User talk:Ahasuerus

See User talk:Ahasuerus/Archive for discussions prior to 2014.

Frozen?
Could any of the recent changes/patches have somehow frozen the Top Verifiers page? It hasn't changed in at least 4-5 days. I check my numbers a couple of times a month to make sure my insurance is keeping abreast of my additions [which always happens in great leaps at this time of year]. Thanks! --~ Bill, Bluesman 05:16, 15 January 2014 (UTC)


 * That list is supposed to be refreshed every night at 1am server time. I see that the script that updates the list was last run 22.5 hours ago, but let me check to make sure that it didn't error out... Ahasuerus 05:19, 15 January 2014 (UTC)


 * After re-running the script manually, I see that your count of primary verifications is now 11,815 vs. 11,800 yesterday and the count of secondary verifications is 80,419 vs. 80,396. Similarly, my count, which I incremented 30 minutes ago by verifying a book that I had lying around, has gone up by one. In other words, everything seems to be working OK. Ahasuerus 05:57, 15 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks! --~ Bill, Bluesman 17:41, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

Request for another clean-up script
Is it possible to write a script which finds publication records which give the ISBN-10 for post-2007 books? (Similar to the one that finds ISBN-13 in pre-2005 records.) I know ISBN-13 was supposed to be fully implemented by January 2007, but am certain some small press and self-published books continued using ISBN-10 well into the next year or so. So perhaps give January 2008 as the start for the search? At that point all major publishers were fully compliant. I would use the advance search to find such records, but the ISBN field of the publication search form only accepts full numbers. Thanks for considering it. Mhhutchins 04:25, 16 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Sure, shouldn't be too hard to do. Let me add it to the list and I'll try to squeeze it in in between the next two patches. Ahasuerus 04:29, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

And since you've got nothing else to do...
How about a script that finds images linked to pub records from websites other than those listed here? :) Mhhutchins 04:36, 16 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Good point. I'll add it to the list, thanks... Ahasuerus 05:00, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

Author multi-web-page editing
I think there may be a problem with the new multi-web-page handling, at least for authors. Dirk submitted a fill-out for that included two web pages. The moderator screen showed it as  http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/williams_raymond+http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Williams . I accepted it, but when I went to check the author's summary page, there was only Webpages:  SFE displayed, and my browser showed that link was for that full compound-URL text, as shown in the moderator screen. I figured maybe Dirk had made a mistake, so I went and edited it. Sure enough, the compound text showed up as the sole Web Page 1 value. So I fixed it up, removing the second part and putting it into Web Page 2. The moderator screen for that submission highlighted Webpages as a diff, but the text looked identical, and when I accepted it, the author summary (and any subsequent edit attempt) shows the expected two separate links. I suppose it's possible he entered the pair as one value, with a plus sign, but I figured I'd mention it. --MartyD 16:31, 26 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Checking the body of the submission, I see that it contains a plus sign:

 http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/williams_raymond+http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Williams 


 * I guess Dirk was so used to using semicolons that he switched to plus signs once semicolons were disallowed :) Ahasuerus 17:29, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

The Last Space Ship
Are you certain that the "Designed by" credit in this book refers to the cover art? I've personally never seen an interior credit (usually on the copyright page) for design meant anything more than the design of the book unless it explicitly mentions jacket art. The cover art credit is usually on the dustjacket itself, or in the case of softcover books, occasionally on the copyright page, but more often on the back cover. But it's usually explicitly stated as "Cover art" and not "Design". I had a discussion with another editor who had credited Solomon with cover art based on the same interior credit, and has since reverted the changes. Thanks. Mhhutchins 17:38, 27 January 2014 (UTC)


 * That's a good point -- typically I don't enter "designers"' names in the Cover Artist field, but I must have slipped in this case. I'll go ahead and remove it. Thanks! Ahasuerus 18:21, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

