the wikis popping up are just out of the box mediawiki installs. There's nothing stopping the guy from whipping up a new theme at a later stage.

Re:Another wiki?

[generic-man]

Frankly, I think it's the start of the web's focus on content over appearance. There are still a lot of sites out there that pay more attention to their DIVs or TABLEs than their actual content, but wikis and blogs are made to be syndicated, diffed, restyled, etc., to let the content shine through.

The data is still relatively unstructured when compared to a dedicaetd database, but if TV IV can come up with a sound data model internally, they can store the data and manipulate it as much as they want. If they turn out to be just a bunch of HTML documents that any troll can edit, then they will disappear into obscurity.

Re:Another wiki?

[arodland]

Agreed, though for entirely different reasons. Personally, I just think a wiki is too freeform. Come up with a basic set of "objects" with defined fields, and it will be easy to get consistent information and plot the relationships between shows and actors and directors, etc. Run it on a wiki, and you'll have inconsistently-formatted, inconsistently-maintained data with no integration. Wikis are cool, but they don't solve every problem. And while I'm at it, the mediawiki code base is scary ;)

Re:Another wiki?

[arodland]

I just realized that I hit "Submit" before my thoughts really had a chance to solidify, so let me expand a little bit. The issue with wikis is that they're really based 100% on "presentational" notation -- especially mediawiki, which has no higher goal than "transform these tags into HTML tags by means of a mess of regexes", and which allows almost free mixing of its wikitext (which could almost be used for semantic purposes) with equivalent HTML. It's not structured enough; trying to get anything useful out of it is like dealing with really bad, pre-CSS HTML.

SG-1

[Anonymous Coward]

It also says this is the last season of SG-1 - pleeease say it aint so. I love the new enemy, the Ori and they definitely deserve more than one season of coverage.

And why did they have to kill off Vala for the last couple of episodes? She and Michael Shanks have great chemistry.

Re:SG-1

[Anonymous Coward]

Every season since season 6 (maybe even season 5, but I'm not sure on that) has been the last season. It'll most likely be renewed, but until then, it's the "last season".

Re:SG-1

[Jarlsberg]

Rumour has it there's a strong chance it'll get renewed. It's all down to the ratings and how many people watch it, though. I agree with you -- this season has been a blast, and has taken SG-1 to new heights. While I'm sad to see RDA leave the show, I think the new cast members are terrific, and the new enemy is awesome.

Re:SG-1

[peragrin]

They didn't kill off Vala. Vala is just trapped in the Ori's Home Galaxay, where hopefully we will have either a few episodes there, or spin off like Atlantis.

Good idea but lots of work.

[kencochrane]

This sounds like a good idea, but there is lots of work to get this done.. The good thing with a wiki is that anyone can edit the page, but at the same time anyone else can edit it as well. It is an editing nightmare, even if you have someone always editing all of the pages to make sure the content is correct. I created a website like tvtome but for movies called http://popcornmonsters.com/ . The visitors can add information about movies and actor, but everything needs to be approved, and checked before it can be shown. When I first started, I didn't know what I got myself into. I spend more time approving content then I do writing code to make it better. Does anyone know of a better way to handle this?

Re:Good idea but lots of work.

[RPoet]

When I first started, I didn't know what I got myself into. I spend more time approving content then I do writing code to make it better. Does anyone know of a better way to handle this?

Obvious: use a Wiki. Wikis are not "editing nightmares", as long as there are some interested contributors (and if there aren't, perhaps there isn't demand for the website).

Re:Good idea but lots of work.

[cyborg_zx]

Well it would probably be a good idea, since you clearly have some high use of your site, to recruit some more moderators. You need a moderation heirarchy.

Re:Good idea but lots of work.

[kencochrane]

The problems with wiki's is that you can't always do what you want. I wrote Popcorn Monsters from scratch from the bottom up, and it was the only way that I could do somethings. The only way I could have done that with a wiki, is if I wrote my own wiki software or if I took the wiki code and completely overhauled it to fit my needs. Wiki's are good in some cases, but not all. The good thing about my site, is that once I approve an item, it doesn't get changed unless me or another editor approve the change. In a wiki, anyone can come in afterwords and make changes again. I know you can lock things down, but what is the purpose of a wiki, if only some people can edit things? Might as well not be a wiki then..

