Monday, July 12, 2010

IMDb's weird formatting (UPDATED 2018)

This is an older post and happens to get a lot of hits, so my guess is it's found when Googling how to format IMDb's text. Well, this old antiquated way is over. There is a newer much easier way to do this.

Isn't it odd that IMDb is so very outdated? Their formatting is just plain awful. I see messed up links to movies and names all the time. Here is how they do it:

It really doesn't matter now what you're linking to. You just need to replace the entire thing with a link. So let's say you're linking to Alfred Hitchcock. Go to his IMDb page and you'll see this as his url: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000033/

You'll copy the part that starts with nm so in his case it's nm0000033. So copy that text and write it like this: [link=nm0000033] and you're done!

nm stands for name. tt stands for title, so if it's a movie or a video game title, it'll begin with tt. Foreign Correspondent would be tt0032484.

If you are using an episode, it will still have its own title. So let's use I Love Lucy's "Job Switching". The series is tt0043208 but Job Switching is tt0609243.

In any case, you no longer type the name nor title. You just type [link=tt0609243] and that's it. It'll auto show up correctly. Just remember that it has be an equal sign. That's it!




Old way...


To link to name(s):
'Cary Grant' (qv)
'Alfred Hitchcock (I)' (qv)

To link to a movie:
_Foreign Correspondent (1940)_ (qv)
_You Can't Take It with You (1938)_ (qv)

To link to a TV show:
_"I Love Lucy" (1951)_ (qv)
_"The Golden Girls" (1985)_ (qv)

To Link to an episode:
_"I Love Lucy" (1951) {Job Switching (#2.1)}_ (qv)
_"Dallas" (1980) {A House Divided (#3.25)}_ (qv)

To Link to a TV movie or one particular show without episodes:

_Stagecoach (1986) (TV)_ (qv)


What a pain in the neck that is. Anyway, for anyone who wants to help and fix all the qv's, this is hopefully a helpful guide.

The official help page, which is nearly impossible to find, is here.

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