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From: Mark Anderson on 18 Nov 2009 21:31
I'm posting here because there doesn't appear to be a way to report this
to Netflix. I've been using Netflix for 3 years now and it has been
great. Recently (in the last few months), however, I noticed a lot of
strange things happen with their web site. Sometimes when I add a movie
the site will place that movie and some random movie in my queue.
Sometimes it's repeatable, sometimes it's not. It's not that big of a
deal to just delete that random addition however.

What bothers me more is with Netflix' rating system. I found that to be
one of Netflix' greatest feature. For each movie it would show you what
the general population rated that movie and what Netflix predicts how you
would like that movie based upon your past ratings. A few weeks ago they
turned this off and now they only report their prediction as to how I'll
rate the movie leaving off the general rating. I'm not sure why they
took that away.

Also, I think they really screwed up my rating statistics. They claim I
have rated close to 600 movies in the past three years which is about
double what it should be. I usually only rate about 1/2 the movies I
rent. Recently I've noticed new movies that I put into my queue having
been rated by me which is impossible. For example, the most recent Harry
Potter movie has me rating it with one star when it's sitting in my queue
and I haven't even seen the movie yet. I did give all 5 previous Potter
movies either 4 or 5 stars. I see this with other esoteric films that
get put into my queue. If the Netflix ratings database is messed up then
their prediction of whether or not I'll like a movie will be messed up as
well. This is too bad since I really like their rating system and it
appears the 3 years of rating data I entered in their system is FUBAR.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a way to contact Netflix
about this and/or perhaps fix the data? I like using Netflix but the
predictive ratings are extremely helpful when renting esoteric and/or
foreign films. There are too many movies out there and I hate renting
duds. Netflix' rating system had been pretty accurate for me. Right now
I feel like I'm renting blind. I could perhaps go to imdb.com and use
their rating system but I suspect their ratings have been polluted by
movie company paid shills to pump up bad movies. I sometimes see some
extremely god awful films get ratings in the 7s and 8s which shouldn't
happen.


From: Mark Anderson on 23 Nov 2009 05:30
On Sat, 21 Nov 2009 07:40:16 -0500, Shawn Hirn wrote:

> I have never seen the Netflix web site until now and it took me all of a
> few seconds to find out how to contact them. You need to look harder
> before you say there's no obvious way to contact a company. Down at the
> bottom of Netflix's main web page, there's a link called "contact us."
> Clicking on that link gave several avenues of contact, including a
> 24-hour support phone number 1-866-716-0414, then use service code 888
> 000 for faster service. The link to that information is
> http://www.netflix.com/ContactUs?lnkctr=cuPh&show=true

I'm not a big phone person. I couldn't find a way to send an email to
technical support and be done with it. I'm not about to call some droid
on the phone who probably wouldn't know what I was talking about. There
is a bug in their DB. I can document my data relatively quickly in email
-- about the same time I spent writing that post. Talking to someone
over the phone is usually always a PITA IMHO and this problem isn't worth
the aggravation. It's Netflix' DB that's hosed and I'm sure I'm not the
only person who noticed this. Had they provided a simple support email
address that some human read once in awhile they might get valuable
customer input, customers who are the users of their system. Quality
Assurance is expensive and customer feedback is almost free -- only the
cost of a single email address or forum or whatever besides a telephone.

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