ISFDB:Community Portal

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Before posting here, consider whether one of the specialized noticeboards might suit your needs better:

  • Help desk: for questions about how to do something, either in the ISFDB or the ISFDB Wiki. This includes both questions about how to do a specific task, and also more general questions about what should be done about particular situations where the information is clearly wrong and the solution is not obvious.
  • Rules and standards discussions: for discussions about the rules and standards, such as whether certain kinds of publications belong in the ISFDB, or whether the help text defining capitalization should be modified. It also includes questions about interpretation, such as whether a SERIAL type can be used for sequences of short stories subsequently republished as a novel.
  • Verification requests: for asking help with bibliographic problems concerning specific publications which require a physical check.
  • Moderator noticeboard: for when you are trying to get the attention of one or more moderators.
  • Development: A page for discussing ISFDB-related software development issues.
  • ISFDB:Community Portal/Archive: Archive of old discussions from this page.


Contents

Question about series numbering & Omnibus

The title series The Switch consists of two titles. The first is a chapterbook which is a 16 page prologue to the second book. The second book contains the first book as well as the 120 page "Clockwork". I'm not sure how to enter these. Two problems: There's really only book 1, and an omnibus of book 1 and "Clockwork". So should I enter "Clockwork" as book 2 in the series, or as an omnibus of book 1 and book 2 (in which case there wouldn't actually be a book 2)? And how should I handle the contents of "Clockwork"? It contains the shortstory "The Switch" and the novel "Clockwork", but the novel "Clockwork" doesn't actually exist as a separate novel. So I'm unsure how to proceed. (For now, I have it as a single book, with no separate contents listing, and with notes mentioning the inclusion of the prologue.) Chavey 21:38, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

In general CHAPTERBOOKs should not be put into series, although there are a few exceptions when dealing with complex mega-series like Perry Rhodan in his many guises. In this case I would make the short story record into the first title in the series and keep the novel record as number 2. It's OK to keep The Switch II: Clockwork pub as a NOVEL since our standards allow the inclusion of a "bonus story" in NOVEL pubs. Ahasuerus 07:47, 2 December 2012 (UTC)
An OMNIBUS implies that the novel was previously published. A first-time publication with a bonus story does not an omnibus make. Our current definition of an OMNIBUS is consistent with this: A publication may be classified as an omnibus if it contains multiple works that have previously been published independently, and at least one of them is a novel. (I personally disagree that one of the reprints has to be a novel. I've already argued that a reprinting of two collections or anthologies is also an OMNIBUS.) So I agree with Ahasureus that "The Switch II" should be a NOVEL record. Also that only the shortfiction title record should be part of the series, not the CHAPTERBOOK record. One other thing just occurred to me: you shouldn't create a content record for the "Prologue" of a novel as it is part of the novel and not really a "bonus story". You can always note that the prologue was previously published as a separate story as in this case. Mhhutchins 23:10, 2 December 2012 (UTC)
Thanks much! Changes made. One question: Mike suggests adding the note that the prologue was previously published. I had put that note in the pub record; Mike's example put it in the title record. Which location is correct? (And why?) Chavey 14:53, 5 December 2012 (UTC)
I would suggest that an editor record it in both the title record of the novel and the title record of the shortfiction (as I did for the situation above). I see no point in recording it in the publication record because it's not publication specific. The only time I record such info in a publication record is if there's a statement about it in the book I'm working on. But that's just a personal preference. No one is stopping anyone from being as detailed as they want in a publication record, but generally the information should be specific to that edition of the title. Mhhutchins 17:34, 5 December 2012 (UTC)
Done. Chavey 19:23, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

EDITING OFFLINE - 2012-12-10

Editing is temporarily disabled due to a problem with the last patch. Ahasuerus 03:19, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

The problem has been fixed and editing has been re-enabled. I will be posting patch notes shortly. Ahasuerus 03:58, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Language-related changes - 2012-12-10

The following changes have been made:

  • You can now select your default language under "My Preferences". If you don't select one, your default language will continue to be English.
  • All Title- and Pub-specific edit forms have been adjusted to display Unicode characters correctly. Author- and Award-specific edit forms still display the numeric values of Unicode characters; they will be fixed in the foreseeable future.
  • Edit Title no longer mangles Series names when the latter contain double quotes.
  • For Review and Interview titles, the value of the "title type" field is greyed out in Edit Title since the field is not editable.

If you run into issues associated with the changed edit pages, please post your findings here. Ahasuerus 05:18, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Series fix - 2012-12-11

Another minor patch has been installed. It fixed the behavior of the Series Editor page when an invalid (or missing) series number is supplied. It all tweaked the software internally, which should not affect user-experienced behavior. Ahasuerus 00:01, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Remove Titles changes - 2012-12-11

Remove Titles has been cleaned up a bit. All title and author records are now hyper-linked and extraneous spaces have been removed. Also, if you pass an invalid or non-existing publication number to the script, it will now display an appropriate error message rather than erroring out.

I also looked into making the script display titles in the order dictated by page numbers, but it's a somewhat larger task than I realized. I will need to take the relevant logic out of the Publication Listing script and make it available to all editing scripts. Ahasuerus 05:28, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Page number changes - 2012-12-12

The Contents section of the Publication Listing page has been changed as follows:

  • Square brackets are now ignored for the purposes of determining title order, so "5" will appear after "[4]", but before "[6]"
  • Titles which do not have page numbers or whose page numbers do not follow a recognized numbering scheme, e.g. "A1", appear first
  • Titles whose page number field is set to "fc" appear second
  • Titles whose page number field is set to "fep" appear third
  • Titles whose page number is a recognized Roman numeral, e.g. "xv", appear fourth
  • Titles whose page number is a recognized Arabic numeral, e.g. "15", appear fifth
  • Titles whose page number field is set to "bep" appear sixth
  • Titles whose page number field is set to "bc" appear last

The (Title) Removal Editor page and the associated moderator approval page have been changed to use the same display logic. In addition, the moderator approval page has been modified to hyper-link all title and author records.

The software changes that were needed to support the new logic were extensive and rather tricky, so please keep an eye out for any bugs or unexpected behavior. Reviews and Interviews are a particular area of concern because the software handles them differently. TIA. Ahasuerus 05:20, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

P.S. I see that we have 8 publication records with page numbers like "8, 10" and "7, 11, 1", e.g. see the second Contents item of this pub record. This format is currently not supported by the software and I don't think it's allowed by the Rules and Standards, e.g. see Help:Screen:NewPub. Ahasuerus 05:40, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
About the first rule (concerning the ordering of bracketed numbers): what if a content (like a map) appears on an unnumbered page before the first numbered page? I have counted the pages before page 1, recorded them in the page count field with brackets (e.g. "[8]+345"), and then entered the page number of the map's content record based on the bracketed number. So if it appears on the seventh unnumbered page I'd enter "[7]". The logic you describe would place it after the novel content record which starts on page "1" (or "5"). Mhhutchins 05:58, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
Well, I based the new logic on my interpretation of what Help:Screen:NewPub says, i.e. "Use the lower case form of Roman numerals, for pages in introductory material. This will happen, for example, for material on the inside cover of a magazine, since the pagination usually starts inside", but perhaps my interpretation was, er, idiosyncratic :-)
The way I see it, in any pub which uses regular (i.e. Arabic) integers as page numbers you can have a block of pages that precede the first explicitly numbered page. If that first numbered page is labeled "N" and there are fewer than N-1 unnumbered pages before it, then we can use Arabic numerals [1] through [N-1] (in brackets) for the unnumbered pages and everything will work out fine. If, however, there are more than N-1 unnumbered pages -- in the extreme case that you referred to above the first numbered page is "1" -- then we need to use the aforementioned "lower case for of Roman numerals" like [vii] instead of [7] and everything will still work out fine.
A major advantage of this approach is that it lets you use bracketed Arabic numerals for unnumbered pages which appear at the end of the pub, something that would be impossible if we assumed that all bracketed numbers appear up front.
That said, now that the code that handles page numbers has been cleaned up, streamlined and documented, it should be fairly easy to change it to do whatever we want it to do. Ahasuerus 07:07, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
Bracketing indicates the number of unnumbered pages. So it's illogical, in my opinion, to indicate that number by using roman numerals. Not only illogical but highly possible that it would be misunderstood by the casual user (and probably several editors) to indicate that the content appears on an unnumbered page within a larger range of roman-numeraled pages. I can see the problem caused by unnumbered pages at the end of the book, so is it possible to say that if the bracketed number is lower than, let's say 50, then it's listed first, and if it's higher it would be ordered with the non-bracketed but numbered contents? Mhhutchins 16:37, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
It's certainly possible, but consider records like The "New" Howard Reader (second state), #4 January 1999 or Slippery and Other Stories where [29] and [40] refer to pages after the last numbered page. In addition, there are pubs like "...and Their Memory Was a Bitter Tree...": Queen of the Black Coast and Others where "[t]he items with page number in brackets are two-sided plates with the number of the page they face", so listing them at the end of the pub wouldn't work too well. We also have books like Bran Mak Morn: The Last King where "[a]ppendix pages [are] numbered A1-A45" and magazines like The WSFA Journal #80, May 1972 and Matrix, August 1976 where page numbers are preceded by a letter or a group of letter designating each chapter. And then there are records where the verifier used negative numbers for pages preceding page 1. It's enough to drive a man to drink [green tea]!
I am not really sure what the best way to handle all of these cases would be, but at least the software has been cleaned up and we can make it do whatever we agree upon (within reason.) For example, we could add support for "fractional (secondary?) page numbers" so that plates and inserts would be listed as "53.1", i.e. an unnumbered page following page 53. That would presumably eliminate the need for brackets when dealing with plates. Ahasuerus 05:07, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
I like this suggestion. Chavey 21:01, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
Upon reflection, the easiest way to handle all possible permutations may be to add a new "display order" field. When valued, this field be used by the ordering logic instead of the actual page number. For example, if you have 4 illustrations numbered A-1 through A-4 between pages 51 and 52, you will enter A-1, A-2, A-3 and A-4 in the regular "page number" field, but "51.1", "51.2", "51.3" and "51.4" in the "display order" field. Ahasuerus 15:06, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

"Rocket to the Moon" vs. "Girl in the Moon", by Thea von Harbou

Under the title record for Die Frau im Mond, by Thea von Harbou, we have two 1930 English translations: "Rocket to the Moon" and "Girl in the Moon" listed as variant titles. However, the title page for "Rocket to the Moon" (paperback size book of 187 page) says: "From the novel 'The Girl in the Moon' by Thea von Harbou". This would seem to imply that "Rocket" is an extract, or portion of, the longer "Girl". Should these two books be listed differently? Or is my note on "Rocket" good enough? Chavey 09:17, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

According to SFE3, Rocket to the Moon was a cut version of The Girl in the Moon. I think the current variant structure is fine, although we may want to add a note to the two English VTs to clarify their relationship. We don't really have a good way of tracking textual changes (adaptation, abridgements, expansions, etc) at the moment, but there are plans to improve this area. Ahasuerus 05:30, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
Thanks for the link. I expanded the notes a bit, but left it as a VT. Chavey 01:31, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

r2012-62 installed

A small patch has been installed, but, in case anyone is wondering, it shouldn't change the way the software behaves. I am just cleaning up the existing code to make adding more language features possible. Ahasuerus 05:23, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

r2012-63 installed

Another small patch has been installed. The Advanced Search page now lists the values used in the Storylen field. Ahasuerus 14:07, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Soldier, Ask Not

Am I right in thinking that there's something wrong with this record for "Soldier, Ask Not"? It was published as a novel in the UK and the US (Daw and Sphere) and I don't see that anywhere. Or is it just that nobody's submitted those records yet? Mike Christie (talk) 23:42, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

You're looking at the novella, but I suspect you're thinking of the novel. --MartyD 00:39, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
Thanks. Both of them show up in the series listing at Dickson's page, which is what confused me. Mike Christie (talk) 01:08, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

Riverworld: The Great Short Fiction of Philip Jose Farmer

There's a title listed at Farmer's entry at SFE3: "Riverworld: The Great Short Fiction of Philip Jose Farmer". I apologize if this is another stupid mistake, like the one just above, but I can't see any evidence of this title in Farmer's ISFDB page, and yet the book clearly exists in multiple editions per a search of used book sites. Is it truly missing? Mike Christie (talk) 22:47, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

We do have two entries for that title under Riverworld and Other Stories. Not verified, and probably wrong. The PJF International Bibliography has both as editions of "Riverworld and Other Stories". I'll ask the webmaster what he thinks. --Willem H. 09:25, 22 December 2012 (UTC)
On second thought, I checked my copy of Riverworld and Other Stories. According to the titlepage, the title should be "Riverworld: The Great Short Fiction of Philip Jose Farmer", we even have a note about it ("The Great Short Fiction of" below title and before author on title page), but changing the title feels very wrong. What to do? --Willem H. 09:46, 22 December 2012 (UTC)
Per ISFDB standards, the title field of the publication record should reflect the title given on the publication's title page. There are many cases where the author's name is given in the title of the work: here, here, here, and many others. What feels wrong about changing the title of this collection? Mhhutchins 14:33, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

2012-12-24 - expected downtime notification

I am wrapping up the latest patch and expect to install it later tonight. It will require a minor database reorganization, so I will have to disable access for a few minutes. If you see an "ISFDB is currently not available" message, do not panic :-) Ahasuerus 00:29, 25 December 2012 (UTC)

Going down in 3... Ahasuerus 01:18, 25 December 2012 (UTC)
Everything should be back up. I will be posting the patch notes shortly. Ahasuerus 01:27, 25 December 2012 (UTC)
Done. Ahasuerus 02:00, 25 December 2012 (UTC)

Polly/Kelly Freas artwork

Following is an e-mail exchange with the kfreasstudio@earthlink.com:

"There were a series of books done by Starblaze/Donning in the late 70s to early 80s. The earliest ones had cover and interior art by Kelly Freas. On the covers was a statement: "Edited and illustrated by Polly and Kelly Freas" All of the artwork is signed, mostly with Kelly's unique flourished 'kf' in a circle. The cover statement could lead one to think that Polly also had a hand in the artwork, though I read it that she did the editing. Did she do any of the art?"
attached was a link to our bibliographic page for Kelly Freas, which is about five times longer than the list on the Freas website
Reply: "Yes, Polly worked on the editing and Kelly did all the art. Thanks for the link....definitely some titles missing. Cheers, Laura Brodian Freas Beraha [I remarried On June 17, 2012]"
Result is that we have numerous records erroneously attributing cover and interior art to both Polly and Kelly Freas. I'll clean up the ones I own, or anyone else can pitch in. Shouldn't be more than a couple of dozen records. Cheers! --~ Bill, Bluesman 01:35, 25 December 2012 (UTC)
Additional follow-up e-mail today : Thanks again for getting in touch with me. Also for the bibliography URL -- Outstanding __==-- and Kelly's agent, Mark Corrinet thanks you, too. He says it is a tremendous help and saving him a lot of work as we try to make a catalog of all of Kelly's images. Seems we have a fan or two!! --~ Bill, Bluesman 23:32, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

Author language addition - Part 1 (patch r2012-64)

The latest and greatest patch has been installed. It added a new field, "Language", to all author records, but left it blank. From this point on, every time you edit an author, the Language field will default to your user-specific value (English unless you have changed it in User Preferences), so make sure to change it if the author's primary language is different. (The Help pages will be updated shortly.)

At the moment, the only Web pages that this new field affects are the four author pages (Summary, Chronological, Alphabetical and Award), but the plan is to modify the software to display the languages of all canonical titles that do not match the author's primary language. For example, Philip K. Dick's Summary page currently lists a number of Italian, Dutch, French, etc collections that have no analog in the English language and it will be beneficial to display their languages on the Summary page.

For bilingual authors (Sam Lundwall, Jean-Louis Trudel, Vladimir Nabokov, etc), pick the most frequently used language, but don't agonize too much about it -- the only thing that it affects is which titles will have their language displayed on the Summary Page. The worst thing that can happen if you choose poorly is that the author's Summary page will have too much language information displayed.

