shadokitty

Know the feeling. I had a goal of 31, but as of now I'm already at 24. I suppose unemployment does have an upside :P

Trevor

I stole this idea from someone else I think, but I think the lists are more aesthetically pleasing and easier to read if we make the checklist/bingo card info size=1.

And maybe use some sort of bolding, linking, sizing, or coloring to separate the film names from the comments.

Not trying to sound prickish, just a random thought, after perusing all the lists. I still read all the lists, but I think I'm less lazy than most people (in this matter at least), and many will prefer to only read things that are easy to read. A post in entirely the same font/color/size is harder to read. I just got an outside opinion, and she agrees that posts without any kind of formatting are very difficult to read.

JerryKILL

Bingo cards are also making the list very long and cluttered. Personally, I skip right over them, but I'm not doing the bingo thing. I think it would be kind of interesting to see which movies are being watched the most, some kind of "title count". Some player stats could come out of that, for example who is watching "popular" movies and who is watching more obscure ones ("less popular"). Either way, lots of work going through those lists to come up with such things. Maybe we can all post links to our lists in Excel? ;-)

Trevor

Yep, that's why I suggested making them size=1. That will reduce the clutter in half, making it that much easier for everyone to scroll thru the lists. It would take each person about three seconds to make their entire checklist/bingo card the smaller size, no future editing needed, just a one time highlight and click.
Sounds like you're volunteering, awesome!

Dick Laurent

Trevor - I like your list, kind of similar to mine. Or maybe mine is similar to yours...I tried to go with what works for me and not copy from others, but I guess there's not many things to do differently, so similarities will more than likely creep up. I would like to add IMDB links to all my titles, though. I think that's a nice touch.

riotinmyskull

what if everyone spoiler tagged their bingo card lists?

Trevor

I was debating using wikipedia links just to mix it up, but IMDB links have become somewhat standard.

Your list reminds me to dig out my unwatched Sleepaway Camp quadrilogy.
That might be a great idea there....

Numes

This is much more difficult than you think. I did that for the sci-fi challenge and it turned into a LOT of manual labor. I had a pretty good system with everyone's posts being linked to excel through the import external data option, then I had a lot of text parser functions that would filter out the "1. " and "2. ", etc... The thing that I found out early on was that a lot of people do the numbering different. I know Trevor does "1- " and 2- ". It turns out to be a lot of work to filter out the extraneous information (some people put their comments right after the film, some put it on the next line, some people don't put the exact correct title of the movie or don't put a "The" where it should be, etc...). It was a little more difficult with the Sci-Fi challenge because there were a lot more TV shows than movies and I had to take into account that there could be 2,3, or 4 shows that counted on one line. Like you said, unless everyone also put them in excel in a specialized format, it would be challenging. I suppose you could have a COUNTIF function that looked for key phrases of titles of movies, but for sequels and stuff it wouldn't work as easily and there would continue to be manual work involved.

Just throwing out my thoughts. I think it would be pretty cool to have that, I love stats like that, but unless there is an easier way to parse the webpages (which I'm sure there is,) it would be difficult.

clckworang

I don't know why I never even thought about using IMDB links. I just decided to use links to movie posters in my Photobucket account. I was going to post small thumbnails next to each film, but I don't think I can post that many pics in a single post, even if they were thumbnails.

Giles

yeah, I finally got around to watching II and III and the Blind Series this year for this challenge, talk about two sets of discs that took me years to finally watch (gonna have to watch the Puppetmaster films as well)

Trevor

I know we're supposed to talk about the movies and leave the formatting and other talk to the other eleven months, but...

Having combined stats would be pretty cool, and perhaps more people would agree to rigid formatting guidelines if it allowed the stats. Something to discuss for next year, or next challenge maybe. We could come up with a rigid template and guidelines, asking everyone to use/follow them to allow for statisical reports.

Either that or get ten or so volunteers to manually to the stats for ten or so lists each, then one person to compile.

Giles

that's a good idea [raises hand tepidly]

Numes

Let's be honest. Hardly anyone is going to go for this. A lot of people have unique formatting and I think it's one thing that makes the lists interesting. For instance, wishbone (I think that's the users name) has a very simple, yet interesting table structure that I think is cool, but I also like my format and how I do comments and stuff. Edit: I would most certainly vote for making a mandatory size=1 requirement for all of the checklist items.

