Adding co-stars

+100
This thought had crossed my mind a hundred times before.

However, sometimes people (me) not adding co-stars (at first), because many early scene releases have end credits cut. Or when adding guests from the press-release, where's no separation between guest and co-starring.

Yeh, that would be nice, but I also mostly add Guest stars only first, as the co-stars are often cut in the end, like tnt mentioned above.

The shows I truly care about, I try to add completely of course :)

It's often easy to figure out who is a co-star in most U.S. press releases.

CW, NBC: Guest stars.

CBS, ABC: Characters with no character name are pretty much always co-stars. They typically list the actors in order of crediting, so if number 7 is "Security Guard #2", you can figure 8+ are co-stars as well.

Fox: That's a toughy. Sometimes they list guest stars, sometimes they list guest stars and some co-stars. They almost never list all of the cast.

I just tab through the fields, when I get to Cast Type I type C, 3 more tabs then space to create. You quickly get a rhythm going.

Gadfly wrote:
It's often easy to figure out who is a co-star in most U.S. press releases.

CW, NBC: Guest stars.

CBS, ABC: Characters with no character name are pretty much always co-stars. They typically list the actors in order of crediting, so if number 7 is "Security Guard #2", you can figure 8+ are co-stars as well.

Fox: That's a toughy. Sometimes they list guest stars, sometimes they list guest stars and some co-stars. They almost never list all of the cast.

I got yelled at (sort of, lol) for assuming someone was a co-star if they weren't explicitly marked as such.

pentar wrote:
I got yelled at (sort of, lol) for assuming someone was a co-star if they weren't explicitly marked as such.

Who sort of yelled at you? And had the episode already aired?

Other clues: if you're adding someone to the database or they don't have any other credits, odds are that they're a co-star if they're on a show that has co-stars.

Having a familiarity with the show helps. For stuff like Once Upon a Time, Zoo and Agents of SHIELD, it's pretty easy (for me) to figure who the co-stars are and aren't looking at the press releases. And once a co-star, almost always a co-star. The actors on OUaT that play the dwarves other than Grumpy (Lee Arenberg) are always co-stars. The press releases sometime list guest stars after them, but they're still co-stars.

And sometimes... it's a dirty word for some people, but you have to watch the show. The Internet is a wonderful and miraculous thing, but sites like IMDB and the press network press releases don't give you what you need to make the determination.

Gadfly wrote:
And sometimes... it's a dirty word, but you just have to watch the show. The Internet is a wonderful and miraculous thing, but sites like IMDB and the press network press releases don't give you what you need to make the determination.

This ^^

And since we're complaining about press releases it's a bit of pet peeve of mine that a lot of times they don't list recurring guest characters :)

And sometimes, contributors are just going to screw it up. Ditto with show stars versus guest stars. Someone (didn't check to see who) put in Kristin Chenowith as a show star for the American Gods finale. She... wasn't. You fix it, you move on. Que sera sera.

This sort of got off topic. What I would like to see is if you check the box "Return to this page after a successful create" and you're adding a co-star, the next page will have co-star pre-filled. What happens to me sometimes is I'll somehow forget to change it to co-star after the first one. Then I have to go back and click "Manage" in order to fix it. I hate that.

I agree the best way to add co-stars is to actually watch the episode. That's what I do.

Any news on that topic? The feature is highly usable and will help a lot when adding couple dozen of co-stars in a row.

Basically it would be awesome, if all of the parametres (Cast Type, him/herself, voice) would keep their settings if "Return to this page after a successful create" is checked.

tnt wrote:
Any news on that topic? The feature is highly usable and will help a lot when adding couple dozen of co-stars in a row.

Basically it would be awesome, if all of the parametres (Cast Type, him/herself, voice) would keep their settings if "Return to this page after a successful create" is checked.

This would be helpful, especially lately with Good Girls having 12+ co-stars for each episode so far (episode 1 had 28...). and I always forget to check voice for animated stuff and then have to go back and manage it one at a time. I know it's just a couple more clicks each time but it can be tedious

Bookmarked this thread for my TODO list, but I can't promise anything right now.

david wrote:
Bookmarked this thread for my TODO list, but I can't promise anything right now.

Any chance to see this in the foreseeable future?

Any news?

No. There is no easy way to do this.

Bummer :( It takes about twice the time to add the co-star vs guest star. On the shows where 20-25 co-stars per episode it's kind of critical...

Is it possible to set up a path/choice system where when you click on Guest Cast you go to the same page but the options are all broken out like ...

[Create New] [Manage] * the old method

[Create New Guest Star] [Manage] * New options with each type already selected so they don't even need to be an selectable option on the page

[Create New Special Guest Star] [Manage]

[Create New Co-Star] [Manage] * and son on with the rest

That way the adder can choose the method that makes most sense and/or easiest for them. Like, I may use the old path if I only had a couple of additions with mixed types vs the separate add Co-Stars if I had a butt load of co-stars to add. There are different choices for Cast vs Guest ... why not add s'more choices.

Just a thought ... ymmv

I always thought that for databases, solely relying on manual data entering, improving the data entry tools should be one of the top priorities. With the amount of the data constantly growing, the tools are falling behind, there's literally no improvements over the past two years, not like there's nothing to be improved.

Better tools means a) more data could be added in the same (often limited) amount of time; b) contributing looks more appealing, more people would like to contribute; c) less chance for people to give up because of boring and routine process.

FYI: this is now (ever since the recent change that allows you to add an episode into a specific season instead of the latest) somewhat possible by manually tweaking the URL.

For example, to add a guest cast (and all the subsequent entries if "return to this page is checked") as co-star: https://www.tvmaze.com/guestcast/create?episode_id=1665516&GuestCast[castType_enum]=3

Or to add them as voice-only: https://www.tvmaze.com/guestcast/create?episode_id=2121946&GuestCast[voice]=1

I realise that this isn't super useful to most people, but perhaps it's useful input for one of @gazza911's user scripts :) Perhaps I can incorporate some of such link variations into the UI as well, but I don't have any idea yet how it would make sense.