Most Watched Shows incorrect listing

Just to clarify, did you mark individual episodes as watched, or the chevron (double arrow) on the watchlist to mark multiple at once?

If you used the batch marking on the watchlist then that's normal. 

No, I never marked anything in a batch out of 1000+ episodes I marked, I marked them all individually.

I didn't even know there's a way to mark them in a batch.

So TV shows like Stargate SG-1, MacGyver (original), Supernatural, Star Trek TNG, etc. that have 100+ episodes each where I watched all episodes in all seasons, I clicked on "watched" eye icon for each episode individually and they all appear as marked.

The problem is because the dates aren't there for most of them.

Another trivia... when I first joined this site a couple of weeks ago, I've marked over 1000 episodes in a single day and they all appeared properly on that list (well, at least it looked that way, I didn't even consider that dates weren't properly saved).

It's strange seeing that some episodes from the same TV show have dates and some not, especially since the only way I mark something as watched is either by clicking the eye icon next to episode title on the /episodes link, or rate the episode and verify that the "watched" has been selected.

To avoid strange errors like these, you should force the requirement of date for episode being watched and not allow the field to be "null" or whatever you use in the DB to mark the watched date as "unknown".

PS: I've checked your URL for "watchlist" and I've never even seen such page nor those double arrow icons, so no, definitely didn't mark my watched episodes like that. It was individually for each episode.

PPS: The reason I'm adding this as new post instead of editing mine above is that site gives me blank error message when I try to click "Update" when editing. First time seeing this as I did update some of my posts in the past.

Just removing "watched" icon and adding it again adds the watched date and shows show fine on the list. This is crazy because these shows all did properly have the dates added when I marked them. So they just seem to have disappeared for some reason. I wonder if this happened to all users.

Maybe one of you can check if all the shows you've marked in the past suddenly appear to have no dates.

It would be great if users could add those dates because many of us saw some shows many years in the past.

@MAT13 Just to let you know, all those 3 bugs in the initial post are related to the time not being known; the stats are from within the past [week/month/year] so if you don't know the watch date, you can't include it in the statistics.

All of the individual watching (via rating, watchlist, all episodes page, individual episode page & calendar) will cause it to be the current date.
I double checked all of these just to make sure. Also none of my recently watched episodes had this issue.

Only the batch updating which I previously mentioned doesn't set the date (this is intended behaviour) - but as you said that you didn't use this page and your recently watched episodes since the 6th have a watched date, it's possible that a bug was fixed.

Currently the only way to set a watch date in the past is to use the premium user API (and even then you'd have to manually enter the approximate date you watched it on as that information was never known so cannot be retrieved).

Okay, thanks for the info. I dunno why I lost all those dates for 10,000+ episodes I have marked as watched. Will leave it like this for now... too much work to go and re-select them again.

Hey, is there a way to see all the TV shows I've watched? I know I can see list of all episodes, but that has a paginator with 515 pages so it could be more useful to just see TV shows listed with possible number of episodes watched next to each show.

@MAT13 wrote:
Okay, thanks for the info. I dunno why I lost all those dates for 10,000+ episodes I have marked as watched. Will leave it like this for now... too much work to go and re-select them again.

Hey, is there a way to see all the TV shows I've watched? I know I can see list of all episodes, but that has a paginator with 515 pages so it could be more useful to just see TV shows listed with possible number of episodes watched next to each show.

By any chance did you use one of the old importers/migrators, e.g. LocateTV?

I didn't realise you had that much unknown, that seems very unusual.

Also, no - there's no way to do that. The closest you can do is view all of the shows you're following: https://www.tvmaze.com/users/172386/mat13/followed

Not sure what LocateTV is but no, I didn't use anything by that name.

For the past 10+ years I've used epguides.com site to keep my personal track of TV shows that I am watching and when new episodes are released. Then about a month ago I clicked on individual episode on that site which brought me to your site. After checking this site a bit, it seemed cool to keep track of all TV shows so I registered an account.

Then during first couple of weeks I just went and searched various TV shows that I've watched and marked individual episodes on /episodes link by clicking on the "eye" icon next to each episode. During that time, all those marked episodes did appear on my stats with dates because under most watched I did have TV shows like Stargate SG-1 or Supernatural which had 100+ or 200+ episodes.

As mentioned before, I didn't know about marking episodes in batches (I actually wished I knew about it back then, lol) so I marked them all individually. Then, a few days ago I noticed that not all episodes appear under "Just watched", but when I clicked on full list it was because the date was not saved (well, it was saved, but for some reason it ended up removed).

Recently I've reported another bug (bug which toggled watched status on/off by rating an episode or changing your rating). This bug was reported as fixed recently, and only after this I noticed this bug. Not sure if there is any relation to that because this bug may have existed before I just didn't notice it.

But it is really strange when you take for example "Jekyll and Hyde" or "Dead to Me" where 7 out of 10 episodes appear with dates. The ordering also makes no sense because I marked many more episodes after those as watched and they don't have the date. So it isn't that just the most recent ones have dates. Some do then some I marked later s watched don't, then some other I marked as watched after do again, and so on.

But I find it strange that this would only happen to me. Perhaps you can query the database and look for episodes that are marked as watched in the past two weeks (probably created_at field) but don't have the watched date set. This will give you the idea if it happened on a larger scale and many other users also lost that info, meaning their stats for last month or last year won't show properly.

I do hope that in the future there'll be a way to list TV shows watched or that there'll be an option to see those stats for "all time" not just past week/month/year. Then at least "all time" will always give correct info since having a date set or not won't matter.

I think it may need @david to look further into this to see if anything strange happened.

Ha, sorry for the confusion, there's a simple explanation. If you mark a huge amount of episodes as watched "normally" - more episodes than you could have actually all watched within that week - we store these watched episodes without a timestamp, which means they don't count towards the statistics page. If we didn't, people would get occasional spikes of having watched hundreds or thousands of episodes within a week, rendering their stats page useless. This does happen only after you've "exceeded the limit" which explains why you've seen them counted towards the statistics briefly here and there.

@david wrote:
Ha, sorry for the confusion, there's a simple explanation. If you mark a huge amount of episodes as watched "normally" - more episodes than you could have actually all watched within that week - we store these watched episodes without a timestamp, which means they don't count towards the statistics page. If we didn't, people would get occasional spikes of having watched hundreds or thousands of episodes within a week, rendering their stats page useless. This does happen only after you've "exceeded the limit" which explains why you've seen them counted towards the statistics briefly here and there.

I see. Thank you. Makes sense. I hope you add ability to regular users to add date or at least year for when it was watched.

Too bad that all lose timestamp because during the past month there were many episodes I watch, but I also marked those I remembered watching years ago and because I marked them as well, those I recently watched also lost timestamp.

What time span is that tied to? For example, if I was 3 episodes today, then tomorrow I mark some 100 I watched in the past, then the next day mark 2 more I watched, will all 105 lose timestamp or only the huge batch marked within a single day?

Ah, nevermind. The stats aren't trying to keep track of which TV shows you've watched and most watched episodes ever, only up to 1 year. Maybe we'll see this option in the future.

Thanks for this "bug" clarification. Now admins will also be aware of this feature ;)

@MAT13 wrote:

Hey, is there a way to see all the TV shows I've watched? I know I can see list of all episodes, but that has a paginator with 515 pages so it could be more useful to just see TV shows listed with possible number of episodes watched next to each show.

Check this out: https://www.tvmaze.com/dashboard/watched

Oh, wow, great. This lists them all. Perhaps adding "alphabetical" or "by year" (of the show) ordering option to the list would be useful/interesting to have. Thanks for this link.