July 23, 2020
As the world of movies and TV continues to shift and expand, we here at TheTVDB are consistently reviewing the guidelines in our Bible, adding new policies, and altering outdated ones.
This past month, we've implemented a number of policy changes that effect how data should be added, stored, and otherwise entered into the site. In the interest of keeping our users informed about these updates, we've rounded up the newest policy changes, along with a few minor functionality adjustments, below.
July Policy Changes
- We have decided to start allowing dead pilots, but only if they were actually aired on a network. They are to be added as Series records, and we have added a Dead Pilot tag option in the TV Types & Format tags that should be checked as well. More info here.
- We've clarified our rules on co-productions, specifically for subsequent seasons of a co-produced series. New rules here:
- In the event that two or more networks are associated with the production of the same series — i.e. Chernobyl (HBO & Sky 1); His Dark Materials (HBO & BBC One) — the rule will be that we will list the network with the first air date to be the network of record, or Original Network. So, in the His Dark Materials example, the UK (BBC One) has a premiere date of Nov. 3, and the US (HBO) has an air date of Nov. 4. So, BBC One would be the Original Network.
- Beyond the initial season the Original Network will be used for the air-dates of any subsequent season. Regardless of which production partner airs those seasons first.
- We've clarified that character photos should always be from the chest up, and removed the language about full-body images being acceptable.
- We've made our episode image guidelines more clear.
July Bug Fixes & Site Updates
- When removing a character from a series that has a role-specific image, the character image wasn't being deleted and its artwork page was remaining accessible. This has been fixed.
- We've shortened the date field so that you can now easily access the calendar.
- We've ticketed a feature that would allow us to flag network as "Web Series providers." When a series is added with one of these networks as its Original Network, the site will auto-enforce our Web Series minimum criteria from the Bible, and require a certain amount of episodes be added, based on runtime.
