Thanks to the new algorithms, you should no longer experience temporary slowdowns in Filmaster performance as computing recommendations is now way less resource hungry. Also, because of some data structure changes it’s now possible to filter recommendations by tags, a feature that was hard to implement before for performance reasons. So now you can easily find out about recommended westerns or best horrors all adjusted to yor personal tastes.

This is only the fiest step and we’re planning to gradually enhance the algorithm in the future. But you should already have seen new personalized recommendations that are much different than the old ones and possibly more accurate. The latter can be even computed mathematically using the recommendations algorithm test which shows the new engine performs at least 10,7% 20% (see: another algorithm update) better than the old one.

The man behind the new film recommendation engine is Jakub Tlałka. He was only a high school student last year. Today he’s a computer science and maths student on prestigous Warsaw University and a part-time Filmaster developer.

The code around the new recommendation engine is — as the rest of Filmaster — open sourced using the AGPLv3 license. You can check it out in our Bitbucket repository or read about it more on our wiki.

It was a hard project for us and we worked with a world famous Polish mathematician (normally emplaoyed in CERN Institute, Switzerland) on the theoretical model.

The new algorithm has a unprecedensed RMSE (root mean squared error) indicator of 0,9698 which beats Netflix and any other film recommendation engine on Earth that we know of. In a nutshell — it’s freaking good.

If you are interested in your new film recommendations, check them out now. We’re pretty darn sure that the precision with which we point you in the right direction on the map of cinema is… well, very very… well, we guess it’s just very precise.

Should you have any comments concerning this brand you feature, please don’t hesitate to ask. And you’re more than encouraged to share your new recommendations in the comments form below!

Adam & Borys, i.e. the Two Filmasters

PS. If you are a programmer, you might be interested in checking out changeset bf0323d801bc which is responsible for this recommendation engine update. Yes, Filmaster.com is free software!

Update April 3rd: Good old recommendations are back now. Our mathematician has been fired. It turned out the only thing he did is reverse the sorting!

GreenCine is the #1 online shop and source for film addicts. Boasting one of the largest libraries of independent, international and documentary films in the world, GreenCine offers more than 30,000 titles over 250 genres for rent. With a diverse and ever-expanding community of members, GreenCine is the #1 destination for film discovery, debate and information.

This is basically the reason we have decided to cooperate with GreenCine. As we focus on reviewing good movies and discussing them, they distribute those movies to you so you don’t have to pirate them online :>

How is it going to work? Well it’s still not very clear but for the time being, we have decided to start exchanging links between the sites, so that GreenCine customers can easily find good reviews of movies they are renting and Filmaster users can quickly switch from a film page on Filmaster to rent page on GreenCine.

Here is an example link on GreenCine: Paris, Texas (GreenCine) with Filmaster equivallent: Paris, Texas (Filmaster).

We’re looking into other ways to cooperate, so don’t be surprised if you start noticing GreenCine links on Filmaster from time to time.

Filmaster has been covered in the recent issue of GreenCine Dispatch, a GreenCine newsletter.

According to the new tradition, we have released a new version of the code: Filmaste 1.0.2 into the wild. This time the only new feature is the spoiler tag. By using it you will make the lives of fellow Filmasters easier by not forcing them to read these parts of your reviews / comments that tell more than necessary about the film plot.

How to use the spolier tag? Easily! Just enter the spoiler <spoiler> between the spoiler tag like this </spoiler> and Filmaster will automatically hide the text between the tags. Pressing the “show spoilers” button will unhide the spoiler.

Read more about the tags available on Filmaster in the Formatting section of the site.

That’s all as far as the new features are concerned. However, we have also added a few small improvements:
- IMDB ratings importing should now work fine again. It stopped working a few weeks before, as IMDB changes something on their side. Thanks to tueksta for letting us know via Twitter.
- All e-mail notifications are now being sent in 5 minutes intervals, not immediately. This doesn’t sound like an improvement at all but trust us – it is. Thanks to the queuing feature, the site does not go slow anymore when the mail server is struggling with traffic. If you have tried leaving a comment on Filmaster in the recent few weeks you might have encountered this problem of “hanging”. Not an issue anymore.
- On short review page, we now show in the sidebar not only other short reviews but also list other longer reviews. This was not very intuitive before, as you had to go back to the film page to see the longer texts.
- Optimizing and refactoring the code – i.e. things important to the project but not visible to you guys.

