100 Movies. 31 Days. The 4th Annual "October Horror Movie Challenge" (10/1 - 10/31)
#726
I can't believe how quickly the movies add up when you get into this. My original goal was 31, now four and a half days in I'm already at 15 with plans to watch a couple more before the day is over. I'm on pace to hit the 100 mark if I can find enough movies to keep this going.
#727
Challenge Guru & Comic Nerd
flame suit on
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.
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.
Last edited by Trevor; 10-06-08 at 10:28 AM. Reason: clarify that checklist = bingo card
#728
Senior Member
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? ;-)
#729
Challenge Guru & Comic Nerd
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!
Sounds like you're volunteering, awesome!
#730
DVD Talk Special Edition
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.
#732
Challenge Guru & Comic Nerd
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.
Your list reminds me to dig out my unwatched Sleepaway Camp quadrilogy.
That might be a great idea there....
#733
DVD Talk Gold Edition
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? ;-)
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.
#734
DVD Talk Hall of Fame
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.
#735
Moderator
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)
#736
Challenge Guru & Comic Nerd
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.
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.
#737
Moderator
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.
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.
that's a good idea [raises hand tepidly]
#738
DVD Talk Gold Edition
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.
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.
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.
Last edited by Numes; 10-06-08 at 01:04 PM.
#739
Challenge Guru & Comic Nerd
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.
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.
#741
DVD Talk Special Edition
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...
#742
Moderator
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.
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.
#743
Challenge Guru & Comic Nerd
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...
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.....
Last edited by Trevor; 10-06-08 at 01:36 PM.
#744
DVD Talk Special Edition
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.
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.
Last edited by Dick Laurent; 10-06-08 at 02:12 PM.
#745
DVD Talk Hall of Fame
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.
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.
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

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.
Last edited by The Man with the Golden Doujinshi; 10-06-08 at 02:14 PM.
#746
DVD Talk Gold Edition
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.
Finally, and completely off topic, I am not ashamed to admit that I ran a BBS for about 2 years back in the day.

#747
DVD Talk Hall of Fame
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.
#748
Challenge Guru & Comic Nerd
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.
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.
#749
Moderator
#750
DVD Talk Special Edition
And I totally miss Trade Wars.