Re:Good idea but lots of work.

[kencochrane]

we have about 5 people that moderate the site, and it works alright, but yes you are right we probably need more. It is hard to find people you can trust when they are strangers, we usually need people to show us that they can be trusted, but you never know.. It is also hard to find good help for free. We offer points to people who add content to the site, and they can collect those points and buy stuff, like DVD's and such. We usually require that members have a certian point level before they can be accepted as an editor. This shows that they have added lots of content to the site, and we can reward them with more privledges and prizes.

Re:Good idea but lots of work.

[RPoet]

The good thing about my site, is that once I approve an item, it doesn't get changed unless me or another editor approve the change.

No, that's the bad thing about your site, the thing that's causing you so much work. With an army of dedicated participant users, things would probably get done quicker, more precisely, and more elaborately.

If you want to control everything yourself, you can't complain about how much work it is. :)

Re:Good idea but lots of work.

[kencochrane]

Your right, it is mostly my fault.. But my system is setup to handle as many editors as I need, just like wiki. I just need to get enough people to help out.. I have had this site for 4-5 years now, and this is the second version of it. The first version was very open, just like wiki, anyone could make changes when ever they wanted, it was great since I didn't have to edit anything, AT FIRST.. Then we had people adding wrong information, and kept messing everything up, so I spent a lot of time cleaning up after people and making sure the information was correct. That is when I decided to make everything go thru editors first. Even though I am spending a bunch of time editing the information now, it is much less time then I was spending before, and it is time much better spent.. The good news about the editing, is that it usually comes in waves, it will be busy for a day or so, and then it calms down and I can get some programing done.. Luckily I have some other people to help me and It isn't as bad as it used to be. As long as I keep adding editors at the same pace as my traffic picks up I guess I should be alright. I guess there is no perfect solution, unless you can hire lots of people from india to handle all of the information and editing for your site, for cheap and you have enough money to pay for it, and get a guantee that it is correct.

Re:Good idea but lots of work.

[Maestro4k]

It is hard to find people you can trust when they are strangers, we usually need people to show us that they can be trusted, but you never know.. It is also hard to find good help for free. Both problems are easily solved in a Wiki. You take a look at contributors and find who's doing a good job, you know you can trust them because they already have a track record. You can give them more authority to help watch for others making bad edits/redirects/etc. Also they're already working for free when it's a Wiki so there's not a problem there.

Wikis are by no means perfect but they do solve the two problems you list.

Re:Good idea but lots of work.

[Maestro4k]

Your right, it is mostly my fault.. But my system is setup to handle as many editors as I need, just like wiki. I just need to get enough people to help out.. Getting people to help out isn't the real problem, your problem is you have no mechanism for telling if they'll be good help or not. At least in a Wiki you can identify the users who consistantly contribute good info/edits/etc. With your current format people can't contribute until you make them an editor. What do you do if you allow someone to be an editor then they start vandalizing your site anyway BTW? I have had this site for 4-5 years now, and this is the second version of it. The first version was very open, just like wiki, anyone could make changes when ever they wanted, it was great since I didn't have to edit anything, AT FIRST.. Then we had people adding wrong information, and kept messing everything up, so I spent a lot of time cleaning up after people and making sure the information was correct. Why were you the only one who could go through and clean up stuff that was wrong? I contribute to a Star Trek Wiki, everything I edit gets added to my watch list. I check that regularly to see what's been modified and take a look at it. If the info was modified to no longer be correct I fix it or revert the edit. Pretty much every contributor on the site does the same thing. The community polices itself and it is working quite well in fact. The admins only have to be involved to ban IPs/users who are vandalizing, then the community will go reverse the edits. (Actually we'll reverse them sooner until it becomes obvious that the person's going to keep changing them back until they're banned. Then we report the abuse to an admin and wait for the ban, then go back in and reverse the edits.) I guess there is no perfect solution, unless you can hire lots of people from india to handle all of the information and editing for your site, for cheap and you have enough money to pay for it, and get a guantee that it is correct. No, a better solution is to trust the community to take an interest in the site and keeping the content correct. If you had the vast majority of people adding incorrect info or vandalizing your original site then apparently there's not a very large community that cares about your content. Also, and I don't say this to be mean, you sound like a control freak. In all your posts on this you imply that only you really knows what is correct and incorrect. You're adding more burden to yourself because of this. I may be wrong on that, but that's how you're coming across.