Wondering what comes next? Wonder no more. You can already take a look at the plan for the next release, hopefully in two weeks time.

Adam & Borys

E-mail notifications

E-mail notifications about new buddy requests or private messages are nothing new. What is new is a notification about responses to our posts on Filmaster and the ability to configure the notifications adjusting them to our needs.

• Now you’re going to receive all responses in threads you either started or left a comment in via e-mail. One e-mail will be sent for each answer listed in Responses tab (which you can subscribe via RSS as well).
• You now have an interface to manage your notifications where you can set up the notices you want to receive via e-mail (or generally turn the feature of if you don’t need it).

Dashboard->Data->Manage notifications

We also added a nice little new feature: you can also turn off the notifications for any thread you followed before, as well as you can follow any thread that you have never left a comment in but still want to be notified of new comments. You do this by pressing the e-mail icon next to the star icon at the top of each thread (review, short or a forum post):

By the way, if you haven’t provided your e-mail address when signing up (it’s not mandatory) but would like to receive notifications now, you can easily set your e-mail address on the profile edit page in dashboard.

Filtering Planet Filmaster

New filters

The second major feature that we added is the ability to filter Planet Filmaster in a way it was not possible before.

You can for instance list only the activities by your comrades or by people with a similar movie taste, narrow down this selection only to shorts or reviews or show only those the starred activities.

Thanks to the generic way we implemented this new feature, it will be easier in the future to add more filters, i.e. to show all activities concerning a movie, a director or specific to a movie genre (filtering by tags).

The looks of the filters is still under discussion. If you have a better idea on where the filters should be placed (currently they are displayed on Planet Filmaster in the right sidebar) or whether or not they should be visible or hidden by default, please let us know in the comments.

Favorites and other minor details

We have also finally fixed the favorites!

• Adam fixed the problem with starring an activity on Planet Filmaster. It used to select not only the activity in question but also visually select all the other activities that were underneath. This is working properly now.
• Also, the “add-to-favorites” stars appear now on top of all threads (reviews, shorts, forum posts) so that you can easily mark the thread as favorite when you visit it.

We hope that the enhancements here, together with the Planet Filmaster filtering capabilities, will allow you to use the “favorites” more effectively.

Release Notes

Warning: Skip this paragraph if you are not a programmer (danger of irreversible brain damage).

According to a new tradition, we have prepared a Release Notes page for version 1.0.1 in our issue tracker. There, you can check the completed tasks in detail as well as go deep down into the code as most of the tasks have links to our bitbucket code repository in comments. You can play with it, tell us how bad we are or re-use if you want to.

What’s next?

We came up with an ambitious plan to release a new version of code every 2 weeks (we were only 2 weeks late this time!) so you can expect more frequent updates in the future. This is what we have in plans for the nearest weeks:

• Private notes for movies — so that you can write something personal next to each film, that is not going to be published anywhere.
• New recommendations engine – we hope to eventually switch to it soon.
• More stuff that we have specified in jira — still to be discussed what goes first.

That’s it for now, stay tuned and feel free to comment on the changes!

Borys & Adam
The
Two
Filmasters

The rating number 500.000 happened on January 13th (not a Friday) and it was mielonka27’s 7/10 for Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl. By the way, mielonka means spam in Polish :>

The average number of ratings per registered user (aka Filmaster) is over 100, so it’s easy to compute that we’re getting close to 5.000 registered users!

And here are the 10 most popular films in Filmaster so far:
1. Matrix (1500 ratings)
2. Forrest Gump (1448 ratings)
3. Pulp Fiction (1430 ratings)
4. Shrek (1332 ratings)
5. Leon (1223 ratings)
6. Lord of the rings: Fellowship of the Ring (1208 ratings)
7. Fight Club (1188 ratings)
8. Sexmission (1148 ratings – this is the Polish comedy of all times, think: Some like it hot)
9. Pirates of teh Caribbean: The curse of the Black Pearl (1135 ratings)
10. Shrek 2 (1131 ratings)

The actual ranking of best films is obviously different and you can play with it (by filtering actors/directors/movie genres/release dates) here: Best Films.

