Wednesday, March 09, 2011

Alert re TCM Website Issues

Turner Classic Movies unveiled a website overhaul today...while it may ultimately turn out to be nice, unfortunately it was rolled out before it was quite ready for "prime time." Feedback on the website from some users is in this thread at the TCM boards.

Of greatest concern to me is the fact that, at least for the moment, a huge number of previous links to the TCM website have gone dead. For instance, the links to the TCM schedule and the article on Jean Harlow as Star of the Month in yesterday's post are now worthless; likewise, last week's link in my post on the June schedule is now gone. At least some of the "overview" page links are working, but links to schedules, trailers, and articles on specific films and actors are now broken.

I was able to Tweet my concern to TCM and received the response "We are working on the link issue. Hold tight and our tech team will follow up." So I'm very hopeful this is just a temporary inconvenience. The present situation is bad for TCM, as it means that current and future viewers seeking to visit the website from my blog will hit dead ends, and it's certainly a disappointment to me that my blog is presently riddled with hundreds of worthless hyperlinks to TCM's website.

In the meantime, I wanted readers to be alert to the issue and understand why the links aren't working, especially as older reviews posted here -- the majority of which contain TCM links -- receive hundreds of hits per week.

Hopefully I'll have good news about this issue to post here soon, and in the meantime I very much appreciate TCM techs working on the problem, which I'm sure must affect many other bloggers and readers.

3 Comments:

Blogger Raquel Stecher said...

I used to link to TCM all the time. I didn't realize that many of the links were now null and void. That hurts TCM for sure since we as bloggers drove so much traffic to their site that way.

I stopped linking so much altogether because it's just too much work. Sometimes I wouldn't even write a post for fear of all the linking I had to do. Now I just do a few links and it usually isn't TCM anymore.

7:58 AM  
Blogger Laura said...

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Raquelle.

For classic film bloggers, this is something akin to IMDb changing all their links. Unless this is somehow a completely unexpected glitch, it appears someone at TCM didn't think it all through before pulling the switch.

Until it's fixed, it seems pointless to link to TCM in future reviews, as those links will also be subject to disappearing.

Best wishes,
Laura

9:17 AM  
Blogger panavia999 said...

PHOOEY! I hadn't looked at TCM.COM for about a week, but finally went there today to setup a reminder for a movie. I had a hard time finding a "remind me" icon! What a piece of junk and it took forever to load. What was wrong with the old setup? It was so sensible and utilitarian. A user could get straight to a movie, read the article, follow other links fast and easily. It was easy to stay at TCM for hours, which is what they want right? Now, it's too fluffy. Maybe this is what facebook types want. I don't belong to any social networking site or twitter, so am apparently waaaay out of touch.
I'll have to recheck my links. I think there's an app for that!
(Hmmm...the word verification is "apoophy". Somehow that seems to work as a mild expletive regarding the new look at tcm.com)

3:24 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home

Newer›  ‹Older