IMDb Links

[m0nstr42]

This is cool... IMDb has just never had all that much information about TV shows, the structure just wasn't there. It would be cool, though, to have a nice integration into IMDb, because IMDb *IS* good for certain things. ex: Search TV IV Wiki for X-files, link to the IMDb page for David Duchovny, find out that David Duchovny is becoming the new Mark Hamill inasmuchas he does more video games now than movies, decide to look up Mark Hamill, proceed to waste 3 hours browsing IMDb and TV IV. It's a beautiful thing.

Why should I contribute?

[Anonymous Coward]

CDDB/Gracenote, tvtome/TV.COM. Wikipedia. Now "tviv.info" Why should I bother contributing to these things in the first place? All they do is wait for the volunteers to flesh it out so that they can steal it all back for themselves.

DEAD LINK DAMNIT

[Tatsh]

As usual a dead link on a Slashdot news article. This would be great if (a) it loaded, and (b) it doesn't have flash all over the place live tv.com

Re:DEAD LINK DAMNIT

[Maestro4k]

As usual a dead link on a Slashdot news article. This would be great if (a) it loaded, and (b) it doesn't have flash all over the place live tv.com Since you're unfamiliar with what TVTome was like before Cnet bought it and made it TV.com let me just explain that this is the whole point. TVTome had a very light interface with minimal graphics. Many pages were text only in fact. All the info was there, loads of it and it was a the best resource for TV series on the net.

Then Cnet bought it and made it TV.com. It has flash all over the place as you noted, it loads slowly (even when not being slashdotted), a lot of the info is missing and the site, frankly, sucks. That's why someone's making a replacement for TVtome.

Re:DEAD LINK DAMNIT

[Tatsh]

I know what TVtome was like. The only reason I ever use TV.com now is when epguides.com doesn't have the show on their listing. I like epguides, it's more minimal then TVtome ever was.

GFDL is seriously non-free.

[hummassa]

And CC-BY (the license for tviv.info) is non-free either, but only because it's buggy. With luck, Creative Commons will fix it, and tviv will adopt a newer version.

This is...

[Anonymous Coward]

...doomed to failure by a totally unmemorable (and downright tacky) ".info" URL.

Why the stupid name?

[rudy_wayne]

I agree that TV.com sucks and isn't nearly as useful as the old TV Tome, but what's with the stupid name?

TV IV? What the heck is that? TV 4? TV Eye Vee?

Re:Why the stupid name?

[Anonymous Coward]

They are TV addicts, so they have TV IV (intravenous). Yeah. It's just a name.

Re:Why the stupid name?

[CygnusTM]

There is a forum called "The TV IV" on the Something Awful forums. (It's "IV" as in "intravenous", i.e. getting our TV "fix".) This is where the idea to create this was born. We initially were thinking of a site to store info on the shows we like, but then we decided that if we invited others, we might be able to build something really good.

Re:OT: "new" replacement?

[Anonymous Coward]

"if it's a new replacement, doesn't that mean that there already was an old replacement, i.e. this is the third now?"

Correct - there have been a number of failed replacements. This one actually has a chance though - it has the support of both the Slashdot and Something Awful crowds. Plus it's a wiki. Everybody loves wikis.

Waiting for IMDB

[Anonymous Coward]

TVIV might be a good short term solution, but I'm assuming that eventually the IMDB will redesign their television programming layout and as a result make TVIV obsolete. Most of the info is already in their database (episode lists, writers & directors of individual episodes, airdates, etc.), they just have to implement it in a more accessible way, for example give each individual episode it's own page so that they can be summarized, reviewed, rated, etc. -- something more akin to the old tvtome design. I don't know for a fact that they're going to redesign it, but they already have an IMDB TV section among their links so I have to believe that this is probably on their radar.

Re:Idiots

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't just moderate a joke down because it is not funny.
What the hell is up with slashdot moderators recently , over-rated here , redundant there and troll everywhere. Half of the posts do not even deserve it .Though troll is far better than over-rated . At least it can be M2'd.

