Main cast

As far as i know the order will change randomly, and it's not even a question of clicking on a person. (What they call popularity here)

I created a topic with several options, I don't know where David, Jan, Thomas and Juan are in the process in deciding which one is better.

http://www.tvmaze.com/threads/549/display-of-main-...

I think someone created a topic about bulk adding, but i'm not looking for it, it should be somewhere in the suggestions forum.

Morning_Star wrote:
First, apologies if this has been brought up before. The forum search is a bit buggered (it seems very loose with the words), but I couldn't find anything immediately, so I hope this is okay.
This is actually twofold:
1) The cast is is arranged in no discernible order. I first took noticed when I was adding the main cast to Da Vinci's Inquest and they were all over the place. Two actors had already been added beforehand, so I thought that might have played some interference, but when I went to add the cast of Da Vinci's City Hall from nothing, it became quite obvious. They certainly aren't in the order I added them, nor are they in alphabetical order of the actors (first or last) or even character. It's absolutely random and that's quite bothersome, especially when there's no means of ordering them.
2) Trying to add the cast to individual episodes is a bit of a pain. First is that you have to add them one episode at a time, which isn't helped by the fact that after I add them, I have to go back to the episode and then navigate to the next. I would think there should be an option to do this in one go. For example, I finally finished managing the cast appearances for War of the Worlds and since the cast appears in every episode (in which they are credited as such), I could have gotten it done in about 9 seconds and two or three clicks. Not all shows would be that easy, but it would certainly help to have such an option.

We are thinking about bulk tools for trusted contributors for adding main cast to episodes, if anyone could do that, I think we will have alot of users just adding all main cast to all episodes, we do not want this to happen :)

The sorting of the main cast is per appearance, the often someone appears in a show the higher he is ranked. But this is also still open for discussion :)

cheers
Juan

Yeah, the sorting of cast is based on the amount of appearances, both Guest Cast and Cast Appearance entries. Once those are added, the order should be good. :)

A tool to add Cast Appearances in bulk is planned indeed!

Okay, I can see it now. Looking at the arrangement of the cast of War of the Worlds, they appear exactly as I would have ordered them. The thing is after adding cast to other shows, I never looked back and was only going by what I saw when managing them. There they appear to be in alphabetical order of actors' first names. It's still troublesome because I'm currently adding the cast to episodes of Da Vinci's Inquest and am copping from what I added to TVRage (reading it via Internet Archive) and I ordered them by their listing onscreen, so I've got two lists I'm having to compare and sort. I understand going by onscreen order isn't the perfect system since there are many shows that add and drop cast members while shifting some in other places, but having them float by total of appearances has some flaws as well. Case in point, Ian Tracey is listed before Nicholas Campbell for Da Vinci's Inquest, which doesn't seem right since Campbell is playing the titular character. And, yes, Tracey appears in exactly as many episodes (i.e. all), so that won't change at all without some manual interference. So I hope there's thought being put into having a manual ordering system to put in place at some point.

And it's good to hear about a bulk tool is in the pipeline. Tangentially related, are there any plans for something like that for crew credit? Not the guest, but the general crew. Because while I haven't even really started in that area, I can't imagine it's going to be any better. I recall it taking ages for me to add all crew credits for just a single episode at TVRage. Even on a good day when all the crew listed onscreen were in the checklist and I didn't have to add anything, it still took longer than I care to admit to finish. There's a quite a bit more names to sort through with wider variety, but having a bulk option would help when there are titles that remain constant (list a Creator credit) throughout a series or if you simply have them sorted out elsewhere (like I do on some notepads for some shows). And I hope this bulk tool (for either crew or cast) has a check-all option because it annoyed me TVRage never had that and there were some times where I felt it would have made it a bit easier.

It is important to add a tool to order main cast. The first three cast members are listed in the search results and are often supporting characters. Primary cast members cannot normally be added by number of appearances, because they appear in all episodes.

For example, in Alien Nation, the primary cast members are Eric Pierpoint and Gary Graham. They should be listed at the beginning of both the cast in the search results and the cast on the show page. The order of the cast on the search results and show page can change with every screen refresh. One show page refresh, one of the least important supporting cast was listed first.

The other reason for manually sorting main cast is that they should be listed in the order of the opening credits (the order is often set by the actor's contracts).

They're listed by number of appearances, aren't they ? Alien Nation is wonky because no one have added cast appearances on the individual episodes yet.

Aidan wrote:
They're listed by number of appearances, aren't they ? Alien Nation is wonky because no one have added cast appearances on the individual episodes yet.

It wouldn't matter much. All of the listed cast were considered main cast and "appeared" in all episodes. There were two Primary cast members, the rest of the main cast is members of the family of one Primary cast member. Most of the guest cast is not listed. Fox also produced three made for TV movies (starting 5 years after the original show) to fulfill their contract and strong fan demand. These are usually considered part of the series. This was one of several shows that were terminated during a Fox purge of SciFi and Drama shows.

It would also be nice if, when the number of episodes is available for an actor, the number were listed in the cast list.