Shows using same name

The channel at the back usually says enough :)

Well, yes. That and country info.

But it defeat the purpose of API's show single search for those shows. Maybe i'm missing something.

We always use the original show name as name, without any suffixes. This is because these suffixes are completely arbitrary: I've seen different sites use three different naming conventions for the same show; e.g. Showname (2000), Showname (NBC) and Showname (UK).

As we explain in the API documentation, we recommend to always use the regular search endpoint when possible, and use the shows' properties (premiere year, country, network) to differentiate if it returns multiple results.

If there are multiple shows with an identical name, the return value in the singlesearch endpoint is undefined. But it really wouldn't be much better if we did include these suffixes in the show name, because you could be searching for "Showname (2000)" while we'd have it stored as "Showname (UK)".

I'm open to improving the heuristics on the singlesearch endpoint to try to improve the match quality for such queries. But because this is hard and will never be perfect anyway, it currently has a low priority.

I see your point.

I will get a way around it. :)

I *really* think the standard is super-simple, and that the current approach leads only to confusion.

The simple standard is that the first show of a name uses just the name. When a second show with the same name appears, if it's from the same country as the first, it gets a year. If it's from a different country, it gets the country.

That's is, super-easy, very simple, no confusion.

So Utopia was first a BBC show in 2013, and is just Utopia. In 2014, a banner year for Utopias, new shows started up in Australia, the Netherlands, and America, at least. Since there are all different countries, they end up as: Utopia (AU), Utopia (NL), and Utopia (US).

While the API may make it easy to distinguish identical shows, the on-site search doesn't make it was easy.

And then there's the completely unrelated show Utopia : http://www.tvmaze.com/shows/64/utopia

How do you want to fit that one in? ;)

porshipman wrote:
And then there's the completely unrelated show Utopia : http://www.tvmaze.com/shows/64/utopia
How do you want to fit that one in? ;)

That's the "BBC show" that Pentar is referring to, presumably.

pwinn wrote:
I *really* think the standard is super-simple, and that the current approach leads only to confusion.
The simple standard is that the first show of a name uses just the name. When a second show with the same name appears, if it's from the same country as the first, it gets a year. If it's from a different country, it gets the country.
That's is, super-easy, very simple, no confusion.
So Utopia was first a BBC show in 2013, and is just Utopia. In 2014, a banner year for Utopias, new shows started up in Australia, the Netherlands, and America, at least. Since there are all different countries, they end up as: Utopia (AU), Utopia (NL), and Utopia (US).
While the API may make it easy to distinguish identical shows, the on-site search doesn't make it was easy.

Seconded.

Tonks wrote:

Seconded.

We will not add (2014) , (AU) or anything like that to the show title, because it simply does not belong there and is no part of the show title, that decision is made and will not be changed, you can see what show it is if you look at the year, network, country or whatever , it is all written on the main show page.

cheers
Juan

pwinn wrote:
I *really* think the standard is super-simple, and that the current approach leads only to confusion.
The simple standard is that the first show of a name uses just the name. When a second show with the same name appears, if it's from the same country as the first, it gets a year. If it's from a different country, it gets the country.
That's is, super-easy, very simple, no confusion.
So Utopia was first a BBC show in 2013, and is just Utopia. In 2014, a banner year for Utopias, new shows started up in Australia, the Netherlands, and America, at least. Since there are all different countries, they end up as: Utopia (AU), Utopia (NL), and Utopia (US).
While the API may make it easy to distinguish identical shows, the on-site search doesn't make it was easy.

Firstly, thanks for the constructive feedback. But the standard? Perhaps this is one specific site's standard, but in general there's no standard for this at all. In fact it's quite the opposite, an utter mess. Let's see...

TV.com names both shows "Utopia", but has "utopia" and "utopia (2015)" as URL's.

Epguides.com has "Utopia (2013)" for the UK show, and "Utopia (2014 : US)" for the American version.

Thetvdb has "Utopia" for the original version with an alias "Utopia (UK)", and "Utopia (US) (2014)" with an alias "Utopia (FOX)" for the American version.

Tvrage had both "Utopia", "Utopia (UK)" and "Utopia (FOX)".

Wikipedia has "Utopia (UK TV series)" and "Utopia (U.S. reality TV series)".

As you can see out of 5 different sites, there's not 2 of them who handled it in the same way. I bet not a single one of them even handles all cases within their own database consistently. So no, I'm highly convinced that slapping arbitrary suffixes onto a show name is not the best way to deal with this.

Instead, if there are multiple shows with the same name, their unique attributes should be displayed so you can easily spot which of the results is the one you're actually looking for. Looking at http://www.tvmaze.com/search?q=utopia, I think we already do quite alright, but there's indeed plenty of room for improvement. The first thing that comes to mind is that we should perhaps show the country flag on the search results page :)

Why not use the "akas" for this problem?

It also improves the single search

You guys are encouraging more and more sites to use your API, and whilst you may not think it is causing problems on your site it is on others, if there are shows of the same name in different countries a country code at the end of the show is essential in my opinion to differentiate between them, likewise if a show starts airing in a country that has already had a show of that name the air year should be added to the title. To me that keeps everything simple.

If you take a show like Shameless which was originally a UK show but now has been remade for US tv, it should be labelled Shameless (UK) & Shameless (US), if a new show called Shameless started in the US in a few years time you then easily add the air start year to the title so Shameless (US) would become Shameless (2011) (US) and this new Shameless would be Shameless (2017) (US) to me that is a very effect way of keeping everything organised.

