Friends Offline Friday (Briefly)

UPDATED FRI 4pm: Almost Done. Check out the new features! Will be a little longer for a few items... but mostly ready...

UPDATED FRI 1:30pm: We'll be revising some software today -- sometime in the next hour I'm told (around 2pm PST give or take) -- it will be for an hour or two at most. The Netflix site will be unaffected, but the Community features will be offline for this period. Watch this post for updates.

Ratings Data

Our crack engineering team reports that while ratings data are updated constantly at Netflix, the Friends part of the site is a little unique and only gets refreshed around midnight each day. Thus, if you rate a bunch of movies, that information could be seen immediately, but also might not show up in a slider until the next day. ("Refreshed" probably isn't the right word. Maybe an example will help.) Scenario: You rate a bunch of movies at 9pm, your Friend looks at the sliders at 11pm for the first time that day, and WILL see your ratings -- BUT, if they log in at 6pm (before you updated ratings) and returned at 11pm, they WON'T see your new ratings. They would have to return to the site after midnight to see those new ratings.

Does this explain things?

Recent Ratings Bug - Fixed

The sliders should be back to normal for all browsers.

Email Announcement About Avatars

We are sending out this email today to folks who review movies. If you've already uploaded a photo, great. If you haven't, this is your wake up call. We're hoping to totally wipe out all those (random) automatic cinematic avatars we give you, and start seeing lots of personal icons out there. (Remember: You can change yours whenever you want.)

Don't you think it will make the site much cooler? Spread the word.

POST SCRIPT: If y'all have questions about avatars, explore the other posts here about avatars.

Brief Friends Interruption Tonight

Sorry for the inconvenience. Swapping in some new code. (Don't get all excited, just some internal geeky stuff to streamline). Your Friends should already be back, or back shortly.

We're Down!

We're up, we're down. You may have noticed we disabled the Friends features this late afternoon while other folks here were updating some code. (Even for non-Friends users, the Similarity % is gone for the moment.) Sorry for the inconvenience. Be back shortly.