In addition, the following bugs have been fixed:

  • The Author Editor page is no longer confused by double quotes
  • The moderator approval page for Author Merges no longer displays IMDB links instead of author images
  • The Author History page (available to moderators through the list of Recent Integrations) no longer errors out when trying to display the history of an author whose record doesn't exist due to a subsequent Author Merge operation

As always, please report any bugs here - TIA! Ahasuerus 01:58, 25 December 2012 (UTC)

How does one access the Author History page? I didn't see a link labeled as such from the Recent Integrations page. Or is it just the link that displays the submission that edited an author's data? Mhhutchins 14:26, 26 December 2012 (UTC)
The latter, I am afraid. It's also potentially confusing -- see Bug 3598404.
The ultimate goal is to make a complete edit history of every record in the database (author, title, pub, etc) available to all users. I expect that we will get there some time next year. Ahasuerus 00:34, 27 December 2012 (UTC)
Isn't this already readily available (but not currently highly legible) via the existing submissions queue? It seems like the best way would be just to search or link submissions into individual record histories. Searches might be time consuming but could be done once and indexed and linked and further submissions should be linked at moderation time. Uzume 13:49, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
I don't think there's a guaranteed way to recover past submissions (what happens when items are merged/deleted?), and going forward we could run into performance problems if we have to adjust the submissions table to keep things in line. I also believe that the XML will not be acceptable to most users - I've tracked down edits manually before and had a hard time finding the bit I wanted. Remember, one submission may update dozens of DB records - e.g. adding page numbers/story lengths to an anthology's contents. BLongley 15:17, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
I am aware of the limitations. I never said it would be easy (and it may not be feasible to cross old merges, etc. but there could be a way moving forward to track such). And yes a single submission could be in multiple record histories. Uzume 15:28, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
There are a few differences between the submission table (which stores the bodies of all submissions) and the history table, which is used to display record history. First, the submission table is not publicly available as part of our backups, so any code that relies on it would be broken if you tried to set up a local/clone copy of ISFDB. Second, the submission table stores the new values of any fields that it intended to change, but it doesn't store the old values. The history table, on the other hand, stores both the old and the new values, so you can immediately see what exactly the change accomplished. If you wanted to get the same kind of information from the submission table, you would have to hunt all over the submission table to find and correlate different submissions. Ahasuerus 22:35, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Author/title edit bug fixes (patch r2012-65)

Removing a Web page or e-mail address from an author or title record should no longer result in the loss of other web pages and/or e-addresses when the removed page/address is not the last one displayed. Ahasuerus 01:51, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

Author Edit - date validation added (patch r2012-66)

The Author Editor page should no longer error out with a Python error when an invalid date is entered. Instead, invalid dates will be silently converted to "0000-00-00", which is what Edit Pub currently does. More robust validation similar to the pop-up error messages generated by Edit Title will be added at a later point. Ahasuerus 04:19, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

Macmillan of Canada

The publisher notes for Macmillan of Canada have a link to a "Macmillan Canada" record. However, this record no longer exists so the link produces an error. Doing a publisher search on Macmillan shows a Macmillan Co. of Canada (which is the earlier version), but no Macmillan Canada. We could just remove the sentence containing the link as it's no longer applicable (at least in terms of conflicts), but thought I'd post this here in case whoever added the note may wish to refactor it. -- JLaTondre (talk) 15:03, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

"Kinder- und Hausmärchen" by the Brothers Grimm

We just reached the 200th birthday of this book, and Google knew all about it, but we had no record of it. Of course we have English translations, but not the German original. So I thought I'd work on adding various editions of this book. (Aside: Since the English version we have are usually translations/adaptations/selections from both volumes, I'm treating their Vol. 1 and 2 as a single title, and distinguishing the two volumes by publication name variants, but not as full title variants.) I'm confused by the contents though, and wonder if anyone can help. Multiple sources comment on how they would keep the same title, while revising the story. And sources talk about changes in the stories included over the various editions, but generally with slow changes. But the two apparent "trustworthy" sources of the contents of this first edition agree on only about 36 titles, while disagreeing on more than 50 titles. So I have no idea which source to believe. The first source is Wikipedia-English, which seems to be done carefully, with notes about changes from the first edition to the second edition, etc (includes titles and ordering only; no page #'s). The second source is Wikisource-German, which has page numbers, and include links to page photos from the original book. You can go to their page (i) and verify that they've taken these photos from an original first edition. Since this probably amounts to a "transient verification", it seems that this should take precedence. But I have a hard time believing that Wikipedia has 50 out of 86 stories wrong. Anyone have an idea of what's going on here? Chavey 17:46, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

There were another titles in first edition (German Wikipedia) Denis 11:11, 27 December 2012 (UTC)
Denis, you linked to the English Wikipedia article on Grimm's Fairy Tales, but you're right that the German page has better lists of the ToC for the various editions, although still not as complete as we will have. With a little investigation, it's now clear to me that the English Wikipedia has the ToC for a later edition, or some "standard" list, but is not the list from the first edition, which I had assumed. I was also surprised by how much change there was between editions: Going from the 1st to 2nd edition of Vol. 1 (with 86 stories), 35 stories were replaced, and 10 were renamed. (My favorite renaming was from "Die drei Raben" to "Die sieben Raben", although my German housemate and I had a good laugh over a later change from "Das kluge Grethel" to "Die kluge Grethel".) So getting all of the contents for the first 7 editions (my goal) is going to take some work, especially VT'ing all of the name changes in these editions. Chavey 15:42, 27 December 2012 (UTC)
Well, Wikipedia-English doesn't seem to recognize the changes between the early printings and just puts together a list of the two volumes probably from the 'definitive' edition (whichever it recognizes as such: the last put together by the Grimms?). Wikipedia-German does show the process of alterations and additions, so this should be the one to follow. The various 'printings' would be better regarded as different editions, I think. If you do need any assistance in translating the text of this source, please let me know it. Stonecreek 16:44, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
Yes, I soon realized the weaknesses of the English Wikipedia, and I'm strictly working off the German Wikisource. The Wikisource link also has substantially more data than even the German Wikipedia. I am uncertain as to how to handle the editions and volumes. It appears that from the second edition on, the changes are modest enough to fit within our "same edition, slight variant" category where we leave changes to the notes. But the variations from the first edition to the second are huge. (35 stories out of 85 are replaced), so it does seem as if it might deserve its own title record. I'm also unsure whether to list the two volumes as different publications or different titles. One of the problems with the multiple title solutions to these books will be the difficulty with how to handle English translations as VT's of these books, which will need to be done. E.g., if I separate Vol. 1 and 2 into separate titles, then which one is the target VT for the various single-volume English editions? Similarly, even keeping the volumes together, if I have various editions under different titles, it will be difficult to decide for each English edition which German edition it should be a VT of. I would appreciate input into these two decisions.
I appreciate the offer to help with translation. So far, when my German is inadequate, I get advice from my native-German speaking roommate. But when I get to the stage of having many similarly titled versions of a story, and need to decide which is the "canonical title" (of which the others are variants), I'll come back to ask for your help. Chavey 20:11, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

Glenn Cooper - In or Out ?

I am not sure about the inclusion of Glenn Cooper's works (or at least a few of them) into ISFDB. I do not have read the books and the Author site does not help much. Any opinion ? --Pips55 22:08, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Based on reviews, his books are thrillers, but at least some of them contain "secret history" and/or SF elements. For example, here is what his Web site says about The Librarians, book 3 in the the Library of the Dead / Will Piper series:
  • Florida, 2026. Will Piper, former FBI agent, is retired and living a life of leisure, his days filled with sun and fishing, his thoughts far from the notorious “Doomsday Killer” case that vaulted him into minor celebrity status fifteen years earlier. But according to what that investigation uncovered at a secret government site in Nevada, the world will change irrevocably on February 9, 2027. Is it the End of Days? No one knows what the Horizon, as it’s been called, will bring, and much of the world is suspended between pre-apocalyptic hedonism and despair.
which sounds reasonably SF to me. Ahasuerus 01:00, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
Also keep in mind that one book in a series may be eligible for inclusion while another one may not. There's no need to be "completist" when it comes to such situations. Mhhutchins 01:02, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
My thinking is that it depends on the ratio of SF titles to non-SF titles in the series. For example, there are a couple of SF books in the Nancy Drew series, but that's less than 1% of the total, so we definitely do not want to include the other 200+ titles. On the other hand, a few years ago I had to process a two volume horror series in which the protagonist fought redneck cannibals in volume 1 and zombies in volume 2. Because the ratio was 50-50, I entered book 1 as NONGENRE and book 2 as a NOVEL. Ahasuerus 01:24, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
I was looking for an easy way out... I'll do more research on the stories, thanks --Pips55 21:20, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

Some RPG pub questions

I have a couple board games based on Dragonriders of Pern and Doctor Who. Question: would those be allowable to be included in isfdb?
I also have some RPGs base on Doctor Who, Star Wars, and the Well World series. Would these, and their supplements, be allowable?--Astromath 15:30, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

This question is very similar to the one you asked at the Moderator noticeboard. The answer is the same: Game related materials are not allowable unless they meet the exception granted by clause 4 of the Rules of Acquisition. When I mentioned the Community Portal, that was in the context of asking about specific works if there was a question about whether the author meet the threshold.
If you think clause 4 may apply, you need to ask yourself the following questions:
  1. Is the otherwise non-allowable work credited to an author of speculative fiction (as defined by ISFDB)? If no, the work is not allowable. If yes, the work may be allowable and proceed to the next question. As I said before, the work must be credited to the genre writer, not merely based on the genre writer's works.
  2. Is the credited author clearly above the threshold? If yes (Asimov for example), go ahead submit it. If you are uncertain, then ask a specific question about that work.
-- JLaTondre (talk) 15:50, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
Obviously, this leaves the Doctor Who board game & RPG out since they are not credited to a single author, so that was easy. The Well World RPG may meet the threshhold, but I need to check about the credit. Same goes for the Star Wars. I need to check the credits on that. Even if that RPG was credited to George Lucas, would he meet the threashhold?--Astromath 21:04, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
I'd say board games are ALWAYS out. RPGs aren't so easy as they tend to start with a big rule BOOK. :-( BLongley 16:31, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Need opinion

Re: The Cataclysm
This anthology has no editors credited. What is the policy here? It has 4 of the authors on the cover with "and more". The title page only has the title, the introduction's authors, the cover artist, and the interior artist credited. The copyright page also has no credits. Is it ok to use "uncredited" like the 3rd volume of this series?--Astromath 21:30, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

There's no codified rule that I'm aware of. But it seems that the de facto standard is to credit the authors who are named on the title page, which many of these non-editor-credited anthologies tend to do. Some editors, myself among them, draw the line to four authors. Anything above that I enter as "uncredited". If there are no authors named on the title page, then it should be credited to "uncredited". That seems to be the case here. Mhhutchins 02:20, 29 December 2012 (UTC)
Ok. I'll edit the authors to uncredited.--Astromath 03:13, 29 December 2012 (UTC)
You'll also need to update the author fields of both publication records. Mhhutchins 03:22, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

LibriVox audiobooks

Just a heads up. All titles of this public-domain publisher's audiobooks should be entered as "digital audio download" instead of "audio (mp3)". It was recently changed but someone has continued to use the old designation. Thanks. Mhhutchins 02:15, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

One more thing. Ever who is creating these records is not sourcing the data. Mhhutchins 02:23, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

Question about the Trantorian Empire series

Re: Trantorian Empire
Question: where does the series name Trantorian Empire come from? The books I have use the Galactic Empire as the series name. Just wondering.--Astromath 03:19, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

There are several answers to your question, depending on what you mean by the question.
  1. Etymologically it comes from the name of the capital planet of Asimov's Galactic Empire.
  2. Wikipedia calls it the "Trantorian Empire". (Not a good reason, but worth noting.)
  3. Logically, the empire developed from a single planet to 5 planets, and eventually to half the galaxy, so if you called it "Galactic Empire", you wouldn't logically be able to include all of the books and stories about the empire from before it became that big.
  4. Logistically, we probably got it from Locus, because that's what they call the series.
Chavey 20:55, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

Question about the Wild Card series

Example: Jokers Wild This is labeled a NOVEL. However, it has an editor like an ANTHOLOGY. The book labels itself as a MOSAIC (but this is not a choice for Type). I guess the question would be "should this be labeled as NOVEL or ANTHOLOGY?" Which would better represent the pub's type?
Personal opinion is that it should be labeled as ANTHOLOGY despite the fact that each part of the mosaic is uncredited (other than a listing of authors on the title page). Second personal opinion: MOSAIC should be a choice for Type.--Astromath 15:20, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

This work is correctly entered as a NOVEL. An ANTHOLOGY is a publication of stories by more than one author, each of which can be entered individually and credited to their respective authors. Jokers Wild doesn't have "stories" which can be attributed to the various authors. The term "mosaic" describes how the work was written, but it's still a NOVEL. "Mosaic" is not a form of publication (e.g. NOVEL, COLLECTION, ANTHOLOGY, or OMNIBUS), but a type of novel, just as a "fix-up" is a type of novel. Mhhutchins 23:07, 29 December 2012 (UTC)
Never heard of "fix-up" novels. I think there should be a way other than the notes to indicate that a particular novel is a mosaic so that the editor can be clearly stated in the author field rather than resorting to notes. Maybe add a checkbox to indicate a mosaic with a number field to indicate how many editors there are, then that would indicate that the first X authors are editors and all the others would be the actual authors of the mosaic. Again, this is only an opinion.--Astromath 00:52, 30 December 2012 (UTC)
There are a hundreds of more fix-up novels than there are "mosaic" novels, which are so relatively rare that making a check box to indicate such would be overkill. The Note field is sufficient enough for explanations about the novel. And the author field of a novel record attributes only author credit, not editor credit. (And in this case, Martin is credited as an author in the author field.) Editors can only be credited in the Note field of novels and single-author collections. That's a problem that will be fixed some time in the future, when the developers have a chance to expand credits for other roles, such as translator, adapter, book designer, etc. Mhhutchins 01:36, 30 December 2012 (UTC)
Another FR that might have slipped through the gaps in my memory! I did indeed start "translator" support last year before Ahasuerus gently asked me to stop submitting stuff till he'd caught up. I think I got as far as recording translators but not as far as putting such on their Author page. I must revisit that - although I frankly still can't drum up much enthusiasm for "book designer". BLongley 15:55, 20 January 2013 (UTC)
It's a very important, yet overlooked and underappreciated, role. Many designers are credited on their books' copyright page. Such book designers like Arnie Fenner (for Ziesing), Carole Russo (for Tor), Gail Cross/Desert Isle Design (for Cemetery Dance and Subterranean Press), Robert Freeman Wexler/Alligator Tree Graphics (for PS Publishing) are clearly underrepresented in the ISFDB based on their importance in the field. A book's interior design, i the long run, is more important than a dustjacket which is not an intrinsic part of the book. (I'll surely get some flack for that last statement.) Mhhutchins 19:44, 20 January 2013 (UTC)
Translator support is fairly complicated. We'll need to figure out what database changes will be required first. Ahasuerus 17:00, 20 January 2013 (UTC)
Ah. I noticed I have several of the "fix-up" novels listed in the Wiki. I never would have noticed. Since you mention that some things are in development, I don't have any more relevant comments. Thx for the info.--Astromath 04:51, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

Tau Zero signature found?

Re: Tau Zero
I have just confirmed that the artist is indeed Richard Powers here. (At least I think so.) I need somebody else to confirm. I also think I see a signature on the the image, but it is so garbled, there seems to be no way to read it. Maybe somebody else could help with a better image. The white veritical streamer, about halfway down about a half inch to the right is where I think the signature is. But it blends into the black cloudy streamer to the left pretty well, so I'm not sure. I've been trying to compare it to signatures on others of Powers works without any luck.

I just found this website. I'm emailing the curator for his opinion.--Astromath 18:30, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

The illustration is by Powers. No need to search for other sources though. It is credited in Jane Frank's The Art of Richard Powers, page 124 as a 1970 Berkley paperback (wrong year). The full painting is on page 116, with signature (see here for a temporary upload, I will delete this image next week. --Willem H. 20:41, 30 December 2012 (UTC)
Many Thanks!!! Could you update the notes? Thx.--Astromath 22:03, 30 December 2012 (UTC)
No problem. Done. --Willem H. 08:56, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

Shadowkeep

Re: Shadowkeep
There's a ™ symbol next to the title (on cover & title pages) so it reads Shadowkeep™. Shouldn't the ™ be part of the title?--Astromath 02:51, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

I don't believe we have anything official in the rules, but the defacto standard is no. The trademark, in this case, is not actually part of the name, but rather indicates the name is trademarked. -- JLaTondre (talk) 13:22, 31 December 2012 (UTC)
Ok. Though I wonder why this particular title is trademarked. Oh, well. Thx for the info.--Astromath 00:21, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
It's a tie-in novel to the Shadowkeep video game. -- JLaTondre (talk) 03:20, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
I think Dragoondelight used the symbol quite a lot (on "Aliens" related works I think). Now he's retired, I guess somebody could now go through our pubs and correct them, but we should probably document the standard first. Also with '®' - I have actually used that one myself, see The Technicolor® Time Machine BLongley 16:05, 20 January 2013 (UTC)
That pub appears to be a different case, however. There is distinction between a title that has a '®' or 'TM' as part of the title and a title that adds the '®' or 'TM' for legal reasons. -- JLaTondre (talk) 17:23, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

First 2013 patch

The first patch of the year is now live. The following two changes have been made:

  • Publication tags are no longer editable. They are still (automagically) created by the software when a new pub is entered. Please note that this change doesn't affect title (or "subject") tags in any way.
  • Invalid review and interview dates are now silently converted to 0000-00-00 instead of causing Python errors at approval time.

Ahasuerus 02:57, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Fantastic Adventures from TSR

I have one of the books of this series Tale of the Comet by Roland Green (July, 1997), but not the other two: A Thief in the Tomb of Horrors by Simon Hawke (April, 1997) and Knorrman Steel, Charonti Bone by Jeff Grubb (May, 1997). I don't know if there's any others of the series. You have Tales of the Comet, but not the other two. Since I don't have them, I'm alerting you to the other two if somebody wants to add them.--Astromath 16:20, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

If they're not in the db, it's highly unlikely another editor has copies of them. I was going to suggest that you create records for them, making sure to note your sources, but I was unable to find any evidence that these titles were ever published. What is your source? There are no OCLC records, and no copies available of either title on Amazon or Abebooks. Are you certain these were actually published? Maybe they were announced but cancelled before publication. Mhhutchins 17:36, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
My source is Tale of the Comet. The series page before the title page. From here: Abebooks & Amazon & WorldCat. The other one is here: Amazon & Abebooks, however this one is not in Worldcat.--Astromath 18:42, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
Look closer at those Amazon and Abebooks links. You'll find no copies available. "Out of Print--Limited Availability" is Amazon-speak for "announced, but not published". Those Abebooks records are not dealer listings, they're title listings. And now that Amazon owns Abebooks, their listings are from the same database. How unlikely is it that there are no copies for sale anywhere on the internet if the book was actually published? The Worldcat record for the first title is also highly suspect. The one available copy is at a single library in the UK. Strange that no other libraries in the world has a copy. Mhhutchins 19:11, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
You may be right. I can't seem to find anything more than what I did. I'm contacting Wizards of the Coast for more information.--Astromath 20:53, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
I just received a response from Wizards of the Coast. Here's the answer they gave: "Thanks for writing in. The novels you mentioned were published, however they are out of print so in order to find them you can search online, or check with local used book stores." I'll go ahead and add them.--Astromath 01:57, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
One request before you do: try to "find them...online, or check with local used book stores." (Some unpaid intern probably answered your email, or someone who wasn't around 15 years ago and has no idea what was actually published.) If you can find a book dealer who can actually sell you a copy (you don't have to buy it), I'll accept your submission to create a record. Mhhutchins 03:34, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
I see you've already made submissions, but you did not source your data. When you're able to, I'll accept them. Mhhutchins 03:36, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
I've sent them another request for cover images and image credits as well as the list price when published. I'll post again when I receive an answer.--Astromath 03:39, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
Good luck. Check this out. Mhhutchins 03:53, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

(unindent)I just got notification that the novels were published by Random House and they gave me both an email & 1-800 contact number. Again, I'm going to try to contact them. Thx for your patience.--Astromath 03:04, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

