How the Kitazo community score is calculated
Everything on a Kitazo title page that is not metadata comes from people using the app: what they logged as watched, what they put on their watchlist, and the stars they gave. No editorial weighting, no curve, and no aggregate score borrowed from another site.
What counts as a vote
A vote is one star rating from a registered account with a confirmed email address. You can only rate what you have logged: a film or an episode has to be marked as watched first, and a season can only be rated once you have watched at least one of its episodes and every episode of that season has aired. Delete a rating and it leaves the average.
Ratings imported from TV Time, Letterboxd or Trakt count too. They are still that person’s own scores, converted to our scale: a TV Time export already uses stars out of five and is rounded to a whole star, its episode reactions are mapped onto one to five, Letterboxd’s half stars carry over unchanged, and Trakt’s 0-10 is halved.
Half stars are real
The scale runs from 0.5 to 5 in half-star steps. Ten values, no zero. The average is stored unrounded and displayed to one decimal, so 4.45 and 4.54 both read as 4.5.
A film has one score
For a film the community score is the plain mean of every rating left on it: add them up, divide by how many there are. An account holds one rating per film, so the vote count next to the score is also the number of people.
A series is scored season by season
Kitazo never asks you for a single rating covering a whole show. You rate each season when it ends, and the series score is the mean of every season rating the community has left for it. So someone who rated six seasons contributes six votes, and someone who rated one contributes one. The number beside a series score counts season ratings, not people. A show that fell apart in its last two years carries that, instead of living off its first season.
Episode ratings do not enter the average directly. They roll up one step: once you have rated every aired episode of a season, that season is filled in for you with the average of those episodes, rounded to a whole star. If you rated the season yourself, your rating stands and the roll-up never touches it.
What is left out
Demo accounts, the logins used for store screenshots and support, are excluded from every community figure: their ratings, their watches, their watchlist entries. They still see their own activity inside the app, it just never moves a public number. No weighting by account age, no bonus for users with many followers, no manual correction on any title.
Two votes still show a score
A score appears from the first vote, and the count is always printed beside it, so you can tell a 5.0 from two people apart from a 4.6 from four hundred. Three votes is the line for something else: below three, a title page is not offered to search engines as a rated page. No machine-readable aggregate rating, no sitemap entry, and the page is marked noindex unless it carries a review written on Kitazo. Anyone following a link still gets the page.
Popularity is a different number
Popularity decides ordering in charts, in discovery and in the similar-titles row. It is never a judgement of quality. It is the sum of three parts:
- watches multiplied by 1.5 — for a film, the people who logged it; for a series, every episode logged by everyone, so a long-running show accumulates far more than a mini-series
- watchlist entries multiplied by 1 — how many people want to see it
- the average multiplied by the vote count — the only part where the score itself enters
A popular title can have a mediocre score, and a 4.8 rated by five people sits nowhere near the top of a popularity chart.
When the numbers change
There is no nightly batch. A title's figures are recomputed the moment someone rates it, changes or deletes a rating, marks it watched for the first time, or adds it to a watchlist. Public pages are served without caching, so the number you are reading is the one stored right now.