MyFanfare - Only TV Shows?

April 2, 2018 8:20 AM

Why is it I can only add TV shows to "My Fanfare"? I want to add movies, special events, etc, so I can continue to follow those conversations, the same way I do for TV shows.

I apologize if this has been addressed before.

posted by ThePinkSuperhero (9 comments total)

TV shows and podcasts are the two media formats we have that are explicitly episodic: that there will by definition be more entries under that specific organizing title is baked into the medium format. And, importantly, the metadata available for those things from third party service providers we depend on is organized around that ongoing-series concept, so it's easy for folks to organize a set of TV episodes under a show, or a set of podcast episodes under a podcast.

Movies and books occupy a sort of liminal space—there are definitely sequels and franchise and so forth, but they are much more likely to exist as one-offs and the metadata that's easily available to wrangle reflects that. So a book series is structurally more the exception than the rule, movie series likewise. (That among the most popular of books and movies are major pop culture franchises conceals that issue a little, but its there.)

For Special Events, there's literally no metadata available; they're hand-crafted posts and to the extent that they're recurring yearly events that is right now more of a budding tradition of practice on FanFare than something that we have a need for new infrastructure for.

So for those, it'd take a lot of work to make an "add to My FanFare" solution function, compared to the existing TV and podcast options; not impossible, but more work than is proportionally justified right now with the other more pressing work that FanFare still needs done. It'd be nice to have it be something that Just Works, and in the future we might get there, but right now it doesn't make sense to try to implement.
posted by cortex at 10:05 AM on April 2, 2018

:(
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 3:57 PM on April 2, 2018

I've got a few movies in my 'My Fanfare' sidebar already (Ghostbusters & Mad Max Fury Road, for example) - did there used to be an 'Add to My Fanfare' function for movies that got removed in one of the updates? I didn't notice until this question that there are no recent movies in my 'My Fanfare' since I'm mostly viewing things from the 'Recent Activity' page.
posted by oh yeah! at 5:34 PM on April 2, 2018

Oh! Yes, so that's the main workaround: Club posts will show up in My FanFare automatically. Folks specifically sufficiently dedicated to a given book series or movie series can start up a club just for that that and subscribe accordingly, and new posts will show up as club members make them.

Note that that bit is entirely human powered; there's no metadata driving it automatically, it's just that someone or someones chose to (a) start a club and (b) make posts that cover a franchise in them. Which is fine but not something we can easily automate for see-above reasons.

I'm not at all anti-franchising but the space between DIYing via Clubs and automating via metadata is an infrastructural one that we don't have a good bang-for-buck solution for at this point.
posted by cortex at 5:49 PM on April 2, 2018

I'm probably missing something (it's been a long day and I'm not really functional) but is there a reason that the "+ My FanFare" link on the movie page (right col, first block below the image) doesn't do the trick? I just added Ready Player One via this, seemed to work for me.
posted by neilbert at 5:02 PM on April 4, 2018

No, you're right, the '+ My Fanfare' is right there already and does still work. I didn't think to check, after cortex's answer I just assumed it must have been taken away rather than that I'd forgotten to click for any recent movies.
posted by oh yeah! at 5:09 PM on April 4, 2018

Wow, that was the thing I wanted. Cool!
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 12:44 PM on April 5, 2018

Ah, geez, I over-interpreted your question to begin with, apparently! Consider my beans plated.
posted by cortex at 12:57 PM on April 5, 2018

I stil want it for special events. So many live musicals!!!
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 6:58 PM on April 5, 2018