I contacted Jeff Grubb through his blog, but he's not yet responded. Mhhutchins 05:07, 9 January 2013 (UTC)
Here's the final word from Random House:
Good Day, Thank you for contacting Random House, Inc., distributors for Wizards of the Coast. We appreciate your continued interest in our publications. We have neither published no distributed 'A Thief in the Tomb of Horrors' by Simon Hawke nor 'Knorrman Steel, Charonti Bone' by Jeff Grubb. We also do not have record of either title published under that name by different authors. Thank you, Consumer Services TU-863809
I suppose we could do to things: 1) Cancel submission. 2) Leave submission, but label it as unpublished. Which do you prefer?--Astromath 00:50, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
It's better to accept the submissions and then change them to unpublished. This will alert future ISFDB editors and users of the situation and avoid everyone from having to go through the process again. Thanks. Mhhutchins 00:59, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
I placed the titles into a series (Fantastic Adventures (TSR)), but that may have been two hasty. These stories may not actually be related either in setting or characters, which would make them a publication series and not a title series. What do you think? Mhhutchins 01:08, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
I think they should be placed in a series. They may be unrelated, but there has been other series that's also unrelated character-wise (see Ravenloft Villain series). I no long have the book in front of me (been reboxed) but they are clearly labeled under the heading of Fantastic Adventures on the page just prior to the title page. As far as the setting goes, it seems to be a general "Fantastic" theme type setting. Tale of the Comet has the theme of "Magic vs Machine". I'm not 100% sure what the themes of the other two were supposed to be. (Sidenote: "two hasty"??? Is that worse than "one hasty"?) 486.png --Astromath 03:09, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
Yes, it's twice as hasty! Back to series, though. I've always assumed the Ravenloft novels were part of a sharecropper universe, which would qualify them as a title series. If there's nothing textually connective about two titles then they should not be placed into a title series, with the one exception being anthology series, which are borderline between a title series and a publication series. (See this page for a better understanding of the difference.) The one question I ask myself: if this title was reprinted by another publisher, would it still be part of the same series? So, if Tale of the Comet was reprinted by Tor, for example, would it still be part of the series "Fantastic Adventures"? Mhhutchins 04:13, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
To answer your question, I would like to think so, but I'm not sure. I'm prejudiced towards putting them into a series. One thing I do know is that "Fantastic Adventures" is a specific type-faced logo similar to the other logos produced by TSR. On the other hand, that logo does not appear on the cover image of "A Thief in the Tombo of Horrors" on the Amazon site, though Amazon does have "Fantastic Adventures Books" as part of the title (most other sites also include "Fantastic Adventures Books" as part of the description). The other book does not have any cover image to be found anywhere and no "Fantastic Adventures Books" as part of its description. The only indicator that it is part of "Fantastic Adventures" is on the series title page of "Tale of the Comet" (the page before the book title page).--Astromath 12:22, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

Proposed The Blood Wars Trilogy name change

Re: The Blood Wars Trilogy
I wish to propose a series name change from The Blood Wars Trilogy to Planscape: The Blood Wars Trilogy. This will bring this series in line with other TSR/Wizards of the Coast series (e.g. Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, etc.).--Astromath 18:49, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

It's already a sub-series of Planescape. This was done to separate the trilogy from two other books in the parent series. What do you propose we do with the parent series and the titles under it? Mhhutchins 19:14, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
I see what you mean by the Dragonlance parent series having it's name in all of the sub-series. It seems redundant to me, but does no harm. Feel free to submit a change to the name of the trilogy. Mhhutchins 19:17, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
I believe it was done so that all "Forgotten Realms" series, when alphabetized, will appear appropriately in the "at home databases" such as Readerware. Same for Dragonlance and others. Since Readerware only reads through their import routine the immediate series title of a novel, it will not put it in the appropriate spot in the database unless I modify the series title.
I'll go ahead and request the change. Thx.--Astromath 20:28, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Elfquest Graphic Novels

Elfquest began as a comic book, was released as a series of graphic novels, but also has book adaptations and anthologies published in that world. The books obviously are "In". What about the graphic novels? Our current listings, e.g. as under Wendy Pini, include a massive number of graphic novels, including a large number of German translations of those graphic novels. I love the graphic novels, but it seems to me that they are "Out". Wendy & Richard Pini don't have enough "book" output to be included here. But before deleting them, I thought I should raise the question here. Opinions? Chavey 20:30, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

It depends upon how you define the "threshold". Is it based on quantity or percentage of work within the spec-fic field? Or is it based on the author's reputation within the field? I believe Wendy and Richard Pini are as well know within the spec-fic field as they are in the comics field. But again, it depends upon that nebulous threshold that no one's been able to define. Mhhutchins 21:07, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
When I was deleting the the graphic novels and illustrated childrens books[1] I felt these should also be deleted. Since their spec-fic is mostly graphic novel related I'd be for saving only the books.Kraang 01:55, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
I also have all the graphic novels. I also have the RPG. All the graphic novels can now be found online for free here.--Astromath 01:52, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
Returning to this question after a month off, I see there is no clear resolution, so I will leave the graphic novels in. If someone else wants to enter all the ones we don't have listed, feel free. (Remember, graphic novels only, not the individual comic books.) Chavey 03:11, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

IMDB award links fixed

A minor patch has been installed. IMDB links for awards should work again, e.g. if you click on "The Legend of Hell House" on the 1974 British Fantasy Award page, you should see an IMDB page which will list all titles that match the title. Ahasuerus 00:53, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

A follow-up patch has changed the name of the field from "Movie URL" to "IMDB Title". Also, Unicode characters should now appear correctly when editing existing awards although the Add Award page still needs to be fixed. (Please note that award editing is currently only available to moderators. Once all major award-related bugs have been fixed, all editors will be able to edit awards.) Ahasuerus 04:25, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
As of this morning, titles with Unicode characters are displayed correctly by the "Add Award" page. Ahasuerus 17:03, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
Yet another minor patch has corrected the Help message for Select Title Award. I expect that there will be quite a few of them over the next few days as various Award-related bugs get fixed. Since only moderators can edit awards at this time, I will be posting related patch notes on the Moderator Noticeboard rather than on the Community Portal. Ahasuerus

Renaming of subseries of TSR/Wizard of the Coast series.

Since Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms & Ravenloft subseries have the series title as part of the subseries title, the other subseries of the other series should follow the same format. This is particular to this publisher. All the Dark Sun subseries should have Dark Sun in the subseries title. The same goes for Spelljammer, etc. The first three series I mentioned set a precident that either should be followed for all subseries of a series, or the series title be deleted from the subseries title of all subseries.
This looks like this is also true for some of the Star Trek and Star Wars subseries.--Astromath 19:15, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Adding the parent series name to a sub-series name is redundant. I accepted your earlier request because all of the sub-series of that one already had the parent name appended to it. But I can see no reason to add the parent name to the sub-series of Dark Sun. Why is this one different from any other sub-series in the db? If this practice sets a precedent, there will be other attempts to add parent names to series. I still don't understand the point you were trying to make above about Readerware. What does it have to do with the ISFDB and how we display series? There's no need that I'm aware of that we be compatible with another database software. Mhhutchins 19:27, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
Re: Readerware, I am unaware of any attempts to make ISFDB compatible with it or any similar products. Ahasuerus 06:40, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

Bradbury/Skeletons

FYI, for someone who knows how to fix it: Skeletons appears to have the wrong image; that's apparently the cover for The Shop of the Mechanical Insects. Mike Christie (talk) 03:56, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

The record was linked to the wrong image on Amazon, and it was just a matter of removing the URL. I was able to find the correct image and upload it to the ISFDB server, and then link it to the pub record. Mhhutchins 05:05, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

General Question: Sources for "Upcoming Books"

I was curious where information for upcoming books is available. Does Amazon maintain a page someplace for upcoming SFF books, or do most contributors collect this info from the individual publisher's websites? On the ISFDB homepage, there's even a 'Selected Upcoming Books' section, and I assume that this list is generated from those upcoming books with the most activity? Thanks! —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Gideon (talk • contribs) .

There are various ways to get lists of upcoming books from Amazon, the Library of Congress, etc. We have a robot that regularly pokes around the Web, leverages various APIs, downloads/massages the data and creates automated submissions. These submissions are then reviewed and approved by moderators, so the process is not entirely automated.
As far as the "Selected" section goes, it's based on our list of frequently viewed authors. It's a rather long list (2,000 records or so), so it doesn't take much to make it. Ahasuerus 16:14, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

Fanucci Editore (Italy)

Is there any particular reason why this publisher's name has been disambiguated by adding the country? I'm not aware of any more Fanucci Editore in any other country that would require this. Mhhutchins 04:51, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

As I recall, one or two of our editors started doing this for Hungary and a couple of other places a while back and it sort of spread by osmosis. Ahasuerus 05:47, 10 January 2013 (UTC)
I'm not sure if it's documented, but it's de facto policy to only give the country name if there's duplicate names for different publishers, or if the same publisher publishes separate lines in different countries (like Orbit/Orbit (US) or Vintage/Vintage (UK). I'll remove the country name from this publisher's name. Mhhutchins 00:15, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
Somebody beat me to it. Thanks. Mhhutchins 00:15, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

Wolfe/Aramaspian Legacy

I don't know which is correct, but there is a discrepancy between the book and contents title in this Gene Wolfe title. In addition, the SFE3 page on Wolfe gives a third spelling. Mike Christie (talk) 12:33, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

They match now. The book's data appears to be from a primary source but it wasn't primary verified, so I took the name from Lloyd Currey's website. Mhhutchins 16:38, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Benford/Wallwork

Sorry to keep dropping problem notifications here, but I am using the ISFDB as a resource for some bibliographic work and am letting you know when I see oddities -- I can stop leaving these notes if you like. Anyway, I just spotted this, which looks highly suspicious; I can't find any online support for the existence of a collaboration, and the title is a fragment of one of Benford's more famous books. I think this may not actually exist. Mike Christie (talk) 23:17, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Another simple fix. Delete the title. There's no publication records, and there's no evidence it was ever published. The title is all over the internet (usually as In the Ocean of Night), but not one copy is for sale. The error probably originated from an error by one person at a single publishing house (probably Gollancz, because this edition is the one that shows up giving Wallwork co-author credit). It spread like wildfire because of Amazon's ubiquity. You've gotta love/hate the internet. I'll delete the title. Mhhutchins 00:04, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

Search page enhancements

As of the latest patch, you can now access "Add New Data" options from the main search page. Ahasuerus 17:01, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

Books belonging to more than one series.

Too bad you cannot indicate pubs that belong to more than one series. For example, First Strike is listed under Star Trek Pocket Books. However it also belongs to a 4 book miniseries called Star Trek Invasion! This miniseries is unusual in that it spans 4 different Star Trek series.--Astromath 03:42, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

Yes, it's an unfortunate software limitation. Since it would be possible (although not easy) to implement, I have created a Feature Request, FR 3600743, for it. Ahasuerus 04:01, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
In the meantime, it's fixable. "Star Trek Pocket Books" isn't a title series - see my extensive notes on how they were renumbered when published in the UK by Titan Books. Anyone care to perform several hundred edits to fix these? :-/ BLongley 07:43, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
Not me! (I've never read a Star Trek book in my life.) But this happened because it took many years to add the publication series feature to the database. I'm betting there are many more title series that should be converted to publication series, especially those academic series, of which I've already converted many. I'll leave Star Trek to anyone who really feels it's worth all of the drudge work. Mhhutchins 16:55, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
I think I could write a one-off script to convert the Pocket Books editions to publication series with numbering, and the Titan editions to a publication series with numbering needing to be done manually. (That's currently only on the wiki, which I don't know how to access in code.) Alternatively, we can let a wannabe moderator prove themselves with this task. ;-) BLongley 17:10, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
Being assigned such a Herculean labor would only prove the editor's ability to withstand mind-numbing typing, and nothing about their database skills! I say go for the script. Mhhutchins 17:16, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
Leave the feature request, though. There are cases like Pellucidar 4 which is also Tarzan 13.--Ron ~ RtraceTalk 22:32, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
It seems to be fairly common in shared universes, e.g. R. A. Salvatore's Servant of the Shard is book 2 of the Forgotten Realms: Paths of Darkness series as well as book 1 of the Forgotten Realms: The Sellswords. Ahasuerus 22:42, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
But sometimes there's a single author with a single title in two different subseries of his "retro-fitted" universe. Mhhutchins 01:10, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
And there's problems like Pratchett's Discworld series where we haven't really satisfied the problem of separating the YA books from the 'adult' ones. I think there's a bug report in for that though. BLongley 12:26, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

(unindent) Ok, with the help of some scripts, I began to correct the Star Trek Pocket Series, and did the first 10 titles. Before I continue, care to look at the series and tell me if I'm doing something wrong? I'm moving all "Pocket Book" publications, except for the hc Pocket Book SFBC pubs, to a publication series, and leaving other editions out. (I'll let Bill worry about the Titan series.) I'm putting all of the titles into the parent "Star Trek: The Original Series" series, and I'm keeping the same numbers as they had in the Pocket Book series. I'd like to know if I'm doing anything wrong before I continue to the other books. Chavey 05:23, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

You probably shouldn't give them the same number in the title series as they have in the publication series. What's the point of moving them from a title series to a publication series if they keep the same number? As far as Star Trek goes, the only titles with title series numbers are the film novelizations, and other works that have a continuous story from one title to another (like the "Stargazer" series by Michael Jan Friedman or the "Vulcan's Soul" series by Sherman and Shwartz. Any self-contained single novel probably shouldn't have a title series number. Mhhutchins 05:38, 17 February 2013 (UTC)
I'd say DEFINITELY don't keep the pub series number on the title series entry. You're very brave to tackle Star Trek as a starting point, unless you're trying to catch Michael as Top Contributor! BLongley 11:36, 17 February 2013 (UTC)
I'll remove the numbers. And I'm certainly not trying for Michael's position! It's just that I'm really good at writing GUI scripts (I use Keyboard Maestro to do most of the work), so I figured that I would have a much easier time of the task than anyone else. Chavey 15:41, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

More award changes (patch 2013-12)

The latest patch, r2013-12, is now live. The software has been modified as follows:

  • For variant titles, the Title page now displays "[may list more publications, awards and reviews]" on the "Variant Title of:" line. Hopefully this will help unconfuse our users who occasionally report that we are missing title-specific information which is found on the canonical title's page - feedback welcome.
  • For canonical titles, the title page has been changed to displays all awards/nominations associated with its variants (in addition to any awards associated with the main title.) Moderators can also select VTs' awards for editing/deletion from the parent title's page. The awards displayed on VT pages are still limited to that VT's awards (which is similar to the way pubs and reviews behave).

Ahasuerus 04:09, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

Excerpt vs Extract

Got a question: what's the difference between an excerpt and an extract? I'm asking because Klingon has an excerpt/extract from 4 novels. I can find nothing in Klingon to indicate which is would be the correct term to use.--Astromath 13:21, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

They're the same. (Post a message on the verifier's talk page to find out how they're presented in that particular record.) The ISFDB standard is to add "excerpt" (small "e") parenthetically to the title, if its title is the same as the larger work from which it is excerpted. If it has a different title, there's no need to disambiguate it. In that case enter the title as published and add a Note to the title record indicating it's an excerpt from another work. They should be entered as SHORTFICTION without a designated length. Mhhutchins 16:47, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
There's an exception to your advice, I think. I've seen a book which included an excerpt from a forthcoming COLLECTION, which in the end turned out to be an entire Short Story. I did put a length on that one, and eventually merged it with the content of the collection. I can't remember exactly what it was - but I'm pretty sure they were Fred Pohl books. BLongley 23:14, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

Unnumbered pages at end of book -- what to include in Pages area for publication

Hi folks, Mike Christie & I have been discussing a book that has 20 unnumbered pages at the end. The first 16 have an essay, the last 4 have ads. For the Pages for the publication -- should we list them as 354+[16] -- including only the essay -- or as 354+[20] -- including the ads? For the full discussion and links to the publication, see this discussion. BungalowBarbara 22:02, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

I don't include Ads in the page count, and certainly don't add them as content. So I vote for 354+[16]. BLongley 23:18, 20 January 2013 (UTC)
I haven't been including in content -- the Help pages are clear on that -- and so far have not included them in un-numbered pages at end of book. I've included essays and excerpts (if un-numbered). Have not included short author biographies, acknowledgements, or additional copyright pages either. I guess my rule of thumb has been that if I wouldn't put it in contents, I wouldn't show it in a count of un-numbered pages either. BungalowBarbara 00:55, 21 January 2013 (UTC)
Darn it - I've just (half) remembered an exception. I'm pretty sure it was a Jasper Fforde book, I just can't recall which one. But the Ads at the end of the book were obviously fictional, related to the background of the novel - I think I included those somehow. If only my memory still worked, rather than being like... oh, what's that kitchen equipment called? Thing with holes in? BLongley 01:19, 21 January 2013 (UTC)
Never understood what "the exception that proves the rule" meant -- but yours is a good example. Made-up ads are plainly part of the "story" and should be included. (And the "thing with holes in" is a sieve -- or do you mean a colander? Or maybe a slotted spoon -- don't get me talking cooking, I could go on all night. ;) )
"Colander" is right. Although "slotted spoon" is just as good a simile. If you want to talk cooking though, try starting with Serve It Forth -- Cooking With Anne McCaffrey  ;-) BLongley 04:50, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

Donation?

My Lady and I are downsizing and I find myself in the unhappy situation of having to get rid of my collection. Of course, I can try to sell it on Craig’s List but would prefer to donate it to an institution (college library, etc.) that has an interest in the genre and where it would be maintained as a part of a collection. I live on the East Coast and its large enough that it would be improbable to ship, i.e. 1695 Science Fiction and Fantasy mass market books in 18 boxes. Since the ISFDB population has a definite interest in the genre, I thought someone might have some ideas. ~ Rhschu

There are a lot of SF Conventions on the East Coast, I would suggest setting up a dealer table at a local Con. Cost membership plus table charges. For example, the Windy City Pulp show in Chicago would be $35 membership, and $90 per table, but they're on the low side.--Rkihara 19:06, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
I'd love to take them off your hands, but I'm more Central than East coast - and in England rather than the US! :-) As it's obviously impractical for us to do a deal, as I'm downsizing as well (last place was a 3-bedroom house that I turned into a 1-bedroom, 2 libraries house, current place is a 2-bedroom that I'm using as a 1 bedroom, 1 storage room place). I'm also thinking of decimating my collection, and am currently thinking of taking a dealer's table at the British Eastercon: then donating what's left over to the Science Fiction Foundation. Which I believe is now based at Liverpool University. (You can probably check them out here, I think they've published many SFnal critiques, biographies and bibliographies.) As a non-US resident, the only place I can think of is TAMU, our former hosts. They had to abandon our hosting, but I think they still like SF books? It would be good to recompense them in a small way for all our good years there. BLongley 01:09, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Doc Savage double novel

I just came across mention of a Doc Savage double novel that isfdb does not have. It is mentioned in all 7 of the double novels that I have. It is "20 and 21 THE SECRET IN THE SKY and COLD DEATH" (as listed on the series listings page). I do not have this novel, but I have traced it to Alibris & Amazon.com. I'm reluctant to add it since I don't actually own a copy. Should I go ahead and add it just for the basic details? Or should I let the isfdb bot add it? Or somebody else?--Astromath 01:56, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

You can add it yourself. Give all the details you're able to, but you must give the secondary source for your data in the record's Note field (not Note to Moderator field). And take precaution: the two sources you cite aren't considered among the reliable sources for publication data of books published more than a dozen or so years ago. Try OCLC. Mhhutchins 02:20, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
We should probably update our help with some warnings about the reliability of some secondary sources. (There's good reasons we don't include Amazon as a verification source!) I'm no longer quite sure about OCLC - after all, they link back to Amazon. But in this case, it seems to actually be available to buy (always a good sign - though if there aren't many copies on sale it's probably worth checking with the dealer(s) to see if they REALLY have it. Don't actually buy it needlessly though.) I'd actually be more convinced by the 7 double novels you actually have that reference it - but you don't mention whether they're actually mentioning it as a past publication or a forthcoming one. So, at worst, it would be worth entering here as an 8888-00-00 ("unpublished") or an 0000-00-00 ("unknown date") publication. BLongley 02:54, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
It is listed as past publication. In fact, I have the last volume of that series and it lists it as a past publication.
I have a separate question: shouldn't the "/" be replaced with "and" in the titles? All 7 of my novels use the word "and" on the title page. Just asking.--Astromath 03:03, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
Always use the title page title if you're working from a primary source. If you're working from a secondary source, try to get more than one in order to get a consensus. According to the OCLC record, it's an "and". Mhhutchins 03:26, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
I might add: the publication record's title field doesn't necessarily have to be an exact match of the title record's title field. If you're adding a new publication (simultaneously creating both a new publication record and a new title record), they will match. Mhhutchins 03:28, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Time for even more mods?