The slashdot moderation system is going to hell.
This is not a Troll , its off-topic .If you like it could be Flame-bait ,if you define flame-bait as : a strong opinion that is correct if slightly offensive to the moderators . moderate accordingly

Hi CygnusTM.

[hummassa]

I withdraw my other comment... I think CC-BY 2.0 was deemed non-free, but 2.5 I don't know yet (seems OK to me).

Licensing?

[MrBandersnatch]

For me the real question is what form of licensing they are using? Ive written some code that parses TV.com, IMDB and a few others to extract episode information and combined this with newzbin and a modified version of torrentocracy so that I have a MythTV based NZBTV channel (well several actually - drama, sci-fi , films etc) WITH episode information (it works quite nicely and will be even better when I integrate a search into it *grin*)

Id LOVE to make the service and plugin available to others however most services attach nasty copyright resrictions to their content and episode guides so I couldnt embed the info in an RSS feed :(

So heres hoping TVIV has a nice OS/GNU license...

Re:Mirroring TV.com? Oops...

[Maestro4k]

However, proving who was the copyright holder of a paragraph, which was originally written by one person, then modified by, say three others, would probably make this too complicated to work on a large scale. It's pretty much impossible, TVTome didn't note who submitted what information. The only people who could edit existing info were editors for a show. Users could add notes to counter mistakes already posted but that was it. Also all posts had to be approved by the editor for the show before they were added.

I am fairly certain that signing up for a TVTome account did not say anything about your giving them copyright to your contributions. I have refused to contribute since CNet bought them out and made the bastard child that is TV.com so I know I'm not bound by CNet's TOS, no matter what they may want to think. Also the first I found out about the move was when it occurred, I never received any E-mail from TVTome and I didn't visit the site's homepage since I had bookmarked the few shows I was interested in and just went straight to them. I would hope that they at least announced the move on the homepage but I can't say for sure because I didn't visit it.

Also, in my case, I'm not going to contribute to any site the TVTome creators setup. They sold out the site once (to horrible effect I might add), why wouldn't they do it again? I've found a nice wiki that covers the series I'm interested in and contribute there. All my contributions are covered by a Creative Commons liscense and since the wiki tracks changes people can see that it was me who contributed it.

Re:bahh..

[tomhudson]

How is this a troll?

By 2000, tv viewing was down 27% in homes with a fucking DIAL-UP connection.

My dogs watch more TV than me.

I have watched a total of 2 hours of tv this summer (and that was a dvd). Better to get out of the house and visit friends and family, etc., than to waste time watching advertising and not-funny "comedies."

Heck, even slashdot is better than the average TV fare.

Multi-show sites like TV.com can never compete...

[Tycoon Guy]

... with show-specific fan sites. Why would you bother going to TV.com, where at most you'll find a one-paragraph description of episodes that you've already seen, when a show-specific site can offer so much more information?

If I want to know about Desperate Housewives, I'll go to Get Desperate. For Lost, I visit Lost Media; for Family Guy, the Family Guy Files, and for CSI, CSI Files. I even still visit Crashdown, a Roswell fan site, even though that show was cancelled YEARS ago. Most of these sites are updated several times a day -- TV.com can never compete against that.

What I would really like would be an index to the best show-specific fan sites on the internet, for every single show that's out there. TV.com should just switch to that!

Re:bahh..

[FidelCatsro]

"How is this a troll?"

I think reading that post perhaps made the moderator miss out on seeing someone make a cup of coffee ......in the latest thrilling instalment of reality TV show "Big brother

"Heck, even slashdot is better than the average TV fare"
I would go further ...Reading Tom Clancy is more intellectually stimulating than TV shows these days.

I watched Slightly more TV recently .. but all of that was DVDs of things aired several years ago .
If I am ever forced to see another reality TV show i may just go postal

What gives SA?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this site somehow associated with Something Awful? I see that stupid ass grenade of theirs in the site logo icon up top.

Re:What gives SA?

[F_Scentura]

Unofficially, the TV IV is a new and relatively popular subforum of SA.

Re:bahh..

[tomhudson]

DVDs of things aired several years ago .

Yep. Just can't get enough "Red Dwarf."

I've noticed my book-buying has gotten really serious over the last few months. I used to buy a foot or 2 of books a year - I now buy (and read) between half a foot and a foot a month. You can find some pretty decent bargains if you look. Picked up 3 anthologies by Stephen Coonts, for example, for less than $7 each (2 hard-cover).

