Rotten Tomatoes audience VOTES not scraped anymore
#1
I recently noticed that for movies released after June 2019, the RT audience VOTES number is not being scraped anymore, using any scraper/method. My skin supports this. The audience percentage is scraped correctly. I'm almost certain this is to blame:
https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/art...nce-score/
I've compared against the RT site, every movie in my library older that this date shows the number of votes, newer ones do not.
Is there any way around this?
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#2
Probably you would have bigger chance for attention if you were providing debug log and example movie instead of bumping threads and opening new ones on the same topic...
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#3
Ok, sorry, I'm not in front of my system now. Please try for example Anna (2019) or The Dead Don't Die (2019). I'll provide debug logs as soon as possible.
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#4
Since RT doesn't provide an (open) API, the scraper uses omdbapi, hence the API key is needed for scraping RT ratings. Omdbapi indeed doesn't provide the number of reviews for these movies. Nothing we can do about this, of course there is no workaround.
However, there are multiple 2019 movies where the number of reviews are available, so I am not sure if the announcement mentioned above is to blame. 
Maybe you could try to get in touch with omdbapi?  However I wouldn't bet on this. Kodi is not sponsoring omdbapi and rt ratings seems to be an undocumented feature of the API, maybe they are not even supporting it any longer.
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#5
(2019-09-23, 10:48)olympia Wrote: Since RT doesn't provide an (open) API, the scraper uses omdbapi, hence the API key is needed for scraping RT ratings. Omdbapi indeed doesn't provide the number of reviews for these movies. Nothing we can do about this, of course there is no workaround.
However, there are multiple 2019 movies where the number of reviews are available, so I am not sure if the announcement mentioned above is to blame. 
Maybe you could try to get in touch with omdbapi?  However I wouldn't bet on this. Kodi is not sponsoring omdbapi and rt ratings seems to be an undocumented feature of the API, maybe they are not even supporting it any longer.
Thanks for the detailed answer. Yes, there are movies of 2019 being scraped correctly but only those before 30th of May (when the RT change occurred according to the above link). This can't be a coincidence. You can easily check that comparing the scraped data with the actual site: If the site states "user ratings" in audience, it's being scraped (in general). If the site states "verified rates" it is never scraped. 
The List.Item entry seeks for audience votes but they are currently referred to as "verified votes" by RT. Most probably it's the OMDB's fault, but the scrapers should now update accordingly, if OMDB responds to that. Funny thing is some movies from those (after 5/30) return "0 votes", whereas others "no votes" (the string is totally empty).

On a side note there are also movies before that date (5/30) with full ratings in RT but no scraped data at all (try eg. "The Wind(2019)).
Or others with no critics' reviews but with some audience votes. These are also not scraped at all, including the actually existing audience votes (try eg. "City of Lies(2018)).
Thanks once more!
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#6
As I said the scraper is using omdb api. As I said omdb is not providing that parameter (the api response is n/a) for those mentioned movies. So please tell me how shall I update the scraper then? Shall the scraper automagically guess the number of votes from the N/A response or what?
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#7
(2019-09-23, 14:55)olympia Wrote: As I said the scraper is using omdb api. As I said omdb is not providing that parameter (the api response is n/a) for those mentioned movies. So please tell me how shall I update the scraper then? Shall the scraper automagically guess the number of votes from the N/A response or what?
No, you are right, I understand. I said when and if OMDB responds to these changes. It's obviously not the scraper's fault.
I think it is going to be increasingly difficult to scrape RT ratings in the future.
On a related question, I recently saw the Plex app (Android TV), which can provide excerpts from RT critics' reviews (just a paragraph). How are they able to do that? I haven't seen a similar feature in Kodi and/or related addons/scrapers.
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#8
This is available in UMS. You can select this for plot outline.
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#9
I'm not talking about critics' consensus. This feature in Plex (Android TV) has one paragraph from the actual reviews on RT, randomly chosen(both good and bad) and displayed done by side.
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#10
I imagine that either there are some other open APIs what make this info available, or else an official one and Plex has got access to use it.
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Rotten Tomatoes audience VOTES not scraped anymore0