I see the submission queue is getting rather long again. I think part of the problem is that we're now doing so much more non-English work, so a lot of our current mods are not actually qualified to deal with them. They may even be ignoring certain editors on the grounds of different languages - e.g. I just approved two Dirk P Broer submissions that were no-brainers, and I don't have any skills in his native language. Obviously we are going to have to be slightly more careful about choosing specialist mods - we don't want anyone to sneak up to mod-level then start using us as an Arabic porn-site for instance - but I think I see a backlog that can only be cured by new mods. Discuss! BLongley 10:31, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I do think it would be good to have new moderators, only there aren't that many I can think of. Dirk comes to my mind as possible candidate, he really did some more work than just updating authors in the last few months, and my impression is that maybe MLB is near the portal (but I can't decide if he's ante or post it). Maybe BarbaraBungalow isn't too far from it, also? Stonecreek 14:33, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
I agree Dirk is probably ready, do you want to start the process? First step is to make sure he WANTS to be a mod. I've known people turn down the opportunity before - maybe through a lack of confidence, or the thought that once you're a mod you'll be left on your own to deal with things: I hope nobody thinks that's true, we still support each other don't we? BLongley 16:17, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
At the moment the queue looks worse than it actually is since it contains a significant number of my pseudo-Fixer submissions. I will be working on them later today now that I have found the faulty cable and straightened out my internet connectivity.
In general, as the number of contributors grows, the average number of outstanding submissions in the queue is liable to grow as well, but I would only start worrying about it if there is a significant number of "stale" submissions older than 12-36 hours. Or if moderators report overload, of course. Ahasuerus 17:05, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
Do you think we need better guidelines on approving another mod's work? Since you took back Fixer to your own account I've stopped modding them, whereas there are times when I quite like to get my teeth stuck into some stuff I'd never have found by myself. BLongley 17:11, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
As of a few patches ago, it's no longer possible to approve other moderators' submission. However, Fixer's submissions will be making a triumphant return in the not too distant future (once I finish some software improvements.) Ahasuerus 17:17, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
You'd better check the logic - the two submissions I'd left in the queue for me to follow up on have both been approved by another Mod. Fortunately, I can recall what titles were involved as I also left the physical copies on top of my scanner. BLongley 08:28, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
Yes, the list of Recent Integrations shows that Michael approved "Fantasy Newsletter, No. 28" and "Fantasy Newsletter, No. 29" yesterday night. I will ask him how he did it -- it's possible to get to another mod's submission by manipulating URLs. Ahasuerus 17:57, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
I must have missed that patch (maybe it was while I was in hospital?) and am not sure I approve of it. (No pun intended.) What happens when a mod goes inactive on the rest of us? E.g. Pips55 has some of the stalest submissions around, and frankly that's a cause for concern. BLongley 17:32, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
This sounds a little disturbing. Not actually being a moderator, I cannot say I am up on all the latest moderation policies but frankly if I were a moderator I would rather have another moderator look at my submissions. Methinks we could all do with another set of eyes and thoughts. I am not saying that is necessarily appropriate for everything submitted but I find it odd to require moderators to moderate themselves in every situation. Perhaps I should make another account if I was ever nominated for modertatorship and make submissions from there if I want someone else to look at them (I have considered such for a bot anyway). Uzume 13:17, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
I'd quite like to encourage Mods to help other Mods, but it might be best to have two types of submission - normal, that any mod can approve, or 'reserved' where the submitter intends to follow up. For instance, the two outstanding changes I've got in the queue look like simple Cover uploads, but I intend to check why those two issues seem so much shorter on the number of reviews. BLongley 14:29, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
Perhaps a good method would be to have two methods for moderators. First the original returns where a moderator can make submissions that can be moderated by any other moderator. Next a new method to make a submission and automatically place it on your own hold list so that in this case your submissions are automatically held by you so other moderators would not try stepping on you when doing some project or similar. Uzume 15:34, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
In the past, we had problems with moderators accidentally approving other moderators' submissions and also creating messes when trying to 'help' other mods. For these reasons the ability to approve other mods' submissions won't be making a return unless there is a groundswell of support for the feature AND we implement some kind of "opt in" flag similar to the one described above. Ahasuerus 22:14, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
We could probably use a lot of existing functionality here. Just allow Mods to choose 'Submit' or 'Submit and Hold' options. The former are fair game for any other Mod, the latter is automatically restricted to the Mod submitting it. BLongley 23:59, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
As a work around, moderator's submissions could be made to always be submitted on hold to themselves then they would be visible to all moderators and a moderator could remove the hold if they wanted supervision on some submissions. Uzume 19:08, 17 February 2013 (UTC)
I think that is less optimal than my solution. With mine, there's no need for a second step to release the hold. Mods can choose one button or the other, and even the most unpredictable of mods shouldn't get it wrong very often. BLongley 21:15, 17 February 2013 (UTC)
That is why I called it a work-around. What I described might be easier to with the current code but it not really an optimal solution (which is more along the lines of what you describe). My point was to attempt a quicker reversion to previous usage without moderators stepping on one another (which was the impetus for the change to begin with). Uzume 04:25, 19 February 2013 (UTC)
That said, it would be fairly easy to make other mods' submissions visible (but not approvable) by all moderators. Ahasuerus 22:14, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
Count me in as a supporter for that. BLongley 23:59, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
Meanwhile, while I think of it before I go for something to eat, can I point out that SFJuggler is coming on nicely, and Paul-Heinz Linckens looks VERY promising to me. BLongley 17:36, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
If a moderator becomes inactive, his submissions can be accessed by other moderators by manipulating URLs. The primary intent of the change was to prevent accidental approval of other mods' submissions, which has caused problems in the past. Ahasuerus 17:41, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
To answer the original question: no. There are currently only 10 submissions in the queue by non-mod editors. There have been times in the past couple of months when there were upwards of 200 submissions, when I was the only moderator working on them while other moderators worked on personal projects. (Adding to the length of the queue is my refusal to work on one particular editor's submissions. Thanks for handling those, Marty. There's another one whom I'm becoming increasingly frustrated with, but at least that one eventually gets the point.)
I've not moderated anything but my own submissions in the past few days because of a personal project, which usually results in the queue building up. As for the list of possible moderator candidates presented here, there's only one who might be close to eligibility, but someone would have to present a strong case even for that one. Mhhutchins 18:18, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Marion Zimmer Bradley question

In the middle of a bibliographic project and using the ISFDB as a resource, I noticed that "Ancestors of Avalon", by Bradley and Paxon, appears on Paxon's page but not on Bradley's. Shouldn't it be on both? Mike Christie (talk) 01:47, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

It was written solely by Paxson and credited to both only in the UK editions (for obvious commercial reasons), so a variant was created for the UK title record. The software displays all variants on the page of the parent record, which is credited only to Paxson. So the title wouldn't appear on Bradley's page, because she didn't write it, regardless of the publication credit given in the UK. Mhhutchins 20:35, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
Got it. Thanks for the explanation. Mike Christie (talk) 01:48, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

Remaining space on the ISFDB server

I'd read something recently on one of the talk pages (heaven knows I can't find it now) about how we're fast approaching the limits to the available space for our website. Did I misunderstand, or is this true? Mhhutchins 20:31, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

We are currently using 20 GB out of the 40GB that we have. At the rate we are adding cover scans, we may need to get additional space in another year or three, but it's not a concern at the moment. However, it means that we shouldn't be uploading large (multi-MB) files to the server since they can add up quickly. Ahasuerus 20:37, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
I've been keeping an eye on the image files and with few exceptions they've been kept under 150kb. Should we consider lowering this? A bigger problem seems to be that when a file is replaced, the previous file remains on the server and has to be deleted manually. This is fine for those moderators who upload replacements and are aware of the situation and remembers to delete the old file (at the moment I know that Bluesman and I are the mods who are doing this). But when a non-moderating editor replaces an image, they may be aware that there's a preexisting one but are not in a position to delete the old one. Is there a way to flag such files so that a moderator can go back and delete the old one? I wouldn't want this deletion to happen automatically, because occasionally an editor replaces the wrong file. But I would like to be able, during quiet times, to go through these replaced images and either revert the change or delete them. This should free up a substantial amount of space. Mhhutchins 20:47, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
I think 150Kb is fine for now. I can relatively easily identify all files that exceed this (or any other) limit and we can shrink them if needed. For example, www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/f/f8/SBLJRRBNWX1978.jpg is 1.3MB in size, a prime candidate. Ahasuerus 21:23, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
Damn! How did something that big even get on the server??? Talk about disregarding warnings! Mhhutchins 21:28, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
I suppose uploading can get repetitive and tiresome and when people are tired, they make mistakes... Ahasuerus 02:31, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
If you can make a list of these files (say, over 250kb), I can take a look at them, and shrink them if necessary.
Yes, it's doable. Here is a quick list of the worst offenders, i.e. 1MB+ files:
  • 1.4M MNDFLGHTQB2009.jpg
  • 1.2M PIDFPBEJDR9609a.png
  • 1.6M Oscar.jpg
  • 1.3M SBLJRRBNWX1978.jpg
Ahasuerus 02:31, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
Is it possible to get a list of replaced files as well? Thanks. Mhhutchins 21:28, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
I believe so, but I'll have to look into the way the software stores replaced files. In general, the MediaWiki application doesn't delete anything, it just moves files to special ("deleted" and "archive") directory trees which are normally invisible to users. If we start running really low on space, I can zip them up, download the resulting archive and burn it on a CD/DVD, but we are OK for now. Ahasuerus 02:31, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

Another question about "exact matches"

Re: Doctor Who Target Novelizations Shouldn't this series be renamed to "Doctor Who Library"? All of the novels I own have the following on the title page: "Number x in the Doctor Who Library"; where "x" is the series number.--Astromath 01:12, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

I don't recall it being in the first editions of earlier titles, but I couldn't tell you offhand when it changed. And the Target versions should probably be a publication series, even though we have 6 different versions of the Target publisher name. BLongley 01:36, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
Too bad there isn't a way to add notes to a series record for this kind of stuff.--Astromath 01:44, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
There is a FR to add a Notes field to Series records. Probably another couple of months out, though. Ahasuerus 02:15, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Laumer/Knight of Delusions

I was about to submit a change for this title to "Knight of Delusions (novel)", with this justification: "The history is complicated: Night of Delusions is the first version of this novel, and it was retitled "Knight of Delusions" for 1982 publication, which was in a collection titled "Knight of Delusions". The collection and the novel need to be distinguished, but "rev 1982" is not a good way to do it because there is no other version of the novel with that title."

However, I'm wondering if there's any disambiguation needed in the title at all, since they're of different types. Can't they both just be "Knight of Delusions"? Mike Christie (talk) 17:06, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

There shouldn't be any disambiguation at all according to the ISFDB standards. When a work is revised, but keeps the same title and author credit, it's not supposed to be varianted, only noted in the title record's Note field. But in this case, the titles are different, so a variant has been made, which means that it's unnecessary for the "rev 1982" disambiguation. I'll remove it and record that it's revised in the Note field.
And if a collection and a novel have the same name, just the type itself should be sufficient to keep them separate, with perhaps a note of warning for editors not to mistakenly merge the two records (although I believe the logic has been fixed so that there's no "auto" matching of these title records when the "Check for Duplicate Titles" function is used.) Mhhutchins 17:55, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for the explanation; if I see another like this I'll know what to do with it. Mike Christie (talk) 18:06, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Duplicate Finder logic refinements

The Duplicate Finder logic has been enhanced not to report VTs as potential duplicates of their parents. In addition, a new column, Storylen, has been added to the page in order to help with disambiguation. Ahasuerus 04:38, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

Tag search enhancements

The Tag Search logic has been tweaked. Tags are now displayed alphabetically and the internal tag number is no longer displayed. Each tag is hyper-linked to go directly to the individual tag page. In addition, the Publication Month search page (as well as the Forthcoming Books page, which uses the same format) has been changed to display magazine tags, which were previously ignored. Ahasuerus 04:53, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

User pic

FR 3601975 reads "User pics? Like author pictures, only for Editors rather than authors?". Unfortunately, the user who created the FR hadn't logged in, so s/he won't be getting an e-mail notification when I respond on SourceForge. Since the question may be of interest to other editors as well, I will post my answer here:

"There is no need to modify the ISFDB software to support this functionality: User pics can be hosted on a third party server and then linked from the User page."

Ahasuerus 05:03, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

It is even easier to just upload them to the wiki since the wiki has that functionality built in. If that's something we don't wish to use wiki resources on, then probably should have that discussion as I've already seen an editor page that has done that. -- JLaTondre (talk) 12:00, 5 February 2013 (UTC)
Since our disk space is limited, I'd rather not encourage users to upload personal images to the Wiki. A few dozen images won't make a difference, but if even a few people start using the Wiki as a general purpose image repository, we can quickly run out. Ahasuerus 20:18, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

Possible brief service interruption

A new patch is about to be installed and it may result in strange display errors for the next few minutes. I will disable editing until the patch has run its course. I will post again when we are back to normal. Ahasuerus 04:32, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

The patch has been installed and we are back to normal. I will be posting the patch notes shortly. Ahasuerus 04:35, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

Award and biblio warnings changes (patch r2013-29)

Patch r2013-29 has made the following changes to the software:

  • The Award Bibliography page has been cleaned up to display the year and the name of the award more consistently and cleanly, e.g. here is what Heinlein's award page looks like now.
  • The "Awards" section of the Title page has been cleaned up as well -- see Stranger in a Strange Land for an example.
  • Bibliographic warnings are no longer displayed for ebooks missing ISBNs and/or page counts.

As is often the case, the changes were more wide-ranging than they may appear, so if you see any odd behavior, please report it here. Ahasuerus 04:58, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

It turns out that the patch introduced a bug in the process of moderator approval of Award Edit and Award Delete submissions. The bug has been fixed. Ahasuerus 23:59, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

Publication Listing changes (patch r2013-30)

As per FR 2909643, INTERIORART and letters are now indented on the Publication Listing page, e.g. see Startling Stories, March 1948.

However, now that I am looking at the results, I don't like the fact that individual titles are staggered because page numbers can be anywhere between 1 and 3 characters in length. I'll try to get them to line up properly tomorrow. Ahasuerus 07:22, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

Still looks good, but I can see where the transition from 1 to 2 digit numbered pages, and from 2 to 3 digits can cause some display problems. Mhhutchins 07:51, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
I like it now and will like it even better, when the fix is installed! Thanks, Ahasuerus. Stonecreek 08:59, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
It turns out that it's not quite as simple as I hoped it would be. I had to convert the Contents section to a border-less table and then tweak it to look like a list, but it caused some other problems. I'll put it on the back burner for now. Ahasuerus 23:29, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

Self-referential series no longer allowed (patch r2013-33)

As per Bug 3598815, Series Editor no longer lets you enter the name of the current series as its own parent, which was known to cause an infinite loop. Ahasuerus 06:26, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

This should probably go one step further and totally disallow such loops by walking up the series specified to check if the current series is the same as or the parent of any series specified as a parent. Uzume 12:53, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Award navigation enhancements (patch r2013-34)

The Award Bibliography page has been enhanced to display a matrix of all years when the currently displayed award was given. See this page for an example. Ahasuerus 20:53, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

Nominating Dwarzel (Desmond Warzel) for moderatorship

Nomination Statement

I nominate Desmond Warzel (Dwarzel) for moderatorship, and he has accepted the nomination. In more than four years as an editor, he has made over 4000 contributions, and honestly, at this point accepting his submissions has become ridiculously easy. Moreover, he has excellent communication skills, responding fast to every message on his talk page (it's amazing how few messages were necessary for that number of years and submissions), and agreeably putting up with all of the nonsense I've thrown at him. (Give him a medal!) Desmond specializes in small press publications and podcasts, but in that area, he's learned all the skills necessary to become a moderator: merging and varianting title records, adding and updating pub records, working with series, and pretty much anything that can be tossed in his direction. Hopefully with this position, he'll be a more active participant in policy and rules discussions, but that's never disqualified many current moderators. (That's a joke in case anyone can't detect the tone in my words.) I think Desmond will make an excellent addition to the moderating team.

Support

  • Support, as nominator. Mhhutchins 22:53, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Support. Ahasuerus 23:01, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Support. MartyD 00:47, 9 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Support. Rudam 09:36, 9 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Support. --Willem H. 09:46, 9 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Support. Hauck 11:30, 9 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Support. -- JLaTondre (talk) 12:11, 9 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Support --~ Bill, Bluesman 17:19, 9 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Support. PeteYoung 04:25, 10 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Support. BLongley 21:21, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Support. Stonecreek 09:38, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Oppose

Comments/Neutral

Outcome The nomination was successful (closing it a few hours early since I may be gone for a day or two.) Congratulations, Desmond! Ahasuerus 15:39, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Further award tweaking (patch r2013-36)

The annual Award page has been changed to display authors for title-based awards based on the title's current authors rather than on the authors as of the time when the award was entered. The page should also load slightly faster, although the difference won't be noticeable until we have a lot more awards (we have 32,794 award records at the moment.) Ahasuerus 05:14, 9 February 2013 (UTC)

New publisher fields?