Adam & Borys i.e. The Two Filmasters

• Next to each movie you now see two figures: the average rating (AVERAGE) and the personalized rating computed for each of you based on our recommendation algorithms (LIKELY), which is your likely score for that film if you haven’t seen it yet (FLM-255).
• We added links on director’s and actor’s pages to their best films sorted by average rating (i.e. rankings) and by likely scores (recommendations) for each of you (FLM-145)
• Commend editing form doesn’t scare anymore — proper CSS styles have been added (FLM-233).
• Comment date displayed on Planet Filmaster is not the creation date, not the last update date which was pretty misleading (FLM-174).
• Basic sitemap exists now at sitemap.xml — this is meant for Google, not for you guys. It should allow the search engines to crawl our portal better and put it higher in the search results. More work is required here as we still do not have site maps for individual blogs (like michuk.filmaster.com) – separate site maps are required there.
• On the short review page we list the author’s ratings now, just like on regular review pages:
  
• External videos have been divided into three categories: trailers, full feature movies and “other videos” (like interviews, fragments of films, etc).
• The looks of teh public profile page has been updated. We’re getting rid of ugly headers and replacing them with the nice ones, prepared using our Filmaster font.

• Some performance issues have been fixed, including the performance of the Filmasters / comrades page which used to load terribly slow due to a stupid query bug.
• Fixed the blog post form — editing a draft does not publish it accidentally anymore (FLM-256), some 404-errors related problems (FLM-158), filtering by actors (FLM-246) and CSS for blog posts / reviews (FLM-248)

As you can see, we’re currently focusing on fixing tons of minor bugs and issues and adding small but useful features you’ve been requesting for a while. We’re also preparing the ground for bigger new features, which we’re going to talk about on the blog pretty soon.

But for now, this is it. Hope you like the changes and please retweet / link to us on Facebook and other social networks to let your friends hear about Filmaster!

B & A – i.e. the Two Filmasters

External reviews and trailers

We have added an option to add links to external reviews and film news that are displayed on specific film pages. Films can be also assigned videos like trailers and other film-related video content (interviews with producers, directors, etc).

The links and videos are first-class citizens on Filmaster. They appear as activities on Planet Filmaster as well on personal blogs of the editors that add them.

Adding external links is obviously an option that spammers would enjoy. That’s why you need to be part of the Editors group in order to be able to add those. If you requre such permissions, just contact us aand if we know who you are (e.g. you have recently submitted somre movie reviews or comments), you’re likely to get those rights.

Two examples of films with links and video content are: James’s Camerons long-awaited Avatar and Tommy Wiseau’s loved and hated The Room.

And yes, you can nicely switch between the videos on film pages using the array buttions (in case there is more than one).

If you are an editor (i.e. you can modify tags, English film titles and add film synopses), you should have the permissions to add links and videos. Please do so!

Clickable Tags

Tags assigned to movies are now clickable! We have prepared special tag pages that list all recent activities connected with films tagged with the given tag as well as rankings of such films.

For instance, going to tag: comedy shows you the list of recent comedy reviews and an all-time top 25 of film comedies.

When you click the “more acttivies »” link you’ll be transported to the Comedy Planet, where you can browse through all reviews and forum posts tagged “comedy”.

You can subscribe tags as well! There is an RSS feed for each tag so now you’ll never gonna skip any of the horror reviews or reviews of films about abortion, or communism or Japan.

Filttering rankings, recommendations and your ratings

You asked for it and we delivered. All film lists can be now filtered also by:

• number of ratings
• actors playing

For example, now you can check my favorite flicks with Robert De Niro or find out the all time bests (rated by at least 200 Filmasters).

Additionally, more for Google than for you guys (sorry for that), rankings got more telling titles, e.g. when you’re looking for best Woody Allen dramas before 2000 it will change the browser title accordingly.

Easier publishing of reviews

New Publish button on the new review page. It will publish the blog post so that it’s available for everyone to see (before you had to manually change the status on the select list, which was confusing). The Save button now only saves the review into drafts so that you can work on it later. There is also an Unpublish button in case you published something by mistake.

What’s next?

We’re not done yet. Lots of other new features are coming soon. One of the highlights is the new film recommendation engine (described here). We’re expecting to deliver the new set of updates during the week between the Christmas and the New Year.

And remember! You can also contribute to Filmaster by implementing some features (Filmaster is open source software!), translating the site into another language or just telling us what to do on the Filmaster forum.

Adam and Borys
The Two Filmasters

Choosing the slogan

There are many slogans we may use to promote Filmaster but for Reddit we have decided to advertize the site as the blogging network for film buffs. Why? Well, Reddit is all about contributing and discussions. It makes sense to assume that peple who are active on Reddit watch movies. And perhaps they even want to share their impressions somewhere in the Internet.
Well, Filmaster is the place to do that!