Gonna have to buy more bookcases soon.

This is already a problem

[Von Rex]

First thing I did was look up my favorite series, Battlestar Galactica, and saw that they immediately gave away the surprise ending of the last episode.

The old TV tome would give spoilers too, but there were protected under a "more info" type of link, as I recall, so you wouldn't see them if you were didn't request them.

Other than that, though, it seems to be a useful site. I really missed TV tome after it was utterly butchered by tv.com.

Funny you should mention CDDB

[artifex2004]

I remember when it was free, and I was adding content to it. then it went private, and I was annoyed they made money off my time and effort. Then IMDB started up, and I thought, surely they won't do the same thing... but they did.

I know, fool me twice, shame on me. So I haven't helped with Wikipedia or TVTome :)

Re:Funny you should mention CDDB

[Anonymous Coward]

I know, fool me twice, shame on me. So I haven't helped with Wikipedia or TVTome :)

TVTome I can understand, but Wikipedia? They can't cut you off from the data you submit, even if they wanted to. If Wikipedia went pay tomorrow, the content is still free because of the license, unlke CCDB/IMDB/TVTome.

Re:Funny you should mention CDDB

[IpalindromeI]

IMDB does make most of their data available for download, though. With some time, you could slice that up and put it into your own local database and query it however you wanted.

tvtome was awesome...

[Jinsaku]

I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one who is pissed that tvtome was absorbed into the wholly wretched tv.com. While the tvtome interface was slow and not all that great, it is like a rocket ship compared to tv.com, in which it can take about 10 link clicks to get more information about a particular episode in a particular series.

This tv wiki brings back much of what we lost when the unfortunate happened.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

That was a fantastic sunset last night! I may have to take out a loan to pay for it, but it was worth every penny.

You people who worship money disgust me.

Cue William Shatner

[WidescreenFreak]

I think that William Shatner's classic "Saturday Night Live" skit is more of what you're looking for.

{Shatner at podium at a "Star Trek" convention}

"Before I continue I just want to say ... Get a life! Would you, people? It's just a TV show! {points to geek with Spock ears} You! Have you even kissed a girl? {geek slowly lowers head} I didn't think so!"

Even at that, you're still a pompous coward for posting AC. :P

RSS Feeds for TV Schedules

[Fraser Cain]

I've been looking around for some kind of service that will let me choose the shows I like and then subscribe to an RSS feed that updates me whenever one of the shows I watch has a new episode, so I can set the PVR, etc.

Anyone know of such a site?

So change it abit

[Snaller]

All the big companies do that with their "intellectual property" and hey wooptie, they have many more years of copyright proteciton because its a new work - doesn't this work here?
"We changed a comma so its a new work!" :)

Nope not just you

[Snaller]

It turned into total crap (and given their abuse of stylesheets, much of it is unreadable crap as well).

The problem is centralization.

[Rob T Firefly]

I ran the main Sealab 2021 fansite for years, which I recently shut down due to a number of factors. Looking at TVIV, it seems like it may be a good place for me to dump much of my old content, without having to sell out to something commercial and turn all the fan community's work that went into my ad-free fansite into just another lump of data to increase CNet shareholder value. Additionally, seperate fansites usually lack interconnectivity. Knowing that someone from my show is doing a guest spot on yours is a lot more difficult without either constantly referencing the person's IMDB page or an insane amount of crosslinking between sites. Fan sites can be the best, but they can lack permanancy.

Re:The problem is centralization.

[AK Marc]

Additionally, seperate fansites usually lack interconnectivity.

Then why don't the central fan sites just link to the better dedicates ones? It seems it would make sense to point everyone to those sites. Of course, the commercial sites don't want to send all their ad-reading viewers off to another site, but the Wikis of the world should be more open to external linking to the appropriate resources.

CNET is trash

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate CNET. They are nothing more than a mouthpiece of Microsoft. Just like Gartner.

At least they are better than Larry LaProte on TechTV. If he really wants to impress me, let's see him built a Solaris 8 box from scratch.

Niether are very good...