A few months ago Darrah created FR 3523186, which reads:

  • As we get into more international publishers, it would be helpful to have regularized information about where a publisher is located. I request that we add a "Headquarters in" field to the Publisher record, as displayed in (for example) Companhia das Letras. While adding this field, I suggest also adding a "Founded in" field, or "Years of publications" fields, which are generally useful information, e.g. when a book is submitted with a year outside the expected range.

I have been thinking about this and I don't think a separate Headquarters field would be feasible. Small presses move all the time (as their owners move from place to place) and even larger companies have been known to move more than once during their lifetimes. Besides, larger companies can have more than one HQs. The current practice is to state (in Notes) where the publisher was based as of a certain date and it seems like the best we can realistically do. "Founded in" may be more feasible, but I am not sure how useful it would be.

As far as "Years of Publication" goes, I can see how a field like that could be used to check new pubs to determine if the submitted year falls outside of the previously established range. We'd probably implement it as two separate fields, but we can figure out the details later.

Thoughts? Ahasuerus 01:16, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

I agree that adding a place of publication is not feasible. And I can't think of any other reason for the "Years of Publication" feature other than as a warning for moderators (like the "Unknown Publisher" warning now). Figuring out that range should be fairly easy for the major publishers, but I can't see how it could be done (or why it needs to be done) for publishers with less than a hundred records in the database. The bigger question though is why should it be a field? Couldn't that be done by the system rather than having any editor input? It would just be a matter of the system checking the publisher's records and a simple warning popping up saying "Date before (or after) the publisher's first (or last) known publication" or something like that. Mhhutchins 02:41, 10 February 2013 (UTC)
I think there's value in recording the official publication date range on the publisher, to pick up existing problems. I wouldn't want us to have to rely on derived-from-Amazon-data dates. BLongley 21:19, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
And now that I think about it more, I really don't see much value returned for the effort involved in determining the "Years of Publication". The feature request doesn't offer a strong case for it. Mhhutchins 02:43, 10 February 2013 (UTC)
Thanks, folks, I will record the feedback in the FR and lower its priority. Ahasuerus 00:10, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Image file limitations again

I'm not sure if it's a recent phenomenon, or just that I've been paying more attention to the uploaded file list (some newer editors are having unexpected difficulties with file uploads), but I've noticed a significant number of files being uploaded which exceed the stated standards of 600 pixels on the longest side. Most of these are being uploaded by veteran editors and moderators. I believe the original reason for limiting the size of the image was to bolster our claim of "Fair Use". I brought this up for discussion back in October, but nothing definitive was settled. At that time, all I wanted was for the warnings to at least match the stated standards. Only a few editors made a practice of exceeding the limits then, but I've seen others joining in. I think what may have caused this is the ability for some image software to produce larger images dimension-wise while keeping the size of the file relatively smaller (under the 150k limit) than they had to be in the past. If we can't police ourselves, perhaps it's time that the system be programmed, if possible, so that the standards are set and no file which exceeds those standards can be uploaded to the server. In the past we allowed exceptions for wraparound dustjackets, but I think many editors have used this exception for getting around the standards. I see no need whatsoever for the ISFDB to host cover images that are more than 600 pixels tall. If anyone can argue otherwise, I would like to hear it. Mhhutchins 03:19, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

No argument here, just a technical comment. The MediaWiki software (used for the Wiki and for the file uploads) only has built-in capability to warn about, and limit, uploaded file size. It does not have a capability to warn about image dimensions that I'm aware of. All of its dimension-related functionality pertains to how the image is rendered in the Wiki. --MartyD 11:45, 10 February 2013 (UTC)
Argument - I believe that the internet has 'matured' as a medium over the last decade and particularly over the last many years (6?, 7?) since the ability to upload an image has been available. Simply put..... Absolutely everyone (Blogs, websites, fan sites, news articles, reviews, affiliate links, etc) uploads and hosts cover artwork these days. Any publisher stupid enough to complain about linked and titled cover artwork in the far (internet) past has been well educated as to the positive power of free publicity, regardless of the size or quality of the linked book image. I am aware of exactly 'zero' artists who are bothered or concerned by the proliferation of uploaded copies of complete cover art images of works that have been previously sold. Many I believe are ecstatic when they are properly attributed as the artist in reference, instead of merely noting the author or publisher). (I am not aware of anyone in particular but believe there are artists that have (and should) object to print ready, artwork files, without the Book cover text, title, blurb, logo overlay being applied - but plain artwork is not the question.) 'Cover Art' is the amalgamation of the artists underlying image or picture, and the publishers title layout. The question of 'Fair Use' of 'Cover Art' when referencing a published work has been asked and answered. The answer is 'yes'. Kevin 18:34, 10 February 2013 (UTC)
I believe that we should drop all consideration of 'fair use' being the limiting factor in allowing upload (and storage and serving) of cover art images. The discussion/limitation should center on the requirements of storing and serving the files. Kevin 18:34, 10 February 2013 (UTC)
This post wasn't meant to turn into a Rules & Standards discussion. I wanted to know if there is a way that the wiki can limit uploads to the documented standards, whatever they are. (Marty, thank you.) If anyone believes we should change those standards, feel free to start such a topic on the appropriate page. Mhhutchins 20:57, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Search anomaly

Why do only Italian serials come up when I do a title search for "complete novel"? Mhhutchins 04:35, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

You are running into the 300 hit limit of the regular search. If you use Advanced Search and click Next Page a few times, you will see the rest of the matching titles around page 5+. The problem is that many Italian serials appear first when the software sorts by title, which, in turn, is caused by the fact that they contain a space as the title's first character. A data entry problem, I assume? Ahasuerus 05:30, 10 February 2013 (UTC)
I did use the Advanced Search, but after the first 4 or 5 pages, I stopped looking. Looks like these records were all created by Bill Longley's Data Thief and he, or anyone else, noticed the leading space. Hope they can be fixed without updating each title record. Mhhutchins 05:37, 10 February 2013 (UTC)
Unfortunately, browsers do a darn good job of hiding white space from users :-( And yes, it's possible to remove the leading spaces automatically -- let's see what Bill says. Ahasuerus 06:35, 10 February 2013 (UTC)
I can't see any reason to keep a leading space in a title. And I think that if these had been entered via the manual user interface, leading and trailing spaces would have been silently trimmed away. We could probably do with adding that to the web API - but there's many things we need to do with that (eventually). I haven't yet managed to get a local implementation of the system to accept API submissions, has anyone else? BLongley 21:14, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
Yes, leading and trailing spaces are automatically removed when processing regular submissions. Unfortunately, most of our validation/cleanup occurs when submissions are built via the user-accessible front end, so robotic submissions do not go through the same process. It's on the list of things that we need to improve. Ahasuerus 00:30, 13 February 2013 (UTC)
I believe the code current zaps spaces in the web editor before the submission is actually made and there are minimal checks on submissions actually made after that (via the API or otherwise). Since this is a purely mechanical thing, we might go so far as to bandage this going forward at moderation time when the submissions are applied and records are updated. Ideally such submissions should be rejected up front however. Uzume 12:45, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
I don't think leading white space is worth a rejection - new editors get disheartened pretty easily anyway, the more we can do to help the better. I've seen double spaces creep in, and those could be fixed silently. Now that we've standardised our ellipses, those could be auto-corrected too. I'd favour auto-correction with a notification to the user as to where they went wrong. BLongley 14:14, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
I was thinking more auto-fixing at the editor level and rejecting at the actual submission level (where API submissions also exist). This keeps the submissions clean (and thereby easier for moderators) while still making the hurdles for editing easier. I called it a bandage to auto fix it at moderation because that might be easier for now versus fixing it in the editor. Uzume 15:38, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
Just to clarify what I said above: all regular submissions already have leading and trailing spaces removed automatically (what Uzume called "auto-fixing") at the time the submission is created. It is a part of the standard validation/auto-correction process that handles all human-initiated submissions. Unfortunately, robotic submissions do not go through the same process at this time. What we need to do is to add the validation/auto-correction logic which is currently used to handle human-initiated submissions to the logic used to handle robotic submissions. How exactly we do it is a technical question and probably not something that we need to go into on the Community Portal. Ahasuerus 22:27, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
In the meantime, feel free to zap those spaces. BLongley 21:14, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

Series for artwork?

Hello, I wonder if it's possible to create "series" for artwork. I have in mind Hunter's robot, for example, 61256 61127, etc. Thank you. ForJohnScalzi 01:00, 14 February 2013 (UTC).

My testing has shown that coverart records won't display the series on the artist's summary page. The software developers would have to make some underlying changes for it to be displayed. Mhhutchins 01:06, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
Yes, the software has no concept of art series. There's no reason I'm aware of that would prevent us from making it display such things, if we thought it would be useful. We'd have to decide whether it's better to have one "Artwork Series" section or separate "Coverart Series" and "Interiorart Series" sections and, in the latter case, then what to do with a series having mixed types. I can experiment a little just to make sure it would work, but those records are titles just like everything else, so I'm pretty confident it would be fine. --MartyD 02:07, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
I'm not sure about general usefulness of such thing as art series:) If the defining characteristic of series is the subject matter then probably there will not be many. But those robot things by Hunter as so good - it's worth having art series just for them! ForJohnScalzi 02:15, 14 February 2013 (UTC).
I take back "not many". There would be things like Gaughan covers for Lensman, or D'Achille dragons of Pern. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by ForJohnScalzi (talk • contribs) .

Brief ISFDB downtime

I will be installing a fairly big patch later today and I will need to take the site down for about 5 minutes, so don't panic if you see an "ISFDB is unavailable" message :) Ahasuerus 17:08, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

The patch has been installed. I will be posting the patch notes shortly. Ahasuerus 01:22, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

What do you expect from Primary Verifications?

I've been reducing my collection a bit and so have been moving my Primary verifications to Primary (Transient). When this means that the FIRST Primary verification is gone, the pub no longer shows as [VERIFIED]. I think this is a fault, but want other peoples input before creating a Bug or Feature Request. There's actually a few questions here:

  1. Should a publication be shown as [VERIFIED] when there's only a Primary (Transient) Verification?
  2. Should a publication be shown as [VERIFIED] when a Primary 2, 3, 4 or 5 is present but no Primary 1?
  3. When removing a Primary Verification, should all the lower Primaries be moved up one position?
  4. Should the Verifier Name be shown on the Verification screen? I've had to go back and check which Primary I'd actually taken, I couldn't tell from the Verification screen alone. In the end I left a gap at Primary 3.

Answers to any or all the above would be appreciated. BLongley 22:25, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

I would answer "Yes" to all four questions. Mhhutchins 23:16, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
Me too. We really need to redo verifications to be more in line with the rest of the software, though, and eliminate the limit on the number of primary verifiers. Ahasuerus 01:24, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
Agreed - verifications are a coding mess at present and need a lot of fixing in the long term. The above 4 suggestions could be added in a day though, plus testing time. I think they would be worthwhile as a short-term stopgap, but if you're not keen then I'll just plough on moving my verifications despite the misleading messages. I think I've probably got about a thousand verification changes to make though, which could disrupt displays quite nastily in the meantime. BLongley 02:38, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
Well, if the changes turn out to be reasonably self-contained and do not take a great deal of time to test, I am sure I can squeeze them into my testing schedule. Ahasuerus 05:52, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
Methinks the best solution would be to make a more generalized primary verification system that allows arbitrary number of primary verifications (instead of just 5; I know it would be nice to have my entire library verified but there are pubs that already have five so I cannot add such). And further with such a system have a means of setting whether one wants to "own" and be notified of changes to the record. If not this would be like our current "transient" primary. If one does want to "own" a record then this could be handled like current normal primaries are now. Uzume 12:36, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
Agreed, in the long term we will want unlimited primary and transient verifications. But then we have to consider suppressing the full list of verifiers to keep pages manageable. We should probably separate Secondary sources from Primary sources - at present any mod can add a few more primary slots but the "[VERIFIED]" code won't be able to detect them. The whole system is broken as we don't use the Primary Key for a source, we use the position in the list of all sources - a big Relational No-No. We should be able to automate "N/A" entries by date of publication compared with the known date-span of Secondary Sources. I added "My Verifications" so that people could generate a list of most of their collection, but as you point out, 5 isn't enough. There's a lot to do, and it doesn't seem high priority, which is why I'm suggesting some small quick fixes in the meantime. BLongley 14:05, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
BTW, we already have FR 3312724, which reads "It would be useful to at least display some skeletal information about the pub on this [Verify Publication] page". Ahasuerus 02:16, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
Easily doable, if the requirements are made a little clearer. I'm not sure of the connection between osteopathy and bibliography though. Is this a Spine question? As most Books have them and most Magazines don't. Do we need to add a "vertebrate" flag? ;-) BLongley 06:18, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
You can be very funny, Bill. Uzume 19:12, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

(Unindent) I've submitted changes for 1, 2 and 4. I looked at 3 but a) it wasn't as easy as I expected and b) it doesn't seem really necessary after 1 and 2. So if somebody prefers to take the Primary 5 slot each time even if earlier primaries are blank, they can continue to do so. The long term solution will probably remove fixed numbers anyway. BLongley 20:53, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

Thanks--that will go a long ways until the proper fix can be made. Uzume 02:54, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

Award enhancements (patch 2013-42)

Additional award enhancements have been implemented. There is a new "Award Overview" page which is meant to display award-specific information which was previously only available in the Wiki. The new fields displayed on this page are: Webpage(s), Wikipedia Entry and Notes. The page also lists all years when the award was given (hyper-linked) and all categories that have ever been used by the current award (not hyper-linked yet). Overview pages can be accessed from annual award pages and I plan to link them from author-specific award pages in the next patch. Moderators can edit this information via the "Edit This Award Type" option in the navigation bar on the left.

The next step is to move the data that we have on the Wiki Awards page to individual overview pages. I have done the first two (Analog and Prix Apollo) -- calling for volunteers to do the remaining 50ish awards. I would estimate that it takes no more than 5 minutes to move the data for one award. I am thinking that we may want to leave the "Status" information on the Wiki page, but that's debatable.Ahasuerus 01:48, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

I've copied all the Wikipedia and web pages over, although there'll be at least four more to do when we separate the Heinlein/Bradbury/Norton/Atheling awards. Notes not done yet, as some of them will need rewriting after the separations. BLongley 20:37, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
Thanks, Bill, appreciate the effort! I will be adding a new field, "Description", to the Award Types table shortly. Well, shortly after I finish sorting out the changes that you have committed over the last couple of days :) Ahasuerus 23:16, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

Once all data has been migrated, I will change the "Awards" link in the navigation bar to point to a new "award directory" page. It will be similar to our author directory page except that it will consist of just one page since we don't have that many awards.

As is always the case with big patches, new bugs are fairly likely. Please report any irregular behavior here. TIA! Ahasuerus 01:48, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Patch r2013-43 has been installed. The award list on the Award Biblio page has been converted to a table -- see Ellison's, Simak's and Heinlein's pages for examples of what the new layout looks like. As mentioned earlier, the links in the "Year" column take you to individual award years and the links in the "Award" column take you to their respective Overview pages. Ahasuerus 05:51, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
I have seen you doing some significant work on award code lately. I find that interesting since awards were sort of originally Al's thing and how ISFDB got started. Uzume 12:38, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
When we started working on ISFDB back in 1995, it wasn't clear that we would be able to cover all SF-flavored pubs. Award-winning titles seemed like a good starting point since their inclusion guaranteed that we would at least cover the core works. Of course, we ended up cataloging a lot more than that.
When the conversion from ISFDB 1.0 to ISFDB 2.0 occurred in 2005-2006, awards were the last thing to get converted. Unfortunately, Al never had enough time to finalize the awards-related code, so it remains the least polished part of the software. Bill started working on awards in mid-2010 and I finally got to test/implement his changes in late 2012, which led to more enhancements coded and deployed in January/February 2013. There is still a fair amount of work that needs to be done in this area (award levels are a mess and award categories need to be changed), but we are getting there. Ahasuerus 20:54, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
Methinks I asked this before but evidently I did not fully grasp it. So we moved from ISFDB 1.0 (I believe a C/C++ type of implementation as memory serves) to 2.0 (something akin to and the base of the current Python). So tell me again what does "ISFDB Engine - Version 4.00 (04/24/06)" mean? It says "06" so still 2006 time frame to I assume this is still some version of 2 but perhaps this could be interpreted as some sort of 2.4.0 perhaps? It may also be some sort of reference to some other version like DB version (which from the same isfdb.py says 'SCHEMA_VER = "0.02"'). And of course we have gone beyond that with a joint SF CVS repository and continuous (albeit perhaps some what slow) development over the years. I am just trying to figure out that the "four" in the engine means/meant with respect to the current "two" code base. Uzume 21:04, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
No idea, I am afraid. Perhaps Al still remembers the gory details. Ahasuerus 23:52, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
I started to work on Awards after Darrah expressed interest in adding some new awards. Ahasuerus seems to have taken it even further, and I must check it out to see if any of my fixes are actually in there! BLongley 14:09, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
All but one of your changes, Bill, have been implemented, although they had to be adjusted to work with the rest of the changes. The one change that was not implemented had to do with adding Award Types -- the approach that I ended up taking was completely different, so your code couldn't be reconciled with it. Still, about 85% of your changes went in after massaging/rewriting, not a bad batting average. Ahasuerus 20:47, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
Not bad at all, considering the vague or non-existent design specifications! I expected far lower, considering I'm now working for another developer/designer rather than being the lead developer/designer/despot as I had been for the last decade of my paid career. I've just submitted a small change to see if I can remember the processes - I spent longer on documentation than on the fix itself, which probably indicates we have some robust checks in place. BLongley 23:52, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Exotic Gothic 4

I have a problem like #Books belonging to more than one series. where I want to add "Exotic Gothic 4" to the Exotic Gothic title/work series but that breaks the Postscripts series as "Exotic Gothic 4" cannot be in more than one series. Now it is true that the Postscripts series is really a pub series and not a title/work series, however, this is further complicated by the fact that Postscripts was a magazine now turned anthology pub series. This furthers my assertion that magazines/fanzines should be pub series and not title/work series (we could still have editorial title/work series but they would not have to cover the entire magazine necessarily; multiple pub series could handle reissue/reprints). Currently the magazine issue grids are sort of hackishly implemented to find the pubs within a title/work series. A similar pub series issue grid would be simpler and much more useful. Anyway, short of software and policy changes, any ideas on how to handle this? Thanks. Uzume 13:35, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

