Hi!
Because of IMDB's no-bot policy I inquired a couple of weeks ago what the
best way would be to submit links to Wikipedia articles about movies, so
they can add them to the "External reviews" section for each movie. Here's
the reply:
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I apologize for the delay in getting back to you (I was out of the office
for the past 2 weeks). The easiest thing to automatically submit several
links is to send them to our mail server. You will need to send a
specially formatted email to adds(a)imdb.com with details of the title and
link.
Please note that our mail server doesn't normally accept incoming email
from unauthorized users so you will need to let us know the email address
of the sender so we can allow access to it.
This is the syntax you will need to use.
URLTITLE
title|type|URL|description|
END
or
URLNAME
name|type|URL|description|
END
where:
title = Title of film exactly as it appears on
IMDb.com
type = a 3-letter code that identifies the type of link
URL = the link
description = description of the link
"type" can be one of the following:
COM comments/reviews
IMG image
SND sound
MOV movie
FAQ Frequently Asked Questions list.
OFF official sites
POS movie posters
TRA movie trailers
MSC miscellaneous i.e. anything that doesn't fit into a type above.
a few examples:
URLTITLE
Alien (
1979)|COM|http://crazy4cinema.com/Review/FilmsA/f_alien.html|Crazy for Cinema
Alien (
1979)|COM|http://efilmcritic.com/hbs.cgi?movie=583|eFilmCritic
Alien (
1979)|COM|http://www.igs.net/~mtr/haiku-reviews.html#Alien|Haiku Reviews
Cheaper by the Dozen
(
2003)|COM|http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/2003/12/122402.html|R… Ebert,
Chicago Sun-Times
Jaws (
1975)|MSC|http://www.sharks.net/bigger_boats.html|Real shark attacks
END
or
URLNAME
Garbo,
Greta|IMG|http://www.goldensilents.com/stars/gretagarbo.html|Golden Silents
Portrait Photos|
Eastwood,
Clint|MSC|http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/eastwood.html… of
Cinema - Great Directors Critical Database|
Hitchcock, Alfred (I)|MSC|http://hitchcock.tv/|Alfred Hitchcock - The Master Of
Suspense|
END
What I suggest is that you create a sample submission and send it to
me along with the email address that you would like to use as a
submitter, so I can check that everything looks ok and set things
up on our side.
GC
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So what we need is a mailbot which takes a list of Wikipedia articles and
the corresponding IMDB titles, apparently of the syntax "Title (year)" and
generates and sends the respective mails. Preferably it would keep track
of its submissions (could be done easily in Perl using a tie'd hash) so we
can update the list. For extra points, it could try to auto-guess the
title in the IMDB, say, by filtering out "(movie)" from the Wikipedia
title and looking for the first [1-2][0,8,9][0-9][0-9] match in the
article.
Mike, are you still interested?
Regards,
Erik