Latest Fixer submissions
I like that you're now giving the ASIN in the Note field of publication records of ebooks (like this one), but wonder about the reason for entering Amazon's "Print Length" in the ISFDB record's "Page Count" field. We know that MOBI formatted ebook files (like Kindle) allow the user to set the page count. So perhaps providing the Amazon's data about the print length to the ISFDB record's Note field would be better way to record it (if we have to record it at all). Just a suggestion, or maybe one that needs further discussion. Thanks. Mhhutchins 20:58, 28 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Well, I am still experimenting with Amazon's data, so things are not settled yet. There are different fields like "ASIN", "EISBN" and "EAN", which Fixer can access, and I am not 100% that I got all the relationships right, at least not yet. There are other complexities involved, e.g. Fixer's internal ASIN-ISBN crosswalks which need to be maintained to ensure that the same record is not submitted twice.


 * As far as "Print Length" goes, that's another can of worms, e.g. sometimes Amazon's records say things like "page count from ISBN NNNNNNNNN", where NNNNNNNNN is the ISBN of some dead tree edition of the same book. On balance you are probably right that it's safer to record Amazon-provided page counts in the Note field. I'll see if I can make the change later today. Thanks. Ahasuerus 21:28, 28 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the adjustments. BTW, are you intentionally omitting the Amazon list price for the ebook editions? They're not included in the latest Fixer submissions and I'm not sure whether I should add the price to the record. Mhhutchins 19:22, 29 January 2014 (UTC)


 * List prices are not available for ebooks, at least not via the interface that Fixer has access to :( Apparently Amazon's intent was to make so-called "offer" prices unavailable, but in the process they also zapped list prices. Their official announcement says:


 * "Unfortunately at this time Offer Prices for Kindle Items are not supported by the Product Advertising API. List Prices are however, provided by the API."


 * but no such luck. And, since other users have complained about this issue, I assume that it's a problem with Amazon's API rather than with Fixer's logic. Fixer should be able to get list prices in other ways, but it will take some time.


 * Also, in many cases ebook prices appear to be inconsistent, e.g. consider our publication record for the ebook edition of The Long War. The value of the price field is "£6.99" because that's what Amazon UK shows, but if you pull up the same ISBN on W. H. Smith's site, the stated price is £9.99. Ahasuerus 19:54, 29 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Another reason for bibliographers to hate ebooks! (I need to start a list.) Should I leave the field blank or record the current price? At least the record will give the Amazon price and indicate the date at that price. Mhhutchins 20:47, 29 January 2014 (UTC)


 * I think it would be best to record the current Amazon price in Notes and indicate where it comes from. That's what I plan to do with Fixer once I enhance his logic to grab list prices. Ahasuerus 21:02, 29 January 2014 (UTC)


 * BTW, here is something else that I realized earlier today after processing almost 500 ebook ISBNs. Normally, Fixer gets two records for an ISBN, one from Amazon.com and another from Amazon UK. They are clearly different records and can have different publishers, titles, authors, etc, which make the manual reconciliation process time-consuming. With recent ebooks, however, the records returned by Amazon.com and Amazon UK are always exactly the same, which suggests that Amazon has a separate "Kindle" database shared by Amazon.com and Amazon UK. It may also help explain why there is no list price -- since prices are country-specific, they wouldn't be available in a shared record and would have to be pulled from some other location at page generation time. Oh well, the adventure continues! :-) Ahasuerus 21:02, 29 January 2014 (UTC)