I would argue with the statement "that the Postscripts series is really a pub series and not a title/work series". If that were true then no anthology series could be considered a title series. And since publication series can't be displayed on an author's summary page (only titles [works] are displayed, not publications), then, for example, all of the fifty + anthologies currently displayed on Terry Carr's summary page in series would be distributed chronologically among other nonseries anthologies which he edited. This would be far less useful than having them displayed as title series. There are more or less extreme cases than Carr's, but this is a good reason to keep anthologies in title series.
Also, it's not true that "the magazine issue grids are sort of hackishly implemented to find the pubs within a title/work series". They work only by placing editor records into an editor series and have nothing to do with title series. If an editor record is not placed into an editor series, it will not appear on the magazine grid. (These editor series are displayed on the editor's summary pages as "Magazine Editor Series".) Mhhutchins 15:57, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
I agree with Michael with one caveat: when a series contains both EDITOR and ANTHOLOGY records, the grid logic will display all pubs associated with both types of records, which is what is happening in this case. If the result doesn't look right, you can always create two separate series, one for the magazine version and another for the anthology version and then put them in a super-series. Or we could easily change the grid logic to ignore all non-EDITOR titles in the series. Ahasuerus 22:45, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
I am aware of how the issue grid logic works and that is why I said it was sort of hackishly implemented to link to pubs that have title records (albeit usually editor title records) within the same title/works series. As far as I know there is no restriction on title type or pub type shown within an issue grid (though I would have to check the code again to be sure). I believe the link to the issue grid is only shown/listed when on a title/works series that contains editor title records (though it is not hard to construct the URL for an issue grid on any title/works series--even ones that contain no editor title records) and on pub records magazine pub records that have editor titles in a series. This is as opposed to pub series which are linked on the publisher, individual pub records and title records listed pubs within such a series. In a similar vein title/works series links are present on author/editor records and individual title records. Uzume 19:54, 17 February 2013 (UTC)
I beg to differ. My point was not that all anthologies should be pub series but that Postscripts should be. Mike, what makes you believe my assertion that Postscripts should be a pub series implies all anthology series should be? That seems a rather large leap as I see it. Uzume 19:34, 17 February 2013 (UTC)
You're correct. It was not a clearly logical leap. But the matter-of-fact delivery of the statement that Postscripts is "really a pub series and not a title/work series" led me to make that leap. I will reassert my belief that Postscripts is not a publication series. If one were to believe that then the next logical step is to believe that all similar anthology series would be publication series. What makes this series any different than Universe, New Dimensions, Orbit, or hundreds of other anthology series? None of the volumes in these series have any connection other than the editor and the series name. If Postscripts were a publication series, what would keep another editor from making the logical decision, based on the precedent, to change other anthology series into publication series? Why wouldn't Exotic Gothic also be considered a publication series by this same logic? What would each volume in this series have in common other than their "exotic gothic-ness"? BTW, having the same publisher doesn't make a series into a publication series. There are many publication series which have jumped publisher. When this type of series was created we chose not to use the term "publisher series" for that very reason. Mhhutchins 21:53, 17 February 2013 (UTC)
You make a valid point that pub series can and do jump publishers (usually following an editor and/or change of the hands of an imprint). I suppose it is sometimes a fine line as to what makes a series a pub series vs. an editorial series (be it magazine, anthology, or other editorial work). Uzume 02:50, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
I am not sure why whenever I suggest something be a pub series I get such a major push back and words like "convert" appear. I was never suggesting editorial records (and series) should go away (in fact they should stay) but rather that a series of pubs should be handled as a pub series--why does that have to be so complicated? I would like to see the issue grids converted to use pub series. I really do not understand why that appears to imply that any (editorial) title/works series would go away. I would in fact advocate that several of the existing pub series probably need more in the way of editorial records (someone had to put the pub series together--they should get their credit and blame). Uzume 14:37, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
A "major push back"? It's just one editor speaking to another. Unless you're conferring more power on me than I have, I wouldn't consider this conversation "major" at all. And no one has gotten close to saying that you were "suggesting editorial records (and series) should go away". I've looked back over what I said and there's no such accusation (and I never used the word "convert".) Perhaps we're both guilty of misinterpreting the other's words. I'm prepared to end the discussion as it seems now we're just going in circles. Mhhutchins 18:07, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
Well I did not mean just this incident but I shall grant you we have probably misread one another several times in the past. Uzume 20:17, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
In fact the point that I wanted to put this anthology into the Exotic Gothic title/works series goes exactly against that "leap" so that was definitely not my case. My argument that Postscripts should be a pub series stems from the point it has several editors and the series is really only bound together by the publisher PS Publishing. Exotic Gothic on the other hand is an anthology series bound by a single editor Danel Olson across publishers. It is true a pub series does not show up as a series on author/editor pages but the same case could be made for title/works series not showing up on publisher pages. I believe Postscripts would be better off being a series on PS Publishing, than on editors: Peter Crowther, Nick Gevers, and Danel Olson. I can see how that could be argued against but that was my initial assertion not that all anthology series should be pub series. Oh and by the way, editor records are a type of title record so editor series are title/works series. In fact as far as the database and code is concerned there is no such thing as an editor series. It is only a title/works series that may happen to only contain editor title records. Uzume 19:34, 17 February 2013 (UTC)
If you were aware of this, then you should have referred to this "type of title record" by its given name: editor record. It would not have added to my confusion over the point you were trying to make. I don't know anything about the underlying code, but only what each record is called in the daily communication among editors. Mhhutchins 21:53, 17 February 2013 (UTC)
I did not mean to assume certain information of the reader of my comment but obviously I did. It can be clearly seen via URLs which records are title/works records and series vs. pub records and pub series. Even magazine (and anthology, etc.) editor records are listed under title.cgi. Their correlated series are listed under pe.cgi like all other title/works series (albeit issue grids under seriesgrid.cgi are also commonly used for these). I am surprised you have not noticed this. Uzume 02:50, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
Now who's jumping to an unsubstantiated conclusion? Just because I don't know code doesn't mean I can't read a URL. I only wanted to point out that on this wiki in discussions we try to differentiate each of the different types of records, and this one is an EDITOR record. We don't call it a "title" record. The same situation with INTERIORART, COVERART or ESSAY records. Yes, they're all "title" records, but when we talk about them, we refer to the type of record. I was wrong in assuming your reference to "title" didn't include editor records. And for that I apologize. Mhhutchins 18:07, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
Well I do not feel slighted and do not feel I need an apology. You expressed some lack of knowledge in an area and I was just trying to communicate to make sure we are "on the same page". I know you have much more experience in bibliographic work here than I and frankly it shows and I am pleased to get you help. I freely admit an interest in spec-fict bibliography but also a stronger interest in the code and development here. Uzume 04:18, 19 February 2013 (UTC)
Back to the original problem: changing the database's ability to place a title record into two different title series would solve the problem. How that's done is beyond me, but I believe it's doable. Mhhutchins 15:57, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
Yes, that would be FR 3600743. Ahasuerus 22:45, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
So what is the suggestion during the interim when we do not have such functionality? Thanks. Uzume 19:34, 17 February 2013 (UTC)
Enter the record, title or editor, into one series and note the work's apparent placement in another series. That seems logical to me. Mhhutchins 21:53, 17 February 2013 (UTC)
I was going to suggest something along the lines of using a title variant but that breaks the invariant assertion of keeping variant titles out of title/works series (for which there is a cleanup script to find such things I believe). I shall just have to place a note on the title and/or pub record--thank you. Uzume 02:50, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

Poll winners now bolded (patch r2013-44)

Poll-based awards have been fixed to display their relative poll position rather than the word "nomination" (a bug introduced in r2013-43.) In addition poll winners now appear in bold on the Award Bibliography page. Ahasuerus 00:50, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

Verification changes (patch r2013-45)

The Title page has been changed to show pubs as verified if at least one of their 5 "Primary" verifications -- or the "Transient Primary" verification -- has been done. Ahasuerus 02:08, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

P.S. Bill, your submitted code had some detritus from older versions of the software, so you may want to do a refresh. Ahasuerus 02:08, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

Wow! If we could implement all changes that fast, we'd clear the Sourceforge lists within a month! I will look into refreshing, but I have got several branches of coding that I don't want to lose - e.g. "Sourcing made simple', "Unmerge Foreign Titles" et cetera, so I want to be careful about changes till we're more aligned. When I've caught up, I can strip this PC down and give it to my parents as an upgrade for them, while I move to my newer Windows 7 machine. BLongley 03:31, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
Well, yes, if all changes were one liners, I am sure we could implement them very quickly :) However, consider what I had to do with this (effectively one line) change:
  • Identified a collision between your change and the changes that I was working on at the same time and resolved it.
  • Found the previously mentioned extra code which was accidentally committed because your development environment was out of sync with the repository and removed it.
  • Tested the new code and found a bug -- the code was displaying the word VERIFIED once per verification, so it could be displayed anywhere between 1 and 6 times per publication. Fixed the bug.
  • Ran some searches and discovered that the exact same code already existed in our standard SQL library. Replaced your code with a call to the library, tested again, updated version numbers, committed, tagged, deployed, updated SourceForge, etc.
Granted, it was an outlier, but that's a lot of things that could (and did) go wrong with a one line change! Ahasuerus 04:49, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
Well, CVS is supposed to help with point one and maybe point two. Point three was my fault - glad to see the Testing process caught it. Point four is one of the bigger problems - a centralised SQL library is no doubt a good thing, but it increases the number of conflicts when you have multiple developers. Fortunately there seem to be only the two of us at present. I've added another quick fix - I can see already that it doesn't quite do what I said it would, the scope has accidentally got wider, but hopefully not in a bad way. When we get back to big changes like additional columns on tables, then there's a lot of help and documentation that need to be part of the process - coding can be as low as 10% of all the editing required! BLongley 05:59, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
CVS did catch point one, but it didn't catch point two, presumably because your version of the software had been modified to change CVS version numbers. It's easy enough to do if you start manipulating your files using OS (rather than native CVS) commands. That's why I think it would be beneficial to back up your copy of the software and then do a complete refresh.
As far as point 3 goes, bugs happen, nothing to worry about. Re: point 4, we already had a function in the SQL library to do what the FR called for, so no changes to the library were required. Copying that code to the main script meant code duplication and, as we discussed earlier, that's no longer allowed -- I am trying to eliminate code duplication, centralize all database access points in the SQL library, then move all library access points to classes. And then relax and take a day off :-) Ahasuerus 19:33, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
I have some outstanding unfinished patches that I have had to keep merging to sync up with the newer swifter changes of late. I should get some time to get ahead and actually check them in however. Uzume 20:15, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

Summary/Award/Alphabetical/Chronological bibliographies inter-linked

As per FR 2855260, the four Author Bibliography pages are now inter-linked at the top of each page. The functionally identical section of the navigation bar has been removed. I am not much of a UI person (being color-blind and all), so all and any suggestions re: improving the look and feel of the links would be more than welcome. Ahasuerus 04:34, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

And as an added bonus, the Awards page now handles pseudonyms correctly. Ahasuerus 05:15, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
Nice. Small suggestion: I think it would look better left-justified instead of centered. Especially on a relatively empty page. See, for example, this. --MartyD 13:38, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
Easy enough to do, but now that I have slept on it, I wonder if we really need to display the "Other views of this author's bibliography" line for pseudonyms? Ahasuerus 19:26, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
I was going to suggest that the "other views" not be displayed for "pure pseudonyms", i.e. those that have no independent titles. Chavey 20:57, 17 February 2013 (UTC)
I think the new display over-uses the BOLD font. I'm not sure how often the other displays are used - I remember telling swfritter about the chronological option that he'd overlooked for several years. Award links are probably worth the emphasis now we're getting close to full usability. BLongley 21:09, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

(unindent) OK, the "other views" line has been left justified and shortened. Also, it no longer appears on "pure pseudonym" pages.

As far as the use of bolding (actually "h3") goes, well, the reason why the "other" biblios have largely unknown is that you couldn't find them easily. We'll see how much use they will see now that users can actually get to them. Ahasuerus 04:21, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

Do we actually have any way to check they're being used? On an edit page, we can see if somebody submits something, but for plain viewing I don't think we can do much except check the Apache logs (if enough detail is set for collection). Do you ever check those? BLongley 11:08, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
I imagine the raw web server logs have a lot of noise in them and to get any useful data out of them they would need significant processing. I know many of the scripts still have issues and dump crap into the logs via standard error (stderr). That is not to say a tool to look for something could not be made. That said, though I believe we do have some sort of hit counts in the database too (I would have to look at that again but check out Annual Page Views; those numbers were generated somehow). I am not sure they record/give enough information to determine which pages are hit however. Uzume 14:45, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
Those pages were derived by Al, and he hasn't passed on his secrets. There only appear to be two types of view recorded, and it's not even clear if pseudonyms are counted with canonical author or not. They're pretty useless stats. BLongley 15:37, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
Every time an author's biblio is generated, a database counter is incremented. Ahasuerus 23:58, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
However, Apache logs are very customisable and with the right settings you can derive a lot of info via grep and wc alone. We could usefully analyse them to find the least used scripts and consider whether to improve, remove or relegate them. BLongley 15:37, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
Agreed. I was very confident that the DB stats would be very useful for this but they were sort of close and I would not recall what they actually covered. The web server logs would be valuable to see what is going wrong with the scripts too (as well as collect stats like you suggest). Uzume 20:12, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
There are various log parsing tools which could be leveraged. We could run them in 6-12 months to see how much use these pages get and perhaps adjust their visibility based on usage (a low priority task.) I don't think we will ever want to remove any functionality just because it's infrequently used -- see LiveJournal's misadventures in this area. Ahasuerus 23:58, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
Well, some of the Cleanup Scripts were intended as temporary until we'd fixed the underlying bugs and cleaned up the corruption. Will "Empty Series" and "Duplicate Publication Tags" ever find anything now? BLongley 09:25, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
Oh, sure, internal tools can and will change over time. I was only referring to user-accessible functionality.
As far as empty series go, it's still possible to create them. Ahasuerus 16:54, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
For now, the font size has been reduced (patch r2013-53) to make the "Other Views" line less conspicuous. Ahasuerus 00:47, 20 February 2013 (UTC)

Verification changes (patch r2013-50)

The "Verify Publication" page has been changed to display the title of the pub being verified and the names of the users responsible for various verifications. In addition, you can no longer change verifications entered by other users, but you can undo another user's "Mark N/A" operation. Also, the page that appears after submitting your verification has been modified to display an "Add More Verifications" link, which takes you back to the verification page. Ahasuerus 03:40, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

This is a welcome change but I can see the need for moderation to remove and/or fix certain erroneous secondary verifications at some point. I considered suggesting secondary verifications should go through moderation much like other publication changes but not sure if that is the optimal solution. Uzume 04:28, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

ISFDB for Dummies

OK, it's not actually called that - it's titled "Using the ISFDB (Internet Speculative Fiction DataBase)" - but it is a beginner's guide to allow people to get the most out of the online database without logging in. Some of you reviewed an earlier draft, and were so nice about it I didn't change much. Now it's out in the wild and you can download version 0.03 from Smashwords - https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/288178 - in various formats. I've only double-checked the online HTML version and obviously need to do some more work on the screenshots, but would like to know if there are problems with any of the other formats. I'd offer a reward like a Free copy or a percentage of the royalties for your help, but it's priced at £0.00 - you might have to make do with a credit in version 0.04. BLongley 01:37, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

P.S. It's not going to be published everywhere just yet, it needs a Cover Image for certain stores. Does anyone want to volunteer to provide one? 1400 pixels wide by about 1.4 to 1.6 times that high, including title and author in big enough letters to show on a thumbnail version. BLongley 01:43, 22 February 2013 (UTC)
I'm game. And I'll even waive my usual £10,000 fee (+VAT). Contact me off-list with what you have in mind. PeteYoung 01:46, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

Title page changes (patch r2013-55)

The Title page has been modified as follows:

  • You can no longer enter tags for VTs
  • VT pages also show their parents' tags (if present)
  • There is no longer an extra space between the tag counter and the comma that follows it

Ahasuerus 07:52, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

Conflicting editor credits for Arrow Book of Spooky Stories

It's been a while since this discussion of the Arrow Book of Spooky Stories, but I'll report now on the resolution. This book was credited, in its first printing, to Nora Kramer, and in a later printing that I was verifying, to Edna Mitchell Preston. Based (apparently) on which printing various people had, other secondary sources attributed the book to one or the other of these authors, but without resolving the conflicting authorship claims. After some shopping, I ended up with copies of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 14th printings. The contents are all identical. Kramer is credited on both the cover and title page of the first printing. Preston is credited in both places in all of these subsequent printings. There is no acknowledgement anywhere of the change or the reason. It's pretty clear (IMHO) that the first printing was an error based on the publication 2 years earlier of the similarly titled Arrow Book of Ghost Stories, and that they corrected this for the 2nd and subsequent printings. (There is no overlap between the stories in these two anthologies.) I've added notes to this effect in the book's title record, and made the first printing a variant of the main title/author. Mhhutchins suggested not bothering with an author pseudonym, but I've included that so that if someone is looking up the book thinking it's by Nora Kramer, they will still be able to find it. I wish I could structure it so that the first printing listed its author as "Edna Mitchell Preston [as by Nora Kramer]", but unless there's a secret I don't know, that's not how it's going to show up. Chavey 01:13, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

Making Nora Kramer into a pseudonym for Edna Mitchell Preston doesn't help the person looking for the first printing of the book. Look at Kramer's page: it's not listed, and rightly so. It's varianting that moves a title to the correct author's page, not making a pseudonym. If an editor (or user) doesn't search by title, they will not find the record. Some may then try to create a new record. I can't see a way around it. Mhhutchins 01:55, 24 February 2013 (UTC)
I was hoping that when they went to Nora Kramer's page to look for the book, that they might notice that the first line there says "Used As Alternate Name By: Edna Mitchell Preston". That would lead them to the book and the problem. At least it's the closest I can see us doing to help such a user. (Of course they might also do a search on the title name.) Chavey 18:23, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

Visited links within the database

The indication by different coloring for visited links has disappeared. Mhhutchins 21:56, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

