Name reference view

Hi - Supporting the previous commentators, I'd like to chime in.

Please don't remove the reference view or add it back.

The new layout we're being forced to use is cluttered, unreadable and incomplete. It doesn't flow well. It's hard to fish out the most important information - what a certain person has done (it is, after all, what defines their career and therefore their existence on your site...)

We're not old and crusty change haters, the reference layout was just something that worked well for the intended purpose. So it should be no surprise that we're disappointed it is being forcibly removed.

You're alienating your most faithful and long-term user base.

as expected, TITLE REFERENCE VIEW is now also gone, thanks for making IMDb suck again (Y) 

Commented on the original thread on imdb boards when it happened and now here. The old layout is/was better, new one is not good. Use whatever you want by default on the site I don't care, but give people OPTIONS. Hate the "trend" of forcing dumbed down websites and software. Options please and thank you imdb.

Wouldn't it be a great idea if there were a database of movies for pure reference, shorn of all the flashy entertainment stuff in which serious film buffs could have all the information on titles, actors, etc presented to them simply and directly? There used to be such a place, IMDB I think it was called, but it got taken over by one of the big companies and rapidly changed for the worse, Sad.

I must say that I'm terribly disappointed in this decision.

Being a film buff, IMDb used to be my favourite website to visit and I couldn't possibly calculate the huge number of hours I've spent poring over film trivia throughout the years.

However, since the beginning of the seemingly never-ending changes (ditching of the forums, this retiring of the "old" page view, etc), which the powers that be have decided to implement, I've enjoyed visiting less and less. It may look prettier (though I don't see how) to some, but for those of us who visit and contribute regularly, it is no longer easy to navigate or user-friendly.

I really hope that the decision to retire the "old" page view is reconsidered, or I will be visiting the site much less often in future.

I realize by now that you won't revert to the old views, but for name pages please do one of the following;

Either
- change the current name pages to expand all categories per default

or
- make a new name page (call it reference view, contributor view or whatever you like) where all categories are expanded by default. If making a new view, please also consider condensing the view to one line instead of two per title. For instance, for Sean Connery it is enough that it says "Goldfinger (1964) ... James Bond" instead of
"Goldfinger                                                                                                          1964
James Bond                                                                                                                "
All professions in the media IMDb report on will do fine with one line per title instead of two, with the very rare exception of some extremely long titles that would get line separated anyway, those being a "problem" even now.

I often go in on a person's page, thinking "didn't I see him in so-and-so sometime, or was that someone else?", so I go in, click ctrl+f to use the browser search, enter my so-and-so title, and get no results. Before, when we had the reference view, that would mean I was thinking of someone else (or the 1% where I did a typo or something). Now, however, the TV credits may have been expanded by default, and the title I was thinking of was a movie (or vice versa), and thus doesn't show up in the browser search when that category is not expanded. It isn't exactly helpful, nor very modern to limit what we get to see, now that computers are more powerful than ever.

It is also super frustrating, as some others here have pointed out, that when you expand a category, click at title and then go back to the list again, the category is condensed again.

The option to always show ALL categories in full should be an option under General Options, along with similar options, like the title reference view. There should also be choices of whether you want to separate acting jobs by media (the current default) or show all acting jobs in one list. Personally I think it would even be useful to have a choice to combine ALL jobs into one list, for instance

Peter Jackson
Bad Taste (1987) ... Derek/Robert
Also Director, Producer, Writing, Film Editing, Special Effects

Such a view would make someone's career easier to follow, as well as making the pages a lot shorter, with a movie listed only once instead of up to a dozen.

I know people who registered an account on IMDb after 2010 solely for the reason of getting the name reference view, exactly because it had the option to always show all titles. We need that option back, regardless of what you call the view. I realize you may not want to make it the default view, as some name pages may get very long that way, but it should at the very least be toggleable in the General Options.

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This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled English language titles.

Until recently, filmographies for 'foreign'  individuals listed each of their films original, non-English language title as its primary title, but also listed one or more English language variants. Now, only the original title appears. This makes it extremely difficult for non-native speakers to (for example) easily locate or identify a film by its (generally more commonly known) English title. For example, I do not read Italian; consequently it has become very difficult for me to peruse the filmography of Italian actors/directors and find what I'm looking for without guessing and/or clicking on multiple films to see if I can hit on the right one. Along with other recent changes which I've noted in other conversations, this has made the site a lot less user-friendly than it once was. Surely even IMDb's mobile interface (the reason given for so many other changes) could incorporate this simple and extremely helpful tool?