Help About User-Generated Reports

Movie-Mine lets you create and customize a variety of useful reports. For example, you can produce:

You can generate some reports without logging in, but certain features are available only to logged-in users, such as the ability to incorporate your own data (e.g. rankings, viewdates, etc.). Another benefit of logging in is that it allows you to customize the Reports menu, saving your favorite reports for quick access.

There is a form for Report Settings at the bottom of every report page, to specify options and control report-related actions. All of these features are described in detail in the following help sections:

Sources

The "Sources" section indicates whose movie ratings are to be incorporated into the report: average critics, average viewers, Rusty, and/or yourself (if logged in). Check Critics to include average ratings from a selection of reputable film critics, if available. Similarly, Viewers includes average ratings from a broad audience of movie viewers, if available. Check Rusty to include Rusty's ratings, if available. When you are logged in, you can also check Myself to incorporate your own ratings, notes, and other items of information that you've entered.

In Advanced mode, two additonal options are available: Blended and Others. Checking Blended incorporates a blended rating, derived from a weighted average of ratings from multiple sources, which you can customize via the Blend Section (below). When Others is checked, you can specify up to 5 additional Movie-Mine user ids (labeled User1 - User5) whose ratings are to be incorporated into this report.

Order by

The "Order by" section of the Report Settings form specifies the sequence of rows in the resulting report. After the checkbox indicating Descending or ascending order, there is a sequence of radio buttons from which to choose the sort field. Available ordering choices include movie title, release year, and ratings from selected sources (critics, viewers, or Rusty). Under Advanced mode, you can also order by a custom blended rating or another user's rating.

When logged in, you have some additional ordering options based on your own data. These include your movie quality rating, watch list rank, date of last viewing, and date/time of your last change. Advanced mode also adds the option of sorting by the date/time when you first created a note or other annotation about the movie.

Include columns

The "Include columns" section of Report Settings has a series of checkboxes for columns of information to be included in the report. Only those options pertaining to basic movie information and the sources that you've selected are displayed. Note that all movie quality ratings are expressed on Rusty's 2-digit scale, where 99 is the best and 1 is the worst, and 0 means not available or unspecified. The following list briefly describes the fields that may be included:

  • Seq: the row sequence number within this set of results.
  • Thumb: thumbnail cover image linking to movie info, with tip showing title + year on hovering.
  • Title/Year: the movie title and year of its release, linking to movie info.
  • Category: list of categories or genres to which movie is assigned, linking to corresponding pages of highly recommended movies.
  • Critics Rating: average of ratings from a variety of well-known film critics.
  • Viewers Rating: average of ratings from a large, diverse community of viewers.
  • Rusty's Rating: the personal rating of Rusty, Movie-Mine's chief editor.
  • Blended Rating: derived rating based on a weighted combination of ratings from multiple sources, normalized to Rusty's usual 1-99 scale or 0 if N/A.
  • User1 - User5 Rating: up to 5 separate ratings from other Movie-Mine users.
  • My Rating: your own rating, if you recorded it. (This and the following fields require you to be logged in.)
  • Rank: a 2-digit number that you assigned to specify how strongly you want to consider seeing this movie, where a higher number (up to 99) indicates greater interest (0 means unspecified).
  • Seen: indicates whether you have flagged this movie as one you've already seen (even if you don't remember or haven't entered when).
  • Viewed: the date you entered as when last saw this movie, blank or 0000-00-00 if unspecified.
  • Created: date and time of your first creation of any note or annotation to this movie (available only in Advanced mode).
  • LastChg: the date and time of your last change to any notes or annotations you attached to this movie.
  • Notes: your own free-form notes about this movie.

Restrict to

The "Restrict to" section of Report Settings allows you to limit report results according to various criteria, including a range of movie release dates. If you selected Rusty as a source, you can specify a range of Rusty's ratings.

If you are logged in and checked "Myself" as a source, you can specify a range of your own ratings and/or watchlist rankings and a range of your dates of last viewing. Also you can restrict based on whether you viewed or haven't viewed the movie, even if you don't recall or haven't indicated when.

Blend

The "Blend" section of Report Settings is where you define a weighted average rating, which can be displayed as an additional column and/or used as a sort order criterion. This section appears only in Advanced mode, when you have also checked Blended as a source.

Assuming you have incorporated multiple sources, Critics, Viewers, and/or Rusty, specify the relative weight to assign each source in computing a weighted average. Each Weight is a number between 0 and 100, indicating the relative proportion of the weighted average contributed by the rating from this source. The resulting weighted average rating is always normalized to the usual 1-99 scale.

For example, suppose we've specified 100 as the weight to assign all 3 ratings, Critics, Viewers, and Rusty. The available (i.e. > 0) ratings from each of these sources will be given equal weight. We could just as well have specified a different non-zero value, e.g. 50 instead of 100, as the weight for all of the sources. The outcome is the same, because it's the relative values that count. If all 3 ratings are available, each contributes a third of the blended rating; if only 2 ratings are available, each contributes half; if only 1 rating is available, it will be equal to the blended rating; if no ratings are available from any of the selected sources, the blended rating is 0.

As another example, suppose we wish to give average critic ratings twice the weight of average viewer ratings, and no weight at all to Rusty. We can do this with Weight(Critics) = 2, Weight(Viewers) = 1, and Weight(Rusty) = 0. If ratings are available for both Critics and Viewers, two thirds of the blended result will come from Critics, and one third from Viewers. If only one of those ratings (Critics or Viewers) is available, it will be 100 percent of the blended rating. In this example, Rusty's rating makes no contribution at all to the result.

Sample Reports

When you are logged in, the Reports menu includes a few choices of canned reports that you can select and personalize. These three sample reports are initially provided for you:

  • My Watch List: your top viewing candidates, by descending rank
  • My Recent Viewings: your most recent viewings, by descending date
  • My Top Movies: your top rated movies, by descending rating

Users who are not logged in can still generate some other types of reports, for example:

Click the Submit button to generate report output using the settings displayed for each of the preceding links. These are just a few examples - you can play around with settings to create and submit other reports, but unless you log in you won't be able to incorporate your own information, and you won't be able to save report configurations to your own custom Reports menu.


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