The coloring of visited links is generally controlled by the browser rather than by the ISFDB software, so presumably something has happened on the client side. It's still the same on my PC using Firefox, IE and Chrome. Ahasuerus 22:10, 24 February 2013 (UTC)
Are you sure? On my websites, I can determine whether the links within the pages show if they've been visited, using simple HTML: LINK="#BD0000" VLINK="#BD0000" ALINK="#BD0000" or in the Header using the <STYLE> attribute: a:visited {text-decoration: none;}. Besides, here on the wiki, the links are showing as being visited. When I go to Google, visit a link, and then return, the color changes to show the site was visited. I did have a Chrome update loaded when I booted up this morning, but I'm wondering why only this one website (the database side) is affected. Mhhutchins 22:18, 24 February 2013 (UTC)
Every website I've gone to that shows visited links, including Wikipedia, and Amazon, still show different colors. This is strange. Mhhutchins 22:25, 24 February 2013 (UTC)
Hm, that's indeed peculiar. Everything is still working fine for me. Have you tried deleting the browser cache to see if it may help? Ahasuerus 22:50, 24 February 2013 (UTC)
Yes, I did that...but that's actually the exact opposite of what I want, which is to be able to see which pages in the database which I've visited. So a record of those visits would need to stay in my cache in order for the browser to identify them as visited. Why it works on the Wiki (and every other website) and not on the database is freaky. I'll shut down my computer to see if they might remedy the problem. Mhhutchins 23:21, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

John Brunner data

The recently published biography of [John Brunner] contains a complete bibliography of his fiction and selected bibliography of his interviews/panel discussions/non-fiction. This includes dates with the month, even for all of the Ace editions of his work. Rather than leave what may be hundreds of notes on verifiers' pages, I'm posting this one note. In each case where the date is expanded the above source will be noted. If the existing date is different it will not be changed but discussions will follow. Also, the ISFDB is listed as one of the 'Secondary Sources' in the back. Thanks! --~ Bill, Bluesman 17:36, 28 February 2013 (UTC)

Affected pub records: [100th Millenium]; [The Altar on Asconel]; [The Astronauts Must Not Land / The Space-Time Juggler]; [The Atlantic Abomination]; [Bedlam Planet]; [Castaways' World / The Rites of Ohe]; [Catch a Falling Star]; [The Day of the Star Cities]; [The Dramaturges of Yan]; [Echo in the Skull]; [Endless Shadow]; [Enigma from Tantalus / The Repairmen of Cyclops]; [I Speak for Earth]; [Into the Slave Nebula]; [The Jagged Orbit]; [Ladder in the Sky]; [Listen! The Stars!]; [The Martian Sphinx]; [Meeting At Infinity]; [A Planet of Your Own]; [The Psionic Menace]; [Sanctuary in the Sky]; [Secret Agent of Terra]; [The Shift Key]; [The Skynappers]; [Slavers of Space]; [The Super Barbarians]; [Threshold of Eternity]; [Times Without Number]; [To Conquer Chaos]; [The World Swappers]. And that's all the book-length fiction. --~ Bill, Bluesman 23:56, 28 February 2013 (UTC)

Superman Exception

I'm posting this here since this is a special case exception. We can move to R&S if we need a more general discussion.

I've found that the Superman comic issue 400 includes a short essay by Ray Bradbury on the inside front cover. It's an actual essay, and not part of the comic, or told with pictures in any way. Would editors object if I were to add this as we do non-genre magazines listing only the Bradbury piece in the content? I would also add Julius Schwartz as the editor in addition to "Editors of Superman". If folks are OK with that, should I scan the cover as well? Thanks. --Ron ~ RtraceTalk 12:20, 1 March 2013 (UTC)

IMHO, handling that as we handle non-genre magazines with one thing of interest is appropriate. I don't know if it's normal to include a cover of such items though.Chavey 15:04, 1 March 2013 (UTC)
Nongenre magazines only have their covers uploaded if they illustrate the spec-fic content. It seems unlikely in this case. BLongley 16:33, 1 March 2013 (UTC)
Except that the piece he's adding is not spec-fic. It's nonfiction. Mhhutchins 17:54, 1 March 2013 (UTC)
I have no objection,but would appreciate a note added to the title explaining that it is an exception. Stonecreek 15:52, 1 March 2013 (UTC)
It would be an exception because the rules are quite clear that we only enter the fiction contents of nongenre publications. Like Christian, I would have no objection to including this if it's strongly stressed in the record that this is an exception to the rule and should not be used as a precedent to add other nonfiction essays from nongenre publications. Even if we exclude any author below the "threshold" and limit the exception to essays which are spec-fic related, this could lead to literally thousands of records which violate the current rule. Mhhutchins 17:54, 1 March 2013 (UTC)
Based on the first sentence of Mike's comment (immediately preceding), my endorsement of the exception is wavering. I think that's probably a good rule to use, even for authors above the threshold. Chavey 17:47, 2 March 2013 (UTC)

Unknown publication of 2001 a space odyssey

So, I came across a copy of 2001 which is not a BCE or a trade printing. DJ is identical to original but No price and No BCE. Its all dark Navy blue boards and spine with gold leaf title, clarke, and NAL. With 221 pages and No statement of edition/printing on copyright page but below the text it has an ISBN of 1-56865-306-9 of which I can't find any info regarding publication dates. Need help SpanishMill 15:24, 1 March 2013 (UTC)

It is an SFBC edition, by the ISBN prefix 1-56865. See [here]. The club ceased using the 'Book Club Edition' slug line in the early 90s. We already have a [record] for the edition you have. Cheers! --~ Bill, Bluesman 15:36, 1 March 2013 (UTC)
Ah, heck, I thought I had looked through every listing and I didn't use the search to enter the isbn, my bad. And thanks for your help Bill. SpanishMill 16:06, 1 March 2013 (UTC)

Nominate "Future Life" for Genre Magazine

Future Life magazine was published from 1978 through 1981 (titled Future for the first year) by the publisher of Starlog magazine. It featured science and science fiction, along with "a healthy dose of space art, music, etc.". Coming from Starlog, you won't be surprised to hear that it has a lot on SF movies, but it seems (to me) that it has enough of our content to justify its inclusion in our "magazines" listing. The issue I'm looking at includes: SF cover by Vincent DiFate; art portfolio and interview with DiFate; interview with Harlan Ellison; reviews of 16 SF books; centerfold art by, and short essay about Ludek Pesek; a 3-page article about the TV adaptation of Bradbury's "Martian Chronicles"; a one-page forum where 5 big-name SF writers were asked "Do you see a continuation of traditional sex roles during the next fifty years?"; along with several articles that we would not normally index. For a listing of all their issues, and some indication of content in those issues, see John Zipperer's web site. I suggest that we include this magazine, but limit content listings to those items relevant to our inclusion guidelines. However, before doing so, I wanted to check with others. Chavey 20:21, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

I wasn't able to find that it published any science fiction, so how could it be a genre magazine? (Neither Miller/Contento, nor Tymn/Ashley include it in their references.) And without fiction it wouldn't be eligible as a non-genre magazine. If you're asking that we include only sf-related nonfiction from this periodical, then what's to prevent anyone from creating publication records for any non-genre magazine that publishes sf-related nonfiction? We would have to make drastic changes in our inclusion policy. Mhhutchins 23:06, 5 March 2013 (UTC)
That's why I asked. It writes quite a bit about science fiction literature, but you're right that it doesn't seem to include any actual fiction. Re-reading the help page on non-genre magazines, it says Normally no editorials, letters, or essays will be entered. Reviews of SF works may be entered, but this will be rare. Significant essays specifically connected with SF works may optionally be entered, but this also will be rare.. The use of the term "rare" seems to imply that I should ignore these reviews, interviews, etc., but it doesn't forbid them, so I'm not sure if I should include this content at all. Thoughts? Chavey 04:04, 6 March 2013 (UTC)
Going back to my original thesis: a non-genre magazine must include some fiction to make it eligible for the database. The first sentence on the help page for entering such publications state: "A non-genre magazine is one that did not specialize in Science Fiction, Fantasy, or Horror, or any other form or forms of speculative fiction, but included much fiction and other content that was not speculative fiction." By this definition Future Life is a non-eligible non-genre magazine because it published no fiction. For argument's sake, let's bend the definition and call it a non-genre magazine. The help page goes on to say that an editor should enter the speculative fiction content of the non-genre magazine. Since Future Life contained no speculative fiction, then we would have to not only bend the rules, they would have to be broken to include sf-related nonfiction into the database. And that's when the slippery slope becomes unmanageably steep. How do we keep out publication records for issues of Starlog, Famous Monsters of Filmland, Fangoria, and hundreds of other media-related publications? Next comes issues of TV Guide, Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone and other general interest magazines that contain articles about sf-related movies. I've already brought this to the attention of the group before when the same topic has arose. This database can not be everything to everybody. Let's enter all the speculative fiction that's ever been published before we start to add sf-related nonfiction. Or we can open the gates and have no inclusion policy at all. Just after we change the name of the database. Mhhutchins 04:35, 6 March 2013 (UTC)
I'm against this a Genre Magazine and also as Nongenre. Yes, there may be some articles of interest but without fiction no amount of 'above the threshold' essayists would qualify it. BLongley 07:58, 6 March 2013 (UTC)
Ok, you've convinced me. I'll try to remember it this time :-) Chavey 18:34, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

Titan vs. Titan Books

We have 112 books listed as published by "Titan" (60 of them verified), and 280 books listed as published by "Titan Books" (23 of them verified). It seems certain that these are the same publisher -- especially since I have found books with some printings listed as by one and other printings listed as by the other. Both of these publishers are listed for roughly the same time period: "Titan" from 1987 to the present, although rare after 1996, and "Titan Books" from 1985 to the present. The company's web site refers to themselves as "Titan Books", e.g. as a division of "Titan Entertainment", and to distinguish themselves from another division, "Titan Magazines". Is there any reason I should not merge these two publishers into "Titan Books"? Chavey 04:26, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

I see no reason to keep them separate. The same goes for Ace and Ace Books, as well as for Bantam and Bantam Books. There are probably dozens of cases where this partitioning of a publisher's output is based on an arbitrary decision by an editor. Mhhutchins 04:42, 6 March 2013 (UTC)
Although, annoyingly enough, "Pocket" and "Pocket Books" are honestly different publishers. Chavey 05:07, 6 March 2013 (UTC)
That's not true, at least as far as the ISFDB handles it. Pocket and Pocket Books are the same publisher, and there's no reason why those two shouldn't be merged. You may be thinking about the French publisher (Presses Pocket) whose books have been kept separate from the US publisher. Mhhutchins 05:44, 6 March 2013 (UTC)
Ah. The comments on the "Pocket" publisher page (which implied the books there were all from a French publisher called simply "Pocket") mislead me. I have corrected those comments. But we also then should standardize on either "Pocket" or "Pocket Books". I see that there are 19 different "publishers" which use "Pocket Books" (e.g. "Pocket Books / SFBC" and "Archway / Pocket Books"), and only one such that uses "Pocket" (i.e. "Pocket / Kangaroo"), so that one might be easy to agree on. I wish there could be agreement on the others. Chavey 18:32, 6 March 2013 (UTC)
I've corrected "Pocket / Kangaroo" to "Kangaroo / Pocket Books" using the ISFDB standard for "imprint / publisher". Mhhutchins 19:43, 6 March 2013 (UTC)
I've also expanded the notes to ask editors to use the full name which is used by the overwhelming majority of records for this publisher. Mhhutchins 19:51, 6 March 2013 (UTC)
So can we merge them? Chavey 20:57, 6 March 2013 (UTC)
Since my post above, I have also realized that a couple of "Titan" pubs are actually from "Titan Magazines". I would look for those before doing the merge. Chavey 05:07, 6 March 2013 (UTC)
I prefer just "Titan" to cut the amount of typing required. (This is also how it's referred to at the Grand Comics Database although not at the Comic Book DB.) If I recall the history of the company, they started as Titan distributors so there may be a historical reason to the short name. I'll see if any of my unpackable boxes contain any such publications, but I suspect they're probably all in the Box of Star Trek novelisations. BLongley 07:51, 6 March 2013 (UTC)
I prefer "Titan Books", e.g. to distinguish them from "Titan Magazines". I think that saving a little typing at the cost of confusing two publishers is not a good idea. Chavey 18:32, 6 March 2013 (UTC)
What two publishers? Titan Magazines should not be present here at all! BLongley 18:35, 6 March 2013 (UTC)
Looks like there was only one such publication. I changed its publisher from "Titan" to "Titan Magazines"; its here. It does claim to have an SF story in it. Chavey 20:57, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

Star Trek series: Pocket Book and Titan

At one point the ISFDB had only "Series", not "Title Series" and "Publications Series", hence what we now know as "Title Series" were called upon to do both tasks. Moving some of these old title series to publication series is a necessary (long term) task for us. I have just completed moving "Star Trek Pocket Books" from a title series to a publication series, which involved updates to about 800 publication recs and over a hundred title recs. As you might guess, I did not post notices for those changes to each of the verifiers' talk pages. This post serves as a general notice. What I did as part of this was:

  1. Put all pb Pocket Book publications from the old series into a Star Trek Pocket Books publication series. Publications of type hc, tp, and ebook were not included. Others are welcome to put those in if they think they belong, but to me it felt as if they were different enough to be excluded.
  2. Since the "Titan Books" British reprints of these books were also numbered, I added a separate Star Trek: Titan Books publication series for them, used existing notes in publication and title records to identify many such books (and then removed those notes, since they were now redundant), and used various other resources to complete that publication series.
  3. While doing the previous item, I realized that there were other publication series used by Titan Books, and hence I created and populated the Star Trek Giant Novel and the Star Trek Adventures publication series. (Giant Novel #1 is missing, and a note about that is listed there.)
  4. Removing "Star Trek Pocket Books" as a title series allowed those books to be organized into additional sub-series of "Star Trek: The Original Series". Using the listing on Wikipedia, I created and populated sub-series for The Yesterday Saga, Fortunes of War, Worlds Apart, New Earth, My Brother's Keeper, Rihannsu, Star Trek: The Lost Years Saga, and Worlds in Collision. I also moved the first three movie novelizations into Star Trek Original Series Film Novelizations, and of course moved some "Pocket Book" sub-series to be sub-series of the main parent.
  5. Along the way, since I was editing the Pub records anyway, I also corrected publishers listed as "Pocket" to "Pocket Books", added links to LCCN and OCLC numbers that didn't have those links, and updated many multi-line notes from the "<br>• " format to the more standard "<li>" format.

There, you have all been notified :-)   Chavey 21:59, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

This should have been discussed first, not presented as a 'fait accompli'. --~ Bill, Bluesman 01:20, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
The conversation was held here: The discussion about it being necessary; my volunteering to do it; and an initial step of a few books with a request as to whether I was doing it right. Chavey 05:39, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
I had very little at stake in the discussion (having maybe three Star Trek novels in my whole collection), but on principle I feel Darrah was doing the right thing. Some discussions get lost on the wiki, and some of us are going to overlook some of those that may effect our verified records. As long as the edits aren't destructive (and these surely aren't), editors should be forgiving of such changes. I commend Darrah for doing what many of us felt should be done, but didn't have the time or inclination. Mhhutchins 06:06, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
I too commend Darrah for this. Well done! BLongley 07:22, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
In retrospect, I realized that I had meant to link to the original discussion in my posting, which is always a good idea for this type of thing, but by the time I finished writing up the posting, I forgot to do that. Chavey 07:55, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
BTW, Darrah, I had to move this title out of the film novelization series, because it came up as an error on one of the clean-up scripts (it had the same series number as the adult novelization by McIntyre. That's why I created a a new series for juvenile novelizations. I've not researched to see if any of the other films had juvenile novelizations. Mhhutchins 06:11, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
Thanks Mike, I wondered why there were two different novelizations of #4. I just did some checking on juvenile novelizations. The publishing company that made that one for "Star Trek IV" did two "Create Your Own Adventures" books based on movies #2 and #3, but no regular novelizations. Are these worth adding? Buena Vista did Audio Book juvenile versions of movies I-IV, each accompanied by a 24 page "read-along" picture book, hence clearly aimed at even a younger audience than Peter Lerangis's 76 page novelization already included. Are these worth adding? Chavey 07:55, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
I don't believe those DIY books should be considered novelizations along with the Lerangis title, so they would not be part of the series. Feel free to create a separate series for those. As for those children "read-along"s, I don't see any value in adding them to the database, but other editors feel differently, because I've seen several of the type already in the db. Your call Mhhutchins 18:25, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
I'm not a big fan of either of those 2 groups of books either, so I'll ignore them. I've added a link in the Bibliographic page for the "Star Trek Universe" parent series that links to a mass of children's books on Star Trek, including these two groups. I'll leave it at that. Chavey 13:09, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

Automatic redirection after login (patch r2013-57)

If you are logged off and try to edit a record, the system will now automatically redirect you to the appropriate editing page upon login. Ahasuerus 02:32, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

And as an added bonus, the Duplicate Finder page no longer errors out after logging in. Ahasuerus 03:42, 11 March 2013 (UTC)
Add Variant and Add Award have also been fixed to redirect to the correct pages after login (patches r2013-62 and r2013-63.) Ahasuerus 03:48, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

4 award types added (patch r2013-59)

The following award types have been created:

Ahasuerus 04:03, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

There seems to be an error in the listing of the last award: two categories identical except for a missing period. Mhhutchins 04:13, 12 March 2013 (UTC)
Unfortunately, award categories are currently entered manually for every award record, so there are multiple misspellings, resulting in duplicates. Bill has created a script to merge about 30 of them and it's currently being tested. There is also an FR to convert award categories from "free text" to award type-specific drop-down lists, which should help address this problem. Ahasuerus 04:31, 12 March 2013 (UTC)
"Merge_Award_Categories.sql" will indeed fix the Atheling award. There's a fine line here: at present, the only online way to fix an award category is to fix each individual award in that category. That amount of work has to be balanced against the risks of mass update scripts, which is why I've only addressed 30 no-brainers. If we're moving to drop-down lists then we probably won't need a "merge award categories" screen in the long term, but that might be a useful temporary ability for cleaning up the current messes: e.g. is 'Novel' always 'Best Novel'? BLongley 05:01, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

Web Pages for Interview and Review titles (patch r2013-65)

You can now add Web pages to Interview and Review titles. Ahasuerus 06:00, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

The Wombles. In or Out?