[adnausium]

I REALLY dont like TV.com, but i also felt an immediate dislike for this new site too....for one thing, one of the great aspects of TVtome was that all the info was available on ONE PAGE! for example: i want to figure out what episode of "scrubs" was the one about Turk and Dr. Cox being on the same pissing schedule (best episode ever BTW)...so i click on scrubs and then on season one then on the first episode, briefly scan the plot...nope not that one, page back click episode two, etc, etc, etc...on TVtome, i could click on "scrubs" then click on episodes and scroll down continuously briefly scanning each plot outline without having to make any more clicks....now this may seem trivial by itself, but this is just one example of the tons of simple things that made TVtome so great. Will any one else EVER get it right??

Wikis are great but...

[__aailob1448]

They are not the second coming of christ. They shouldn't be used for everything and this is one example.

if someone is to make a replacement for tvtome.com, I recommend he uses HTML/CSS/PHP and get on with it.

You can't copyright facts

[emarkp]

And a simple cast list is a fact.

Is it going to be FREE?

[Anonymous Coward]

So what's going to prevent this newest one from getting bought out as well? Licensing? I'm not even going to bother and go look if they're not proclaiming the licensing as a selling point. CDDB, IMDB, etc have weaned me of going anywhere but someplace that will license it back to me, and give me copies.

-- Ender, Duke_of_URL

anonymous editting

[Anonymous Coward]

I refuse to get another name/pass on anymore sites, which is why I do all my stuff anonymously - or sometimes just casually, since I don't proxy all the time and otherwise do encryption, etc....

Validation would be just as much work as allowing anonymous, becuase registered users of wikipedia don't usually troll, and those that do get their accounts locked down.

Part of the lure of wikipedia is instant gratification. a casual user who fixes a typo gets immediate feedback, and says: Cool! And often will go on to do another one or otherwise stick around.

-- Ender, Duke_of_URL

I too need new bookcases

[Anonymous Coward]

Because a bad book is better than good TV.

Even a bad book is faster to figure out or finish, and has fewer commericals.

Per procurement dollar per hour of entertainment it is also far cheaper, especially if you're willing to shop used/thrift/discount stores. It also has higher trade-in value.

They also don't become technologically obsolete.

-- Ender, Duke_of_URL

Re:I too need new bookcases

[tomhudson]

hey also don't become technologically obsolete.

Even the old, obsolete tech manuals are interesting to re-read years later, to remind me of when I'm re-re-re-inventing the wheel :-)

Too bad no one did this for IMDb

[Anonymous Coward]

It's too bad that no one has made a free version of IMDb. Going back 5 or 6 years ago, they had a really clean interface that was chock full of info. After Amazon snatched them up, they've cluttered up the interface, and made the data generally less accessible. (I think you use to be able to get the database info for free.) Because of their connection with Amazon, there's never any info about how to purchase hard-to-find movies or anything like that, which would be such a huge boon to that site's content. Hmm, maybe a ShadowIMDb just for purchase information!&%^@$@!*
NO CARRIER
AmazonRep: Nothing to see here. Move along.

wrong

[maxpublic]

perhaps this will allow the community to rebuild what it has lost.

The "community" didn't lose anything since the "community" didn't own TVTome to begin with.

Max

Re:Multi-show sites like TV.com can never compete.

[praxis]

I used to use TVtome.com because it provided uniform data access to past episode titles. I could do something like this:

1. Pull up a table listing of the episodes on TVtome.com.
2. Cut and past it into Excel.
3. Add a column for the status on which I have seen, which I have missed, which are on my TiVo, etc.
4. Use that data to search upcomming listings on my feed based on episode title and my priority.
5. Print out a weekly "program TiVo" checklist.

This allowed me to select an older show which I may have not watched when it first aired but is in re-runs. Then let's say it's a show one would want to watch in order. Since re-runs are not always predictable, etc, having a list of things on this week that I missed and a spreadsheet with information like a list of all episodes, and if I've seen them, let me easily record those episodes I needed.

This might seem like overkill, I mean, I can always just tell my TiVo to get all episodes. I've tried that, but then for shows like "The Simpsons" I have to weed through 15 episodes a week and delete those I've seen. And I run the risk that it recorded an episode of "The Simpsons" that I've seen over an episode of a show that's lower priority on my TiVo but yet has an episode I haven't seen airing at the same time.

