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@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%7CCrazy for Cinema Alien (1979)|COM|http://efilmcritic.com/hbs.cgi?movie=583%7CeFilmCritic Alien (1979)|COM|http://www.igs.net/~mtr/haiku-reviews.html#Alien%7CHaiku Reviews Cheaper by the Dozen (2003)|COM|http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/2003/12/122402.html%7CRoger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times Jaws (1975)|MSC|http://www.sharks.net/bigger_boats.html%7CReal shark attacks END

or

URLNAME Garbo, Greta|IMG|http://www.goldensilents.com/stars/gretagarbo.html%7CGolden Silents Portrait Photos| Eastwood, Clint|MSC|http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/eastwood.html%7CSenses of Cinema - Great Directors Critical Database| Hitchcock, Alfred (I)|MSC|http://hitchcock.tv/%7CAlfred 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