- March 10, 2006
- 4,434
- 1,897
- Moderator
- #21
It's weird, it is a combination of all that, but in the end Amazon is in control of it. They run multiple servers spread around the world in their data centers that provide the information. I connect to server #23 for example and in Canada you end up connecting to server #45... now aside from providing different type of data depending on what they detect you are from (I'm sure the users in Quebec get the 'French' movie titles displayed), but it can also be that the database Amazon uses for IMDb is not updated in real-time across all the servers.
When they did the major change to their site before, it took up to 12 weeks before all the servers were updated. So it was a mix of some users seeing new version, while the rest was still stuck on old HTML design. I'm sure this is done on purpose as well to get feedback/bug-reports/etc, but it makes my life even harder as I have to account for every situation.
There is still a ton of code in IMDb+ that accounts for situations that are probably totally gone now for everybody, but I'm afraid to remove them.
What is infuriating ontop is that not only can the design be different for entire site, the page content be different for entire site (language of title being the main one), but I've also seen individual movies being different. The latter is caused by the community driven nature of the AKA titles and they do not all follow the same style. This last update Amazon did actually seems to go towards rectifying that goal.
For example "International" is now changed to "Word-wide", but I still caught a few movies that used International. Unspecified is changed to <blank/empty>, and a few other tweaks. It all works again for majority of users as of now, but I have one issue left that I'm working with somebody from Slovenia with to solve. Once I detect the minute difference that Amazon/IMDb does to their HTML code I can improve the title-language-detect system even more and ensure IMDb+ picks the English title.
When they did the major change to their site before, it took up to 12 weeks before all the servers were updated. So it was a mix of some users seeing new version, while the rest was still stuck on old HTML design. I'm sure this is done on purpose as well to get feedback/bug-reports/etc, but it makes my life even harder as I have to account for every situation.
There is still a ton of code in IMDb+ that accounts for situations that are probably totally gone now for everybody, but I'm afraid to remove them.
What is infuriating ontop is that not only can the design be different for entire site, the page content be different for entire site (language of title being the main one), but I've also seen individual movies being different. The latter is caused by the community driven nature of the AKA titles and they do not all follow the same style. This last update Amazon did actually seems to go towards rectifying that goal.
For example "International" is now changed to "Word-wide", but I still caught a few movies that used International. Unspecified is changed to <blank/empty>, and a few other tweaks. It all works again for majority of users as of now, but I have one issue left that I'm working with somebody from Slovenia with to solve. Once I detect the minute difference that Amazon/IMDb does to their HTML code I can improve the title-language-detect system even more and ensure IMDb+ picks the English title.
Sweden