Allow unknown watching date
i'm a Trakt noob. when my favorite iPhone app completely shifted over to using Trakt for their backend, i had to create a Trakt account if i wanted to continue using it. so i did.
recently i learned that the Trakt website lets you also track Movie's & such too (yes, i had not visited the actual website until recently); so i began to explore the site & thought i'd start filling in what i've seen & wanna see etc.
i was astonished to find that i could NOT add any movies to the "History" & "Collection" areas without providing a date & time. THAT's HORRIBLE!!! how the hell do i know when i first watch "The Princess Bride" or "Aliens" or "Braveheart" etc etc etc ?!?!?!?!
surely this can't be so, so... i dug in a little to the support pages - only to find that the Trakt people have made an intentional decision to NOT allow us users to add vids we've watched &/or own without requiring the date & time of such watching/buying! this is INCONCEIVABLE (pun intended) in my opinion!
to me, this renders my utilizing this service/site useless!
but, since this site SEEMS to be the best option to track both tv & movies, i would like to make a plea to the owner(s)/developer(s) to make the date/time part optional. or, if you can't conceive of how to do that (for some weird reason), then put an "unknown" or "i don't remember" option in the date/time sheet.
i read on one of the other posts linked below, where Founder/Admin Justin Nemeth said, "We don’t plan on supporting an unknown date right now since everything is key off of dates" - if that's true, then perhaps you can program in a hidden date/time for database purposes; or just add the date/time of the "Add to..." action AND having an optional date/time of watched/seen option for the users to use if they want to (and if they remember the date/time of when they saw it). all that to say, i bet some creative out-of-the-box thinking could figure out a solution.
now, i spent all this time to try, search, read, & write this but i do recognize that i could have missed something somewhere to render this post a stupid waste; and if that's so, then my apologies!
lastly, if you've actually read this far, then...
thank you for your time & consideration.
.peace.
REFS:
http://support.trakt.tv/forums/188762-general/suggestions/6899488-please-fix-trakt-2-0-re-the-diary-function-previ
http://support.trakt.tv/forums/188762-general/suggestions/4938996-seen-date-should-be-uncertain-different-from-th
http://support.trakt.tv/forums/188762-general/suggestions/9548070-remove-time-option-when-manually-adding-a-title-to
http://support.trakt.tv/forums/188762-general/suggestions/10829259-watched-at-obscure-date

Your points make sense, but as before this is still not something we plan on supporting. I’ll move this to researching, but I don’t anticipate changing this in the near term.
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rbs commented
I completely gave up on trakt doing any good implementation we've asked for. I'm pretty sure one of those ref links (dead now) was one of my posts from almost a decade ago. I've been marking things I don't know the date as watched at my birthday. That's the best solution I could find on my own. This should be a priority. But it's been like 8 years and nothing.
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ahysanti commented
+1. Agreed. Since I joined Trakt back when it wasn't required to specify a watch date (at least I don't think it did), a lot of my movies and episodes are set to have been watched in 2013 (basically the date I marked them as watched), and now when I remember watching something in the past but don't remember when, I have to guess a date, which kinda sucks because it makes the watch history inaccurate.
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Tom commented
I 100% want an ability to have unknown dates on watches. I'm fairly obsessive about managing my data on Trakt and have even written scripts to help me populate old data from streaming services. But there are plenty of movies I've watched at some unknown time, and making me lie about when and dirty up my stats doesn't help. Making the watch datetime be nullable or adding a boolean flag to signify its certainty should be a relatively simple task. Any watches with unknown datetimes should be excluded from time-based stats, but not "all time" totals. Please allow us to catalog the movies we've watched in the unscrobbled, unorganized times in our lives.
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Steven commented
I really want to switch to Trakt, but there's no way I can accurately populate the watch date for all the thousands of movies and TV episodes I've watched in my entire life. Not having an unknown option pretty much breaks all the analytics of the site for people like me, and so, it's kinda pointless to use it. Please just add an unknown date that doesn't affect the trend data! I really want to use Trakt!
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tmg commented
just signed up to Trakt, this would be useful.
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Dinis Correia commented
Any updates on this? I’ve been checking Letterboxd recently and noticed that setting a date is optional when adding a movie to your watched list - this makes perfect sense.
