With our current form of common name, the way the CLT works is cumbersome and not very forgiving

If you Type in "John Smith" the only entries you get back is "John Smith"

Let's say we were looking up John David Smith or all possible variants he may be credited as.

If I type in "John Smith", I think it would be extremely helpful if it would return all the Variances of John Smith like

John Smith
Johnathon Smith
John P Smith
John D Smith
John David Smith
John Smithson
etc.

I would also like this to ignore any diacritics (accents, grave, umlauts, cedilla, etc) So that when I enter "Francois Fayard" it would return

Francois Fayard
François Fayard

and the reverse also be true.

Now within the list returned, you would post Titles/profiles numbers  Like

John Smith                    4/10
Johnathon Smith          15/255
John P Smith                4093/15023
John D Smith                1/23
John David Smith          1/4
John Smithson              2/6

That way we could at a glance know what the various title counts are. 

Would also like them linked, to pull up the list like we have now for the individual. 

I think a system like this may give us more meaningful and hopefully more complete information for making the common name choices.


Charlie

P.S. as a side note, if birthyears were in the DB, it would be nice o have that division too.

Charlie

That might be.  But with the absence of goodguy, and his programming prowess, I think that we need a company version at this time.  Whether a separate utility, or online component doesn't matter.  We need something to give us the bigger picture...

I also first had the same thought as T!M. But after your explanation I watched at the forum. 

So you're asking for an improvment of the CLT, which gets a big +1 from me.
(I think not all suggested will be possible at the moment, but some good ideas in your request)

What I would like seen added is a coloumn with the crew role or cast.
For common name researches where an actor and a crew member share the same name, this could be very helpful. (And yes I know I can click the movie to see this, but with a coloumn with the information I would have it in a more user-friendly way)

GoodGuy's plugin is/was pure gold and it's a real shame he's left the community. I hope the stricter moderation policy will convince him to return.

With that in mind, of course I also approve of this request to enhance the Credit Lookup Tool, by having the option to show the closest matches of a name. +1!