Remember, the TiVo only tracks repeats for a few weeks. When you talk about trying to catch up on 8 shows, some of which have had 100's of episodes, after a few months of watching, 90% of the stuff TiVo records is repeats. So augmenting the TiVo with a spreadsheet and weekly checklist solves the record only that which I plan on watching problem. Only TVtome.com let me grab all the episode titles for all my shows in an easy to use tabular format, with just one copy and paste from each show.

That's why someone would use TVtome.com over fan sites, each of which has a different layout.

Re:Multi-show sites like TV.com can never compete.

[entrigant]

I use to use tvtome.com just to find the upcoming schedule for new episodes, or to find the season and episode number of an episode I've seen. It was one place to go that could do that for every show. Unless you are looking for discussion, rumors, spoilers, backgrounds, etc. for the show tvtome was more convenient and did the job.

Structured data

[harmonica]

Two points I want to comment on concerning the other replies so far:

License - IMDb would be a great place to get data from, but the way they distribute their raw data at the moment is not very import-friendly. I guess they don't want to make it too easy for the "competitors". There are programs that import IMDb data into a database, but it's a tedious way. I'd prefer something ready to import into a database like .sql or .csv and something I'm allowed to use everywhere I please. When doing a TV data project from scratch today, a solid design of the data structures and the freedom to use the data everywhere should go without saying.

Wiki - I like the Wiki approach, but I'm not sure how suitable it is to collectively edit structured data. Wikipedia works great, but it's just a big text for each article. Maybe software exists to support entering database-style rows in a Wiki?

What about forums?

[Maltheus]

Anybody know of a definitive site for TV discussion forums? I like to go to a site and talk about what I saw last night. Presently, I go to ain-it-cool news for that, but they usually just pick a couple of shows a week for that and most of the people there are gayer than rainbows starring in musicals about Judy Garland (shit-together-wise, not sexually speaking). Not to mention they don't use a standard bulletin board system.

I know that each show usually has it's own webpage for these things, but I'd rather just go to a single login site for all TV. I see a discussion link on the wiki pages, but it's a general one. I'm looking for the most heavily trafficed TV discussion group site, that covers all/most of the new TV shows, and uses that standard BB system that you see everywhere. It use to be called the USENET. Even TvTomb didn't really seem to have this. Anybody know of such a site?

Re:What about forums?

[Anonymous Coward]

IMDb has message boards for every entry in their database.

eg:

http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0411008/board/threads/

Go to any title page, scroll down, and look for "Message Board". Lively forum.

Re:Multi-show sites like TV.com can never compete.

[TheoMurpse]

But if I wanted to read about Danger Mouse, My Pet Monster, Denver the Last Dinosaur, or many other TV shows from my youth, TV Tome was a great, centrally located database for pretty much all the non-graphic data you could want about the show, and typically more than the fan sites would have.

Let's replace IMDb while we're at it

[Trejkaz]

IMDb has been full of ads, and not so fun to use for some time now. In addition to this, it seems that you can't even add missing pictures without paying them money, so there are a crapload of missing pictures.

So... let's replace IMDb too.

Agreed

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, and you can read them because they're in human format.

Point I was getting at is that 8-track stuff I have is pretty hard to read when my players are all broke, and I don't feel like shelling out to get obsolete equipment to play them anymore.

Ditto for Atari carts and the like.

ObTopic: IMDb is to X as CDDB is to FreeDB? (I'm looking for an engine for FireFox)

Also anyone know a way download/use your own database (for applications), if you're correcting up FreeDB entries - making your own for local bands, etc, so that applications can check my own DB first, and then if something is new to my computer it'll go check the net (and copy down information so I'm working mostly off of local resources)?

-- Ender, Duke_of_URL

Re:Agreed

[tomhudson]

Point I was getting at is that 8-track stuff I have is pretty hard to read when my players are all broke, and I don't feel like shelling out to get obsolete equipment to play them anymore

Look for an older relative ... if they're in their 60s to 90s you can be sure they've got 8-track, 78 rpm record players, etc. Be warned, though - they'll want you to rip their old shellac 12" records to cd so they can play them on their dvd player.

Re:Mirroring TV.com? Oops...

[Anonymous Coward]

The editors could see who submitted information to them. I forget if there was a way for regular users to see that.