Remove ASIN from the contribution form.

[the8bitMoon]

ASIN (Amazon store ID number) is not a reliable way to catalog retail discs. The same UPC/EAN can and usually does correlate to dozens of Amazon listings from different sellers. Listings also come and go all the time, and many discs aren't available on Amazon at all, and many contributors have discs they didn't buy on Amazon, even if a listing does exist. I personally have discs from a variety of sources, and finding an arbitrary Amazon listing for each one doesn't feel like a meaningful contribution to the DB.

I would suggest, instead of an ASIN field, having an optional "listing" field that accepts a URL to any storefront.

[lfoust]

While I agree that the ASIN can be an imprecise way to identify a specific release - thus far it has been very helpful and accurate enough. A url to an arbitrary product link just has too much atrophy and potential to break.

Originally, I had a feature that could import a lot of the data about a release automatically given the ASIN but unfortunately I couldn't find a way to make that feature work in a deployed environment where Amason agressively blocks IPs

[the8bitMoon]

Without the scraping feature, I still think requiring an ASIN (which, again, is also an arbitrary pointer to a specific seller's listing) adds unnecessary friction to the contribution process. I was trying to contribute the Boondocks box set info, but I didn't buy the discs from Amazon so I ended up having to arbitrarily decide which listing to use. I would at least make ASIN optional. The EAN/UPC should be the only canonical ID.

[shayypy]

I usually find the blu-ray.com page for my specific release and follow the link from there, since they often already have an ASIN stored. You should also be able to search amazon by UPC and get the correct result. Anyway, I agree with your argument that it should be optional - I have in the past contributed releases that had no amazon listing whatsoever, so I used the legacy contribution method wherein it is not required.

TheDiscDB could perhaps take inspiration from blu-ray.com here; when a release doesn't have an ASIN, they will provide a link to a search results page for the UPC on amazon & ebay.