Expectations

As we have decided to try the lowest bid (see how the Reddit system works) we didn’t expect a lot of impressions and visits. Our dream goal was humble: to attact a few bloggers to the site. Of course any extras would be appreciated but one needs to keep it real, otherwise you get disappointed too often.

The results

So, were the results of the little campaign as we’d imagined? Well, take a look at the report below (click to enlarge):

This only shows the impressions and clicks. We received ~25 thousands impressions of our ad which resulted in some 40 clicks (as Google Analytics tells us). Is it good or bad for $20?
I’d say it’s average.

But the good thing is: the people who came to the site, actually signed up and spent some time over there, leaving a few reviews.

Conclusions

We’ll have to see how good the Reddit ad system becomes in the future. It would be certainly great to be able to customize the campaign to only show the ads in the relevant categories or target specific users (e.g. those that put “film” as one of their interests in their profile).
Still, it sounds like a fair new programme and a viable alternative to traditional ad methods like banners or context ads.
We’ll try this again in the future… well, at least we would if we could afford it

Filmaster is free software. Everyone who knows the Pythona programming language and Django framework can join us and implement selected functionalities. During the first months we managed to get six outside developers involved: turin, bolo, mrk, Jakub Tłałka, riklaunim and Osama (the only non-Polish contributor, from Rijad, Saudi Arabia). We want to go further ad make Filmaster a truly international software project being developed all around the world. This is the main reason we have decided to have this tour around multiple geek conferences. And here is the short summary.

Google Open Source Jam in London

On September 24th Borys presented Filmaster.com on a cyclic event organized by Google, the Open Source Jam. It’s an important event on the British open source map. All the geeks from London and around summon to the Google office on Buckingham Palace Road to talk about their projects, eat pizza and drink beer. The 5-minute long Filmaster presentation was well-received, there were many questions and a lot of talks afterwards. You can watch it on Qik.com [embedded video below], but unfortunately the sound is so weak that you will hardly hear anything (Android is a great device but not the best tool to register such speeches).

Olcamp in Olszytynie

A week later, Adam was presenting Filmaster in Olsztyn, Poland during Olcamp, a local Barcamp-like event. Adam’s presentation was much longer, it took over half an hour. The audience was different as well. Not only programmers, but also academics and buisness people. Judging based on the reviews published after the event, the presentation was successful.

Adam on Olcamp

You can find more pictures from Olcamp here: Olcamp v11 w obiektywie

Jesień Linuksowa 2009

On October 2-4 Borys was in Poland for Jesień Linuksowa (“The Autumn with Linux”), the annual Polish Linux summit in Świętokrzystkie mountains. organized by PLUG. The audience here was very technical, so the hour-long presentation focused more on the software aspects of the project, as well as on the nature of OSSD-compliant open software services. The event was streamed live over the Internet. The video (in Polish) will be available for download later this month (hopefully).

Borys on Jesien

PyCon in Ustroń

The next conference attended by Filmaster crew was PyCon Poland — the biggest summit of Python enthusiasts in this country. As Filmaster is written in Python and its most popular web framework — Django, there was a lot to talk about. Adam, who was presenting in Ustroń, talked about the pros and cons of using Django for a service like thus, the benefits of the open source development model and the great libraries (like modules from the Pinax project) that we used to make Filmaster what it is.
The event was full of international Python superstars like Wesley Chun who was promoting his book “Core Python Programming” or Honza Kral, a well-known Czech Django developer. The three day long conference was a great occasion to meet lots of interesting people, listen to tons of great presentations and “lightning talks” and generally have fun among other geeks

A few very promising connections have been established and we may soon have some very interesting news as far as Filmaster further development in many areas is concerned.

Pycon - discussions

Barcamp London

The last even that we’d like to talk about here is Barcamp London which took place last weekend. Borys attended Barcamp and gave two short 20-minute speeches, first on on open internet services and how they can find a competitive edge with the proprietory ones, and the second one focused entirely on Filmaster, an example of such service.

Borys on Barcamp London (Image thanks to yaili)

We certainly hope that the conference activity is going to attract some great new great developers to the project. Building a service like this is not an easy thing so the community behind it (both user and developer community) is crucial for success.

But in any case, it was good fun to attend all those events. We met tons of fantastic people and we hope you guys also had good time listening to us talking about the project.

And now, the fun is over, we shall get back to the code!

Borys & Adam
(The Two Filmasters)