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Growing and Learning: Crew Tips for Newcomers

Matthew Buchanan

As our new iPhone app brings new to Letterboxd, our crew share their favorite tips and short-cuts to get the best out of your experience.

Every so often the Letterboxd community experiences a growth spurt and with the recent release of our iPhone app and some feature love from Apple, we’ve had a lot more new in the past few months. Welcome! Bem vindos! We wanted to share a few tips from our crew on how to get the best from Letterboxd.

Getting started

You can use Letterboxd however you like: as a diary to log films you’ve watched (use the Add a Film button); as a place to keep a watchlist of films you want to see; as a space to rate and review films and to read others’ opinions.

You don’t have to rate the films you watch—not everyone is into the five-star system. Nothing is compulsory, everything you do is your call.

List-making is a beloved preoccupation of many , be they lists that rank the films of a certain actor or director, lists that celebrate an occasion or point out a repetitive absurdity in certain movies. The possibilities are endless.

Top tips

We hit up our crew for a few of their best tips. Karl is a fan of filtering his watchlist by his favorite streaming service to find something he can watch there and then. We’ve recently reintroduced Netflix data to this view, and added over 20 other popular services thanks to our friends at GoWatchIt. Filtering your watchlist (or any other list or cast/crew page) is one of the perks of a paid , but we show the available services on the page for each film (select More Services in the services below the poster on the film’s page).

Ryan loves the visibility filters that accompany collections of films, such as those in a list, for a cast member, or in the popular films section. These include a Fade Watched option to de-emphasize the posters of films you’ve seen, and options to show or hide the films you’ve watched. There’s also an In Your Watchlist option so that you can, for example, view a friend’s watchlist in this mode to see which films you both want to see. All these options appear on the website in a menu attached to the “eye” icon that sits to the right of the available page filters, and they’re in version 1.1 of the iPhone app (tap the Filter/Sort icon, depicted as two slider controls).

When using Letterboxd on desktop, Matthew points out that you can use the J and K keys in your Activity stream to jump back and forth between lists and reviews, and the L key to load more activity. Also, when editing a ranked list, here’s a neat shortcut for moving an entry to anywhere in the list: click the rank (number) of an entry and type a new position, then hit Return to move the entry there without needing to drag or scroll. The remaining items in the list will re-order automatically, but to save your changes in order to publish your edits.

Gemma is a fan of searching for interesting reviews and lists by tags, such as men crying about peeing or films directed by women. And she regularly checks her Activity stream to see what her favorite that she follows have been up to.

For more about the basics of Letterboxd use, have a look at our Frequent Questions page, and let us know if you think we’ve missed anything obvious here.

Activity and community

Once you’re all set up, you can make Letterboxd a more social experience by following other . Your Activity timeline displays the films they add or review, the stuff they like, and the comments they make on your and your other (common) friends’ stuff. If your Activity feed gets too busy, or you want more control over it, upgrading to a paid provides the ability to turn each activity type on or off, and you can select different preferences on each device you browse with (reviews only on mobile, but a larger list on desktop, for example). Upgrading also means you get detailed personalized stats pages for each year of activity on the site, like this.

often set challenges for themselves and each other. Some host movie nights. Recently we saw a running series of Ask Me Anything lists. Some express their thoughts about and thanks to the community through lists, and regularly get into deep, hilarious conversations in the comments.

It’s here that things occasionally go awry, though—good old misunderstandings or vigorous differences of opinion that just can’t seem to be risen above. This is where our block and reporting functions can come in handy.

Blocking someone means you won’t see their content or actions on any pages we create especially for you on the site, such as your homepage, activity stream or the comment threads of your reviews or lists. Nor will they be able to comment on or like your content once you’ve blocked them. Use the options contained in the “flag” icon on a member’s profile page to block or report them. You may still see a blocked member’s content in some public areas of the site, since these pages are cached for all site visitors.

If someone has contravened our community policy in any way, please use the report function on the review, list or comment that contains the offending content, and let our s review the content and take appropriate action.

The golden rule at Letterboxd, not that we have too many rules, is to be cool. We expect you’ll be able to work out what that means. Basically just be excellent to each other. Happy logging, reviewing and list-making!

Matthew Buchanan

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