I wouldn’t really care if these movies/shows didn’t make it to my stats, I just wish i could add a movie without having to set a date (using “right now” or “release date” for unknown dates just messes with the stats anyway...)
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James Bulman commented
I've recently just gone through all my Trakt TV Shows and Movies and manually set the watched date to January 1, 1900 00:00 for all views that weren't scrobbled / were before when I first purchased Trakt. My reasoning for using this date rather than the Release Date was that I had lots of TV Shows / Movies that we're released before I was born.
This solution does work pretty well, but it also interferes with the All Time Stats view which now shows that I watched most of my content on Monday at midnight.
For this reason I'd really like an unknown watched date option.
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Myron Aub commented
> For those that started with trakt from the beginning, perfect, everything is accounted for.
I agree except that I do not believe there is a single user in the entire world who started using Trakt at the very same time they first started watching TV or Movies. Even a young teenager probably cannot remember the exact first time they watched the Wizard of Oz with their parents.
In other words this is an issue that affects practically every single Trakt user.
Probably like most people I use the Release Date for unknown or just guess the year with a random date. As a programmer myself I can totally understand the difficulties involved but it would be great if Trakt could come up with a neat solution.
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protsyk.d commented
I've been an avid Trakt user for years, and have integrated it with Apple TV and a bunch of stuff.
I would pay money to have this and the top issue resolved - dropping shows and marking things as watched are unnecessarily frustrating, while being part of two of the most key processes of the site.
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Pavol Vlasák commented
@justin-nemeth This is single most terrible issue of the Trakt. Maybe you should reconsider implementing it since it's the 5th most voted idea here.
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Dinis Correia commented
What if the granularity of the watch date could be adjusted? So instead of having to choose a specific day I could just go for month/year – or even just year.
This is especially frustrating when trying to mark as watched old TV shows episodes (I watch a lot on the Apple TV, so I manually have to mark them and sometimes I forget to do it right away) – there's no way I can remember the specific day I watched each episode, but I know I watched the entire season in 2017, for example.
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Matthew commented
The main problem I have with not having a 'unknown' release date is that my 'year in review' shows a massive amount of history on one day which is simply the day I have chosen to place all my 'unknown' show watching history.
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BevansDesign commented
I still think this would be a very useful feature to have. When did I see Star Wars for the first time? I have no idea. It came out 4 years before I was born, and I know I first saw it on TV, but I have no idea when.
My options are currently:
1. Just now. That's not true.
2. Release date. That's the most useful option, but it's still not true, and even less true for movies that were out before I was born.
3. Specific date. I can try to guess, but it's likely I'll be off by years, and certainly by months.So let's just add:
4. Unknown. I know I've seen it, but have no idea when. Perfect. That's exactly what I need. -
Adaj commented
A simple solution could be to add a flag labelling any particular date as "uncertain" or "approximate".
If a user doesn't know when they watched something, they could use the release date (or a date close to when they think they watched it) but mark it as "approximate", so they can later see the date was just a guess. This way the system could continue to work normally, while at the same time allowing users to know which dates are exact and which aren't.
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Jason commented
When I'm done watching an episode or finishing up a movie, I always add it to my watched history. But, the only problem I have with this is that you're forced to add the time when you've watched it. All I want to do is just add the date, not the time.
- Example: http://imgur.com/DYXkl5P
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Anonymous commented
Just pick a random date with the right year (or estimated year) in the past.
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ImreToth commented
If you are interested check this post about a temporary solution: https://is.gd/3Ssddh
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ImreToth commented
If you are interested check this post about a temporary solution: https://is.gd/3Ssddh
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Joe Hartenstine commented
ImreToth, I don't know if this is any help to you, but the way I solved this issue for myself was this: for everything I KNOW I've watched before the day I began Trakt, I just put "On Release Date" as the watched date. This, of course, has led me to say I've watched certain silent films 100 years before I was born. But, for me, it made sense that no reasonable person would be bothered by that.
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Dinis Correia commented
I think this would be great, especially for new users (like me).
I'm importing my watched movies from iCheckMovies and there's no way I can get that with a correct watch date.