sort the guest cast in order of importance so that guest stars are listed before co-stars

david wrote 5 years ago: 1

Quoted from https://www.tvmaze.com/threads/3266/tvmaze-wishlist-megathread?page=1 for a discussion:

Aidan wrote:
Here's a aesthetic one that's quickly becoming one of my pet peeves *shrug*.
On the shows episode pages sort the guest cast in order of importance so that guest stars are listed before co-stars.
There are two major benefits to this;
1) The most prominent and relevant actors in that specific episode will be listed first instead of minor co-stars.
2) The actors that will be listed are more likely to have a picture which makes the page look better without any big grey boxes.

Can you list a couple of example episodes where this is a problem? The guest stars aren't currently ordered randomly, but they are ordered by character appearances: the character with the most appearances will show first. You'd think that this would be enough to make sure prominent actors are listed before minor one-off roles.

Aidan wrote 5 years ago: 1

The main idea behind this suggestion is that the actors that play the most prominent roles in the episode gets listed on the main episode page.

We distinguish between guest appearances in order of importance already with special guest stars, guest stars and co-stars on the guest cast page, so why not on the main page?

Listing everyone with the same number of appearances "randomly" is fine, but what I specifically suggest is doing it in order of importance, so you do special guests first, then guests, then co-stars.

Some issues I have with the current setup:

- When everyone have the same number of appearances, eg. 1. Then you will get co-stars listed before guest stars and special guest stars could possibly not be listed at all.

- Recurring co-star, he would be listed before a single episode special guest star.

- When everyone only have 1 episode chances are the co-stars are listed before guest stars

- And the real issue is when all this is happening and there is more than 8 guest appearances, then you run into the possibility that the major characters from the episode is left out while co-stars of the "Bystander #2" variety is listed.

- (Cosmetic afterthought) Co-stars are less likely to have pictures.

pentar wrote 5 years ago: 1

I know this is an old series, but the show Emergency! comes to mind for me. The firefighters in this show were in almost every episode as co-stars, and they end up bumping some of the prominent guest stars off the main episode page.

https://www.tvmaze.com/episodes/132304/emergency-4x18-prestidigitation

https://www.tvmaze.com/episodes/132303/emergency-4x17-kidding

https://www.tvmaze.com/episodes/132306/emergency-4x20-the-mouse

Aidan wrote 5 years ago: 1

This one is an issue too, with uncredited and co-stars taking up space so guest cast isn't listed.

https://www.tvmaze.com/episodes/53163/gossip-girl-1x03-poison-ivy

david wrote 5 years ago: 1

That's a fair point, in the odd case of a frequently recurring but very minor role the appearance-based sorting doesn't make sense.

It is done. :)

pentar wrote 5 years ago: 1

Nice. Well done and thank you.

Aidan wrote 5 years ago: 1

Very nice, it's especially noticeable on procedurals where most/all of the guest cast and co-stars only have 1 appearance.

Also nice to see the the full grid is being used too, finally listing 9 instead of 8 actors.

Great job :)

tnt wrote 5 years ago: 1

david wrote:
That's a fair point, in the odd case of a frequently recurring but very minor role the appearance-based sorting doesn't make sense.
It is done. :)

Thank you, much better now :)

Is it possible also to fix the size of "no image" placeholders, so they would have the same size as actor images? They bigger now, and the grid looks incoherent. If it's not too big of a hassle of course :)

Probably image would tell more https://i.imgur.com/Cr6A0HU.png