I think this would be the way to go. Just have someone takes posts 1-15 / 16-30, etc... They could update them weekly and one person could just compile them and post a weekly stats sheet or something, that could definitely work.

Trevor

Yeah, you're right of course, few will want to follow a rigid format, was just thinking out loud/dreaming. Easily updated stats for the whole challenge would be quite cool. You probably have my vote for best list so far btw.
I'm definitely for this, or even spoilering them. I've gone ahead and spoilered mine for now. Anyone have any thoughts on using spoiler tags?
We might want to look at the lists a bit, just to be sure that posts 1-15 aren't all heavy watchers, and 16-30 all people who started but quit, etc.

Giles

personally "size=1" kills my eyes... I've put my bingo list in spoiler tags.

Dick Laurent

This is my first challenge, and I'm kind of new to boards in general (I did BBS'ing on my Commodore 64, though!), but with me just scrolling through, I like to see comments people make, and if a word catches my eye, I stop and read. I believe the formatting should be distinct to tell the movies and numbers of them, but I prefer seeing the text in whole. I'm much more likely to read something already there. Additional clicking is effort I really don't want to expend. Yeah, I'm THAT lazy...

Giles

and what? peeps above '30' are schlubs .. ?!?

Trevor

No, we're not explaining it well perhaps, no additional clicking required.

We're just saying to use a spoiler tag for the bingo card/checklists, not for the film comments. No one adds extraneous information to the bingo card I believe, it's just a list of titles, most will stay largely blank. People have complained about them cluttering the lists over the last two years at least, so spoilering them will allow browsing the lists to be much smoother and quicker. And they're still there if you really want to see them.

The highlight of this whole challenge is seeing what people watch and reading their comments on them, we'd never suggest anything to get in the way of that.

I swear I'm not a computer nerd, but I actually ran a BBS for a short while. The internet before the internet.....

Dick Laurent

Ahh...it makes more sense now with your eplanation, Trevor. Maybe I should have made sure I understood the bingo card concept in the first place! Thanks for explaining.

I remember the days of DOS SHELL (access through BBS) to fix some buddies system's while they were gone. Those were the golden days of computer communication.

EDIT: Now that I understand the concept, I too am for using a spoiler for the bingo card/checklist. However, I like stats being readily available. They don't take up that much more room.

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

When I used to do it for the Unwatched threads, I copied them into a text file, had to take out any numbering and then ran it through a script that sorted it.

Next you had the problem where if a movie had a "The" at the beginning and some people would include it and others wouldn't, which would cause the list to not be sorted. It would be easy to have the script take it out before the sort but I found it easier to just stop doing it Taking out the numbers was the worst part.

For the sci-fi challenge, I asked Numes to do part of it and I'd do the other part but he was nice enough to do it all. Splitting it up makes it not so bad. One page per person should be the max anyone has to do unless they're really bored.

Numes

Personally, I don't like the spoiler tag for the checklist, I scroll through the posts and don't want to have to click on the spoiler button. In addition, it's not a spoiler. If there was a way to change that text for the button, then that might be different. As for the people who can't read size=1, almost all the current browsers you can hold CTRL down and use your mouse wheel to make the text bigger. Firefox even has a zoom in fuction (maybe IE does too).

Finally, and completely off topic, I am not ashamed to admit that I ran a BBS for about 2 years back in the day. I'm up for a game of Trade Wars or Legend of the Red Dragon.

clckworang

Now that I know for sure that people are actually reading comments, I might go back and make some of my own, rather than just the smilies that I've been using. I guess it depends on how industrious I feel.

Trevor

Good idea on the leaving the stats. Small typo there btw, missing "e" in useless. And they're not useless, I love the idea.

Giles

I actually did the same as well.

Dick Laurent

Thanks for catching that. I forget that spell check doesn't recognize all caps. Originally I was playing with the idea of tracking high used words in my write-ups (i.e. "cool" used 7x), which was "useless" info, but then it seemed too daunting. I'll wait 'till I reach my goal.

And I totally miss Trade Wars.