RaveDave wrote:
You guys are encouraging more and more sites to use your API, and whilst you may not think it is causing problems on your site it is on others, if there are shows of the same name in different countries a country code at the end of the show is essential in my opinion to differentiate between them, likewise if a show starts airing in a country that has already had a show of that name the air year should be added to the title. To me that keeps everything simple.
If you take a show like Shameless which was originally a UK show but now has been remade for US tv, it should be labelled Shameless (UK) & Shameless (US), if a new show called Shameless started in the US in a few years time you then easily add the air start year to the title so Shameless (US) would become Shameless (2011) (US) and this new Shameless would be Shameless (2017) (US) to me that is a very effect way of keeping everything organised.

We already stated that we will not add country codes to show titles because they simply do not belong there.

There are no shows existing named Utopia (UK) or Shameless (US) or Eleventh Hour (US). A country code is not part of a show title, nowhere in the whole wide world. You can easily spot from which country the show is by looking at the shows main page, or looking at the station it airs on.

Why do some people want to make up something that is not existing ?

Is it too much to ask to look at the main show page to see from which country it is on ?

Do you think Tom Cruise would refer to himself as Tom Cruise (US), in case an Australian actor named Tom Cruise is also making movies ?
He certainly won't do it, because his name is Tom Cruise and NOT Tom Cruise (US).

I do not want to be harsh or anything,like that but we explained it very often, that we will not add made up stuff to a show title.

cheers
Juan

A country code may not be part of a shows official title but it is used by the vasty majority of tv listing sites to show the difference between shows of the same name from different countries, you may not feel its needed on your site and you may be right, but you have been quite heavily promoting other sites to use your API some of those sites don't import the airing network of these shows so their sites are now left with 3, 4 even 5 shows all with same name with little way to differentiate them.

Your example of Tom Cruise is correct he would not refer to himself as Tom Cruise (USA) or Tom Cruise (I) but if there were more than one person with that name the biggest movie database in the world (IMDB) would, put in a fairly common name like Tom Smith in IMDB and look at the listings, there are 96 of them, to differentiate the Smith surname's for them all are followed by different roman numerals to seperate them. Whilist it may not be the persons actual name it is seen as the proper way to seperate them from one and other.

At the end of the day its your site, you can do what you want, but do you not ask yourselves why every other bigger tv listing site uses country and air year as a seperation method, yes there maybe one or two shows that needed tidying up on those sites, but the premise is a good one.

pwinn wrote:
While the API may make it easy to distinguish identical shows, the on-site search doesn't make it was easy.

Not trying to be combative, but in what way is the on-site search confusing? Currently, it surfaces the channel, year, top stars, and the shows cover image. I personally thing this site does it better than all other sites I've seen, and I fully agree with David on this one. If another site that is relying on the tvmaze API is having trouble distinguishing between shows with similar names then they need to re-think their code, because it's quite easy to get and match against other show info such as country or year without having to put it in the shows "name" attribute.

RaveDave wrote:
A country code may not be part of a shows official title but it is used by the vasty majority of tv listing sites to show the difference between shows of the same name from different countries, you may not feel its needed on your site and you may be right, but you have been quite heavily promoting other sites to use your API some of those sites don't import the airing network of these shows so their sites are now left with 3, 4 even 5 shows all with same name with little way to differentiate them.

They can always use the country of the network and add the (US), (UK), whatever themselves if they really want it to be added like that, but I seconds srob650's idea that they maybe need to rethink their code and find another way to match shows with the same name.
The API really gives alot of info to use for that so...

RaveDave wrote:
You guys are encouraging more and more sites to use your API, and whilst you may not think it is causing problems on your site it is on others, if there are shows of the same name in different countries a country code at the end of the show is essential in my opinion to differentiate between them, likewise if a show starts airing in a country that has already had a show of that name the air year should be added to the title. To me that keeps everything simple.
If you take a show like Shameless which was originally a UK show but now has been remade for US tv, it should be labelled Shameless (UK) & Shameless (US), if a new show called Shameless started in the US in a few years time you then easily add the air start year to the title so Shameless (US) would become Shameless (2011) (US) and this new Shameless would be Shameless (2017) (US) to me that is a very effect way of keeping everything organised.

The point I keep trying to make is that because these suffixes are completely arbitrary, adding them wouldn't solve the problem at all. Just look at the Utopia example from a few posts back. What if we decided to add one of these shows as "Utopia (2013)", while your other site knew it as "Utopia (US)"? Then despite using suffixes on both ends, it would be impossible to get a match and you'd still be lost.

The only way to get an absolutely 100% correct match is by looking at the show's attributes like network/country/premiere year/poster, all of which are available in the API.

Feel free to keep arguing against it, but please don't waste too much of your time. It's just extremely unlikely that this policy will ever change :) I'll gladly take a few more pages of these posts if that's what it takes for everybody to get it right instead of half-baked.

RaveDave wrote:
A country code may not be part of a shows official title but it is used by the vasty majority of tv listing sites to show the difference between shows of the same name from different countries, you may not feel its needed on your site and you may be right, but you have been quite heavily promoting other sites to use your API some of those sites don't import the airing network of these shows so their sites are now left with 3, 4 even 5 shows all with same name with little way to differentiate them.

I'm sure those other sites do import episode data, right? They could just take the airdate of 1x01 episode and compare it with our API's premiere date. Shouldn't take more than a few minutes to code up and it'll get you better matches than suffixes ever could.

I had 10 minutes to spare, so I created a quick proof of concept on how to handle this properly. In case anyone is still struggling with it, check out https://gist.github.com/tvdavid/e1503f6824aee4ef0dda