 * With the internet as the chief source for ebooks (I hear you can go into some retail outlets and buy them, but even then it's through the internet), I was pretty sure that international barriers would make very little difference. Regardless ebooks are still being released that are restricted to a specific territory. Michael Bishop re-sold almost his entire back catalog to Orion Books in the UK, but those rights didn't cover distribution in the US. So I think they (Amazon) can still determine to where the book is being downloaded and base their prices on the currency of that location. Giving the prices for different territories in the record's Note field has always been allowed when stated in a printed publication, so I guess the same logic should apply to ebooks. I'll moderate the current priceless Fixer submissions without entering the price in the Price field. Thanks. Mhhutchins 22:40, 29 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Another reason to hate ebooks: Scanning without doing any copyediting for format errors. (Just click on the "Look Inside" and behold the countless errors in just a few pages of the introduction.) Ridiculous to charge people for so little effort into "publishing" a book. Mhhutchins 22:48, 29 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Ouch! That's pretty awful :-( However, I suspect that it has less to do with this book being an ebook than with the people who scanned and "edited" it. Every month Fixer finds thousands of new paperbacks churned out by CreateSpace/etc-empowered "publishers", many of them reprinting public domain books. And every month I send 90%+ of them to "Queue 2" or "Queue 3", which means that they won't get processed for a very very long time. The only reason why I don't do it automatically is that CreateSpace is also used by commercially published authors like Norman Spinrad and Lawrence Watt-Evans to bring their older books back into print or publish minor works that commercial publishers are not interested in. Unfortunately, even though the process is semi-automated, separating the wheat from the chaff is still very time-consuming... Ahasuerus 23:05, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

Planet Savers/Sword of Aldones
Does the number line in [this] edition actually have '1' in it? I just picked up what seems to be an identical copy but the number line is 2 4 6 8 0 9 7 5 3. Same catalog #/price/etc. Thanks for checking! [if it's buried, don't worry about it, same question to Don Erikson] --~ Bill, Bluesman 03:28, 30 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Yup, it has a complete number line: "2 4 6 8 0 9 7 5 3 1". It also says "This Ace printing: April 1980". Ahasuerus 04:00, 30 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks! Mine is also missing the date statement. --~ Bill, Bluesman 04:45, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

Strange bug when varianting titles in numbered series
Look at this series. I varianted the last three to a canonical author (unknown in the last case) and look what happened to the numbering of the series. I corrected #7 but left the others for you to see. Mhhutchins 18:02, 30 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks, let me take a look... Ahasuerus 18:09, 30 January 2014 (UTC)


 * OK, I think I got it fixed. I also corrected the 30 affected records, so we should be in better shape now. BTW, "None" is a special value in Python and has to be handled in a special way when filing data into the database. When a programmer forgets about this "special case", "None" can pop up in unexpected places, e.g. as a "storylen" value for omnibuses (which I am sure you have seen.) Ahasuerus 18:42, 30 January 2014 (UTC)


 * It also appears in other title types. An advanced search now for "None" as STORYLEN found 50 titles, including NOVEL, POEM, SERIAL and INTERIORART (the most common), but no OMNIBUS-typed records. (That's because I was aware of that bugh and occasionally do a search for them. I had not realized that it can happen in other title types.) Mhhutchins 19:41, 30 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Curiously, I ran the same search on the development server a few minutes after I had posted and found 42 records. I guess it means that 8 additional records have been "infected" since the development server was refreshed on Saturday morning. Hm... At one point I thought that I could recreate this bug by flipping publication type and title type back and forth in Edit Title/Edit Pub, but I'll have to try it again. Thanks. Ahasuerus 20:02, 30 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Uh, I was estimating. There's no way to tell the exact number without counting them. As it turns out it was a pretty good estimate.
 * I believe this happens when an editor accidentally enters a INTERIORART (or POEM, ESSAY, or SERIAL) content record as SHORTFICTION, and then updates the title records to correct the type. Because the system looks for a "length" in the SHORTFICTION record, it assign "None" to the newly-typed record. Of course, I could be wrong. Mhhutchins 20:15, 30 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Well, maybe not. I tested several different permutations but couldn't get it show up. Back to the drawing board. Mhhutchins 20:19, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

Another quirk
When you get a chance, please read this message I left on another moderator's page concerning a submission-acceptance quirk that's happened at least twice in the past few weeks. Thanks. Mhhutchins 17:25, 31 January 2014 (UTC)


 * That's right, it can happen when the server is particularly slow and the process times out during the approval process for whatever reason -- see Bug 495.


