Quoting goodguy:

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Quoting kahless:

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Fact is: the birthyear field exist. In my opinion it's a very useful enhancement to the profiler. Due to the very restrictive rules I keep those informations local and therefore I'm not allowed to contribute cast and crew with birthyears.

That's not true.
You can have all the BYs you want in your DB and still contribute, because you have to explicitly click a checkbox for each BY you want to submit. By default all BY are stripped when you contribute.

Oh, well - did not realize this yet!  But nevertheless a lot of work when you have many birthyears in your database to verify, if BY's are necessary/allowed for contribution or not 

Actor/Actress/Cast trivia, I think that would be kinda neat, exspcially if you have a movie party and want to show off.

With the Headshot DB being built AND the ability to selectivly specify what BY's are contributed, maybe the BY could be merged with the Headshots?

Quoting Dr. Killpatient:

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Quoting skipnet50:

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so why is it necessary to start a whole new thread on covered ground every few months or weeks

You'd get bored with less to read and your daily post average would drop. 

Those would be bad things?

Skip

I think I should point out that this program is DVD Profiler - not Actor Profiler.

Since trivia about actors is interesting, why limit it to Birth Year? To follow onto what Northblock alluded to before, why not track birth place, statistics (height, weight, hair color), marriage status, number of marriages, parents, children, siblings.  There are any number of things I would personally find interesting about actors that COULD be included in a database.  But what does this have to do with cataloging DVDs? I'll answer myself: NOTHING.

As a tool for differentiating two (or more) actors with the same name, the Birth Year field is usefulf for  DVD tracking. But it serves no useful purpose with the vast majority of actors.

And while a forum is a means for people to discuss things and propose changes, I don't find it necessary to keep rehashing the same issue every couple of months when you didn't get your way the last time.

If you want to use birth years, go ahead - just don't try to contribute these data when it isn't necessary because of same-named cast members.

Quoting EnryWiki:

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Quoting richierich:

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My big concern about using them as an additional data field that we fill for all actors, is how do we verify them for the database.

How do we now, when BY is necessary? 

Sometimes it is very hard to find to find enough documentation to source a BY... I would hate to see how to do it for everyone... I mean sure it would probably be easy enough for the big names... but what about all the rest.... especially some of the actors only in the show for a couple moments... and it is pretty much their first acting job.

Because if we went to having BY for all (and not sure that I am for or against it at this point) we will still have to give suitable documentation for every cast member.

DVDP is a program intended to "Keep track of your entire DVD collection".
So, I think it should do that as priority #1: keep track of titles, overviews, codebars, disc IDs, film credits (hopefully all of them! ), covers, cases, and so on. Birth years are not a priority for the program, unless when necessary.

That said, does DVDP *only* keep track of our DVD collections?
I don't think so. Locally DVDP has headshots, and HTML notes where you can write or download episode guides, film guides or whatever you like. I guess many users like having that sort of trivia locally, so let them (let us ).
Even in the online DVDP database there are Genres and Theatrical release years, data that are not usually found in the DVD itself or in the movie itself. 
I mean, it's not all black or white. 

Quoting pauls42:

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unfortunately it does hurt.

e.g. if there are two actors of the same name (but different people).
Actor A in film A1, Actor B in film B1, B2, B3, B4.

If you add a birth year to any film that one of the two actors has played in e.g. Actor A in film A1, then when that BY is downloaded it changes the BY for all the occurrences of those actors to be that downloaded. i.e. Actor B gets the BY from actor A.

And there is no choice in this.. it just happens.

But if I understood it correctly that is exactly the case where both should get a birth year to differentiate between them.

In most such cases one can "easily" find the BY for one of the actors/crew, and not the other. Maybe we need to be able to enter "unknown" to avoid wrong spreading around? I know it sounds silly to enter a BY and then not tell what it is, but after all, we only need this to make distinctions. Could be any number actually.

At this moment I have the impression the reverse also happens. An updated entry comes in where the BY is not filled in (or not "activated" with the checkbox) and wipes out the existing entry. Actually just happened with the John Williams example.