Boy, how time flies when you’re ranking movies…

We’ve Been Hard At Work

We really feel like we’ve accomplished a great deal since the unveiling of Flickchart to the public just over a year ago.  We expanded our integrations with services like Facebook, Twitter, and Netflix. We added many enhancements to our charts pages, the ability for users to assist us in adding new movies to the site, and new ranking filters such as “By Actor” and “By Director”. We introduced more ways to see what your friends think of your favorite movies, more ways to dive into recent matchup discussions, and the ability to see all the latest movie additions to be ranked.  We most recently added a way to finally purchase some of the awesome posters you come across, more information about what your friends are up to on Flickchart, and even keyboard shortcuts for the hardcore users!

The Blog Is Bigger, Better, and Badassss!

Beyond the confines of Flickchart itself, we also took our blog to the next level to include over 200 posts of amazing things over the past year. With a call-out to you, our users, we received an incredible amount of unique, well-written articles which we’ve turned into our User Showcase. It features some really talented writers detailing topics like the addiction of Flickchart, to the tumultuousness of your Top 20′s, to the enlightenment that might be reached from listening to your inner critic. We had a great addition of the popular “Reel Rumbles“ pioneered by Aric Mitchell - putting a spotlight on some of the most debated film duels in an elaborate, enlightening way that made you think twice about the best films. And to top it all off, we were delighted to bring on-board two Flickchart-obsessed movie lovers – Travis Betz and Devin Barry – who have delivered 37 episodes of the most entertaining movie battle show to ever hit the interwebs – our official podcast, Flick Fights!

It All Adds Up To This

In addition to all that – we’ve grown in numbers too. When we started a year ago, we had an incredibly helpful & informative group of around 20,000 private beta testers preparing us for our public launch. Now, we’re proud to have a membership of well over 62,000 – more than tripling the amount of addicted movie lovers from where we started.

• We have users with over 250,000 rankings
• You’ve commented on matchups over 42,000 times
• We have users that have seen over 8000 movies
• There are over 2200 of you liking us on Facebook
• and over 4000 of you following us on Twitter
• We have a core group of some of our most loyal users who’ve been assisting us (contributors – you know who you are, and  thank you!) to approve movies and grow our number of rankable movies to over 18,000!

But by far, the most staggering statistic is just how many times you’ve all been ranking movies. As of right now, there have been over 101,724,879 matchups served. 101 million! That’s simply astounding.

But Wait… That’s Not All!

We’ve been so excited to see all of you really enjoying your time spent with us, so we wanted to celebrate by giving something back to you for all your help in getting us to where we are today. Here’s a rundown of our latest features available now – on Flickchart:

Rank By Title

We’re very happy to announce that we’ve redesigned our system of ranking a single selected film so that you no longer go to a separate page and rank it only three times. Now, the new method of choosing a film to rank is through a new filter called “By Title”. When you select a film from a movie’s information page, from your unseen list (the list of shame!), or from one of the charts, it takes you to the main ranking page and pits the film against other movies on your list systematically until it reaches its appropriate spot on your list.

There’s also a progress bar to visually show you approximately how many rankings you have left until the movie has settled into its correct ranking. After reaching the goal with the movie in its final position, you’re also presented with an opportunity to share the movie’s place on your list via Twitter and Facebook with your friends.

This is now the perfect way to add a new movie you’ve seen to your list, re-rank a movie to get it out of your Top 20, get a movie to move up or down your list quickly, or simply revisit a movie and see if its relative position has changed over the lifespan of ranking movies on Flickchart. We’ve worked really hard to make this new filter fun, effective, and efficient for all of you, so please let us know what you think of it!

Rank By Franchise

While ranking apples and oranges can be a lot of fun, extremely enlightening, and mentally challenging – there’s also something to be said for simply hitting up your favorite movie series, film characters, and collections of cinema and letting them battle it out. Enter our latest filter – By Franchise – which presents a hand-picked group of over 100 movie franchises for your ranking pleasure.

Rank all your favorite movies from the Star Wars or Star Trek universes. See what your favorite Monty Python comedy is. How many Friday the 13th films are there, and where do they all rank for you?

This filter is also available on the Charts page – so you can filter any combination of year, decade, actor, director, genre, and more with the franchises however you like. For example. you could look at your rankings for National Lampoon movies only starring Chevy Chase. See just Nightmare on Elm St. films from the 80s. Review only the James Bond movies with Sean Connery in the role. The possibilities are endless – and at your disposal.

New Movie Page Redesign

There’s a fresh coat of paint on our movie pages! We’ve put together a new layout that showcases more information about your favorite films than ever before. The biggest new addition is the ability to see at a glance the most popular and recent discussions for any movie. Pull up the best films from your Flickchart and see which movies are going up against it and debated the most amongst other Flickcharters. It’s a great way to find other people who’ve rallied behind the films you like the most and a gateway for you to join the fights and make your voices heard!

You can also now leave comments for just a single movie, reply to other comments, and “like” the best comments. Two other new elements to the page are trailers and other videos from YouTube for each movie, and the latest updates from Twitter to see what other people are saying recently about the movies you’re interested in.

On top of all that, you can now easily let your friends know where a movie rests on your list and bring the discussion to Twitter and Facebook via Tweet and Share buttons at the top, where you can share your ranking for that movie with your friends at any time. We think this new layout provides a wealth of new ways to look at your movies and find new paths to learn more about them on Flickchart. Please let us know what you think of all the changes to the movie pages and what else you’d like to see for them in the future.

We also managed to squash a few long-standing bugs too:

• The infamous “winner drops a place” bug is fixed!
• Searching for movies with special characters now returns expected results (For example, “Amelie” will now properly return “Amélie“)
• There’s now support for alternate/foreign titles (For example, searching for “The Boat” will return “Das Boot” as a result) – this will improve as we add more known alternate titles to our database
• Certain movies that were without posters should now able to be ranked without giving an error
• You should see a wider variety of movies in all filters – you should no longer see any constraints on which films come up in a given filter
• and many other performance, visual, and programming-based enhancements throughout the site

Again, we want to thank each and every one of you for becoming a part of the Flickchart family and discovering more about your favorite movies. All of the unbelievable amount of support, feedback, and dedication are the reasons we love working on Flickchart, and it means so much to us to know that you’re getting just as much out of it as we’ve put into it. As always, there’s plenty more in store for the site in the future – so stay tuned. You never know what we might reveal next!