 * One way to alleviate the problem would be to modify the approval logic so that it would change the submission status from "New" to "Approved" first and file the data into the database second. That way if the script stops half way through the approval process, the submission will be considered "Approved" and couldn't be processed a second time. It won't address the issue of partially approved submissions, but at least we won't have to deal with duplicates anymore. Ahasuerus 22:04, 31 January 2014 (UTC)


 * That's good to know. How hard would the modification of the approval logic be? Mhhutchins 22:31, 31 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Not hard, but I will need to review, change and test 27 scripts, so somewhat time-consuming. Ahasuerus 00:54, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

OpenLibrary.org
I accepted a few submissions that added artist image links using OpenLibrary.org. I thought they are an ok site to link to, but maybe that's just for covers? I found ISFDB:Moderator_noticeboard/Archive_09, but it's only discussing covers. More importantly, I realize we don't give hosting credits on displayed author images (e.g., here). --MartyD 20:01, 1 February 2014 (UTC)


 * As I recall, author images have more stringent copyright standards than cover scans. I think the act of taking someone's picture creates a separate work protected by copyright while the act of scanning a cover doesn't (unless you do some kind of non-trivial rearrangement of pixels.) I am no expert, though, so perhaps my understanding is flawed or incomplete.


 * As far as hosting credits go, that's a good point. Let me create a FR... Ahasuerus 03:58, 2 February 2014 (UTC)


 * It turns out that FR 90, which was created in 2009, covers this territory. Ahasuerus 04:00, 2 February 2014 (UTC)


 * I'd like to see just how many of the photos on our author pages are hosted locally (most of which are probably in violation of copyright) or are improperly linked to non-permitting websites (which would be in violation of our policy about obtaining permission). I would bet money there are very few that avoid falling into either category. Mhhutchins 04:41, 2 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Your wish is my command! :-)
 * Total number of author URLs: 354
 * Number of ISFDB-hosted URLs: 130
 * Number of author images hosted by third parties: 224
 * I'd have to write a new script to determine how many links are to sites that we don't have permission to link to. Ahasuerus 06:15, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Broken link in series update "Cryptid Hunters"
Hi Ahasuerus. Just went to approve an update and when I clicked the "Current record link" I was given an error message. I did an update with the same series but a bogus parent and the link is also broken. I put them both on hold so you could see what's up.Kraang 04:12, 2 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Did one other same problem.Kraang 04:14, 2 February 2014 (UTC)


 * I did a test myself and found the same behavior. It should be linking back to "pe.cgi?#####". But instead, it links back to the non-existent "series.cgi?#####". Mhhutchins 04:33, 2 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Good catch -- the bug was introduced about 10 days ago when the post-submission page for Series updates was changed to show the same table that the moderator approval page displays. Fixed now, thanks! Ahasuerus 04:47, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Python error
Can you figure out why this title record isn't being fully displayed? Thanks for looking. Mhhutchins 18:58, 4 February 2014 (UTC)


 * A minute later, it's displayed perfectly. Strange. Thanks anyway. Mhhutchins 18:59, 4 February 2014 (UTC)


 * My bad -- I forgot to update the database definitions before installing the latest patch, so pretty much everything was broken for a couple of minutes. Sorry about that! Ahasuerus 19:01, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

HMH Books for Young Readers
Re this publisher: I've yet to find a pub that gives this as the publisher, using either the Amazon "Look Inside" or the OCLC record which gives publisher credit directly from the title page. This "imprint" is probably just used for marketing purposes (or just for Amazon), and not a true imprint or publisher name. Every book I've checked gives the publisher as "Houghton Mifflin Harcourt". I'll merge these publishers once you've seen this message. Thanks. Mhhutchins 20:52, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

Same situation with HMH Books. Is it possible to convert these Fixer submissions to bypass Amazon's designated publisher? Mhhutchins 20:54, 5 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Done and done! Merge away! :) Ahasuerus 21:19, 5 February 2014 (UTC)