We have the first book in "The Wombles" series, by Elisabeth Bereford, in the system, but not any of the other 24 books in that series. I'm not familiar with them, so I'm not sure if they should be In or Out, but it seems likely that the should either all be in, or all be out. As best as I can tell from their Wikipedia article, they are fundamentally just anthropomorphic little animals, which would generally be "out". However, they do seem to interact with humans, which would normally put them "in". Anyone care to argue one way or the other? Chavey 21:03, 22 March 2013 (UTC)

I don't know anything about these critters, but it may be worth noting that, according to Wikipedia, "There were five novels:
  • The Wombles (1968)
  • The Wandering Wombles (1970)
  • The Wombles at Work (1973)
  • The Wombles to the Rescue (1974)
  • The Wombles Go Round the World (1976)
... Beresford also wrote a collection of short stories entitled The Invisible Womble and Other Stories (1973), in which the original Wimbledon Common setting was restored. Although based on episodes from the TV series, these stories occasionally refer to events in the novels. ... In addition to these books, a great many annuals, picture-books and children's early readers have been published over the years, some of which were also written by Elisabeth Beresford."
So it looks like there are just 5 novels, 1 collection and a great deal of associational material. Ahasuerus 00:42, 23 March 2013 (UTC)
I don't think "interact with humans" is right - they actively avoid contact with humans. Their origins are unknown, they might have come from a different planet for all we know - but they fit into our world quite nicely. I'd stop after the five novels and the collection, the rest are likely to be too juvenile for my taste. BLongley 06:57, 23 March 2013 (UTC)
Thanks much. I'll add those books and leave the rest out. Chavey 16:58, 23 March 2013 (UTC)
Done. I didn't add the 2011 editions (due to lack of personal interest). Chavey 22:22, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

Strange "pseudonym" for Edgar Allan Poe

Shouldn't this just be credited as "uncredited"? I can't see any logical way that a dash could be considered as an actual pseudonym. Mhhutchins 22:21, 24 March 2013 (UTC)

I realize it's strange, but why not capture it as given? What would we do with a piece credited to "Name Withheld"? Would we record that that way or as "uncredited"? The pseudonym part is less appealing. I tried some experiments, and short fiction and poems work out sort of ok if varianted without a pseudonym relationship. They end up "invisible" on the variant author bibliography. NOVELs and other container titles don't; they're shown as "stray" publications. Is it ok to tolerate that possibility? I'd prefer no pseudonym myself. --MartyD 01:58, 26 March 2013 (UTC)
The credit "uncredited" is a generic designation, not the actual way that a work is credit. (I'm sure you're aware of this.) When the author's name is withheld, when a work has no given author, when it is uncredited, it has always been ISFDB policy to record it as "uncredited". (Don't ask me what we would do if the work were actually credited as "uncredited"! My brain hurts at trying to imagine how to resolve the scenario.)
I agree, that the pseudonym part is the worst part of this situation. But there are plenty of works in the database which are uncredited and then varianted to the actual author without having to create a pseudonym. Making a dash into a pseudonym, as I said above, defies logic when it's obvious that the author never intended it to be a alternate credit for the work. After all, isn't that what a pseudonym is? Poe, in this case, just didn't want the work to be credited, in other words: "uncredited". Mhhutchins 21:06, 26 March 2013 (UTC)
Looking at your source for the data here, go down to the 1839 - August (vol. V, no. 2) issue, and you'll see the poem (page 75) is listed without credit. It seems the researchers and scholars working on this website failed to credit it as published by "—". BTW, the pseudonym is given in the ISFB as two short dashes. To stay true to the spirit of crediting "as given", shouldn't it be one long dash? Mhhutchins 21:20, 26 March 2013 (UTC)
I'd actually prefer this to be "anonymous": It is deliberately credited in a way so as to hide the author's identity. Different from the situation where the work was published with no provision for attribution, which to me is "uncredited". But since we only use "Anonymous" for that explicit credit... I have no problem making it be uncredited instead. I will fix it up. As for your question: Yes, it should be one long dash. Do you know how to make one? I've been using two emdashes where they're long, one where they're short. --MartyD 16:37, 27 March 2013 (UTC)
I don't think there is an alt-code for anything longer than an emdash. I see the folks at the Poe website had to resort to two emdashes, so maybe there is no single character longer than the emdash. Mhhutchins 17:59, 27 March 2013 (UTC)
BTW, I think our forefathers here on the ISFDB didn't realize or, if they did, didn't care about the subtle distinction between uncredited and anonymously published works. For ISFDB purposes, any uncredited work is entered as "uncredited", regardless of whether it was intentionally left uncredited by the publisher or not. It comes to interpreting the state of mind of the editor of the publication, and that's something no one, in the long run, can know for sure. Mhhutchins 18:04, 27 March 2013 (UTC)


From gutter code to no gutter code?

The notes for Dozois' The Year's Best Science Fiction, 3rd collection, Bluejay SFBC edition, says: Gutter Code "Q37" page 265 shows an early Sept. 1986 printing. I have a copy of this book, and a careful search shows no gutter code, either on p. 265 or anywhere else in the book. The book was previously unverified, so I have no idea who added that note, or what the chance is that it's wrong. It seems slightly odd to me, since this is a 626 page book, and I'm used to gutter codes being near the end of the book, but that may just be my inexperience. Our description of Gutter Codes says that their use (at least by Doubleday and SFBC) ended in mid-1987, and so I guess it's possible that early printings of this book used a gutter code and later ones did not, but I haven't previously seen a book like that. I considered the possibility that I had a regular first edition book inside an SFBC dj (the dj specifies its a BCE), but the page numbers for stories is different between the two editions, so I can verify that's not the case. I don't know what to make of this odd situation. Suggestions? Chavey 02:15, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

This happens when a moderator accepts submissions that don't source the data and the submitter fails to do a primary verification of the record. We know the page number of the gutter is wrong, possibly a transposition of 625. The code aligns with the gutter code system so it is probably good. You may have a later printing, one published after 1987. I would suggest something like this: "Some printings may have the gutter code "Q37" on page 625, which indicates a September 1986 printing. The code is not present on the Primary verified copy." Mhhutchins 03:52, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Joan Lowery Nixon, about the threshold?

We currently have three non-genre books listed for Joan Lowery Nixon, and a fourth in the moderator submission queue. I will argue that she is not above the "threshold", and hence we should not include her non-genre works. My arguments are: (1) She has never won any spec fic award; (2) Only two of our many editors have verified any books of hers, and hence she does not appear to be particularly popular among Spec Fic fans; (3) I am one of those 2 editors who have verified books of hers, and I don't think she's above the threshold; (4) Her Wikipedia page lists her as an important mystery writer (where she has won several awards), but says nothing about any of her spec fic works, i.e. none of the books mentioned there are spec fic. I move that we declare her "not above the threshold" and exclude her non-genre works. Is there a second to the motion? Chavey 02:32, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Fine by me!Kraang 02:39, 9 April 2013 (UTC)
I briefly reviewed the data that we have on file for her earlier today and my first thought was that some of the titles were genre-ambiguous, e.g. "The Weekend Was Murder!" apparently features ghosts, so I figured that including her non-genre books would help clarify their "SF status". However, now that I have read the linked Wikipedia article, which claims that she wrote 102 books (and apparently only a small percentage of her output was SF), I think that including her non-SF works would be counterproductive. Ahasuerus 02:50, 9 April 2013 (UTC)
5 days and no objections. Non-genre titles deleted. Chavey 05:44, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

Linking uploaded images to the db records

I've spent the last hour or so linking more than 60 cover images which were uploaded to the server and never linked to the database records. It was only by chance that I stumbled upon them because the editor who uploaded them not only didn't follow the file size limits (which drew my attention to them), but also failed to link them to the records. I'd left a note on his talk page back when he first uploaded them, but he never found his talk page, and I didn't remember to follow-up on the message. All were uploaded on a single day in January 2011.

This is my question: is there an easy way to locate other cover image files on the ISFDB server which are not linked to db records? Mhhutchins 22:13, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

I am afraid I am unaware of an easy way to do this, but we can always do it the hard way, i.e. by creating a list of all images currently on file and programmatically cross-checking their names against the images linked in the Authors and Pubs tables.
<sounds of keys getting clicked>
OK, it turns out that we have 1,981 images that are not referenced in the database. Quite a few of them are snapshots of TOCs, logos, artist signatures, design screenshots, editor pics and so on, but something like 50% (?) look like cover scans that have been either replaced or never linked in the first place. Would you like me to post a list of all 1,981 images on a Project page? Ahasuerus 23:38, 9 April 2013 (UTC)
That can be narrowed down by only checking images that are part of Category:Cover images. While not all are guaranteed to be in that category, if they were uploaded via the normal process, they should have the template that adds the category. I've used the API to grab the category contents. Give me a few minutes to compare against the publication links in the last database dump, and I might have shorter list. -- JLaTondre (talk) 23:57, 9 April 2013 (UTC)
I narrowed it down to 1,598 images. However, checking through some of them found that, in addition to ones that were uploaded and never linked, there are also ones that are linked in the notes field of a pub (example publication that links to a pre-publication cover). I can modify my script to remove those as well, but that will take more time and I might not have a chance to get to it until tomorrow. -- JLaTondre (talk) 00:23, 10 April 2013 (UTC)
Listing of 1354 images at ISFDB:Unlinked Covers. Given the large number, I'm thinking it would helpful to update the listing with the name of editors who uploaded them and then we could point active editors to their images and have them fix their own (especially since I assume most of those are verified pubs anyway). I'll try to get that done tomorrow. Note, this listing should contain the 60 Mhhutchins referred to above since it is based on last weekend's database dump. I can re-run this weekend to clean those out. -- JLaTondre (talk) 01:26, 11 April 2013 (UTC)
Thanks to you both. I'll take a look at the list and see if there's a pattern or reason why they're not linked. Mhhutchins 03:29, 11 April 2013 (UTC)
It looks like in some cases the ISFDB-hosted scan was subsequently replaced with a higher quality externally hosted scan. Ahasuerus 05:33, 11 April 2013 (UTC)
I uploaded a new version which:
  1. Properly handles images with spaces in their names: These were incorrectly being listed even if linked. This change, plus the ones Mhhutchins already removed, drops the list down to 793 images.
  2. Lists the images by uploader
Because it is working off a database dump, any images uploaded between 04/06-09 will also be listed. If you find a lot of those, I can modify the script to check the upload date and ignore those. Or I can re-run when the next database dump is available (this weekend) so there isn't much of a delta between when the dump and when this list is made. -- JLaTondre (talk) 01:00, 12 April 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for the new listing. Of the 12 listed under my name, 5 had been replaced under a different file name by other editors (which broke the link to the pub record), 3 of them were uploaded this week, 3 had been uploaded by other editors which I resized (all of which I've now linked to the records), and one mystery file because it was linked. Could it be the odd character that showed it as unlinked? I reloaded it again so maybe it won't appear on an updated list. Mhhutchins 01:20, 12 April 2013 (UTC)
The three covers listed under my name had all been properly linked, so I don't know why they show up on your list. The covers were uploaded on April 7th, so there's a slight possibility that you grabbed the database dump in the half hour or so between when the covers were uploaded and when they were linked. Chavey 05:48, 12 April 2013 (UTC)
That's exactly the reason and he pointed that out: "any images uploaded between 04/06-09 will also be listed." Yours were uploaded on the 7th. Mhhutchins 06:15, 12 April 2013 (UTC)
Done mine and Benario's (because he/she seems to inactive and they were for french titles). Hauck 08:40, 12 April 2013 (UTC)
Yes, the odd character caused it to be listed. Character encoding between wiki page names, URL encoding, and Perl's MySQL driver is not consistent. I'll see about cleaning those up and re-running against this weekend's database dump when it is available. -- JLaTondre (talk) 12:28, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

SF review of non-genre work

In verifying an issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction, Greg Cox has an essay on "Vampire Fiction" in which he reviews 7 books or stories. One review, of The Vampires, by John Rechy, notes that the book has nothing genre in it, other than the title, and says it "is included here solely because of its title". Our help page says of reviews like this that "Non-sf works should be entered". So I created a review of that title, added a title record (as "Non-Genre"), and did not include any of the publications of that book under that title record. Seems reasonable to me, but that means (1) the title record might get reported by some data validation scripts; (2) the author (linked above) now exists in the ISFDB with only a single work, that work being non-genre. Was this the right way to handle this review? Chavey 05:57, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

That seems to be the wrong approach to the situation, in my opinion, even though the current rules may allow it, depending upon which of the conflicting standards you follow. (I follow the one that says you don't create records for non-genre works by authors who aren't above the threshold.) I guess I'm a purist, but when a publication would not otherwise qualify for inclusion based on the current policy, creating a title record for an obvious non-genre title opens the door for other such works and creates a precedent. In these cases, I just create an ESSAY type record which covers all the bases, and I recommend that approach to others. You wouldn't be expected to create a REVIEW record for a movie, or a music recording, even though it appeared in an sf publication. What about all of those reviews of stage performance that have been published in the past few years in NYRSF? So why should this case be different? And what's going to stop an editor from coming along and adding all of the publications for this non-genre novel? Mhhutchins 06:12, 12 April 2013 (UTC)
It seems that this approach (which I think I agree with) would require changing the current help pages. The current NewPub help page description of Reviews says: 
Note also that only books, magazines, and short fiction are entered; if the column reviews
fanzines, you don't need to enter the review records for these, only the ESSAY record. 
Non-sf works should be entered but if an onerous number of non-sf-related works are 
reviewed in a column you are entering, discuss the situation on the Bibliographic Rules 
page to decide what can be eliminated.
A possible replacement for this would be (new text in red, removed text struck out): 
Note also that only genre books, magazines, and short fiction are entered as reviews; if the
column reviews fanzines or non-genre material, you don't need to enter the review records 
for these, only the ESSAY record. Non-sf works should be entered but if an onerous number of 
non-sf-related works are reviewed in a column you are entering, discuss the situation on 
the Bibliographic Rules page to decide what can be eliminated.
Is this an appropriate change? Should this conversation be moved to "Rules and Standards"? Chavey 07:35, 12 April 2013 (UTC)
I'd move magazines to the ESSAY section - due to the merging of editor records these are actually MORE likely to be unlinkable. BLongley 15:26, 12 April 2013 (UTC)
Agreed, as I'm having to working my way back converting several fanzine/magazine reviews into ESSAY records. Also it wouldn't hurt to give an example or two, for newer editors, on how to properly phrase an ESSAY record for a review of a below-the-threshold non-genre title, or film, fanzine/magazine etc. PeteYoung 16:57, 12 April 2013 (UTC)
Yes, Darrah, this should be moved to the Rules & Standards discussion page. But I like the changes you suggest, and like Bill, believe that magazines should be moved to the essay part of the instructions. And yes, Pete, there should be a standard titling in the conversion of a review to an essay. We'll go into that once the discussion has been moved. Thanks to all. Mhhutchins 19:24, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

(Unindent)

Conversation moved to Rules and Standards.

Trade paperback cover protection

I've never been able to find anything that protects the covers of trade paperbacks as good as the Brodart products for the dustjackets of hardcovers. I could find nothing on Brodart's website that was without adhesive, which I don't want. And surely nothing that permanently adheres to the book. Does anyone have suggestions? I'm thinking there must be a company which sells rolls of clear acid-free polypropylene which I can cut to size and then fold over the flaps of the paperback's cover. Mhhutchins 20:35, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

I put all of my books inside archival plastic bags, such as the ones comic book collectors use. It has the disadvantage that you can't read the book without taking it out of its protection, but at least they are well protected the rest of the time. Bags available from comic book stores work for most trade paperbacks, but for a wider variety of sizes, I buy book bags from BagsUnlimited.com. I didn't see any simple rolls of polypropylene there, although they might have it available, but of course you could always create your own "Brodart-style" cover by taking an oversized book bag and cutting two seamed edges from it, then folding and taping as appropriate. Chavey 22:25, 15 April 2013 (UTC)
I don't like the idea of bags because I want them on a shelf and ready at hand. My trade paperbacks are on the same shelves as my hardcovers. After some more googling I found this dealer selling something very close to what I was looking for. I imagine there will be loss since I'd have to customize each cover. Anyone else have ideas? Mhhutchins 00:11, 16 April 2013 (UTC)
Gaylord does have multiple sizes. Their product line EA-8RU through EA-16RU might be what you're looking for? There are two-piece products [EA-VX650 through EA-VX1300] as well that adhere to themselves. They have a line of slip-ons [EA-RW166 through EA-RW316] that I toyed with but I use the poly rolls to cover my trade paperbacks. Takes a bit more time but way cheaper than a specialty product. Even hardcovers that have no jackets can be done, I've protected all of the Easton editions that way. Bags for MMPBs and Magazines. Also, BagsUnlimited sells rolls, product ACNER8 through ACNER14 and at least $10/roll less than Gaylord or Brodart. --~ Bill, Bluesman 23:15, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

The Silmarillion

I have been asked to start a discussion as to whether or not J. R. R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion should be considered a collection or a novel with multiple parts. I haven't read this book, I just listed a French translation of this book on this site. Still, it looks like a collection to me. Please enter this discussion and weigh in on the subject. MLB 21:23, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

I agree that this is closer to a COLLECTION than a NOVEL, and would have no problem in converting my verified record. Mhhutchins 21:55, 17 April 2013 (UTC)
Other than The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, there's not much else by Tolkien that isn't more collection than novel. --~ Bill, Bluesman 23:18, 17 April 2013 (UTC)
I.m.h.o. this is a collection. Christopher Tolkien's states in his introduction: 'The book, though entitled as it must be The Silmarillion, contains not only the Quenta Silmarillion, or Silmarillion proper, but also four other short works'. This made me enter my editions of the work as collections. --Willem H. 20:19, 18 April 2013 (UTC)
I agree. The jacket flap also refers to it as a "great collection of tales and legends". But more importantly, I'd argue from mine (2nd printing of the 1977 Houghton Mifflin edition), the 2-page title page clearly presents it as a collection, listing all of the contained works. --MartyD 00:46, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

Verification 'corrections'?

With the recent [change], how can an incorrect verification be removed? With an active editor, a note is sufficient. In [this] record that's not possible. I'm sure Ernesto meant to click N/A, he did that a number of times for Tuck. I've checked quite carefully in case the title was listed under one of the various ghosts that were Muller and it's just not there. --~ Bill, Bluesman 16:53, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

Look at the paperback listings in the third volume, page 779. This is probably what Ernesto meant as a Tuck verification. I see no reason that he shouldn't have. It gives the title, the author, the date, the publisher, and the catalog number. Pretty good verification data. Tuck does this for hundreds of publications which he felt didn't need to have separate listings in the author section of his encyclopedia. Mhhutchins 18:06, 19 April 2013 (UTC)
Thanks, Michael! I don't have the third volume. I would still like to know what one does for a 'true' incorrect verification?? --~ Bill, Bluesman 19:35, 19 April 2013 (UTC)
Same here. Also, what to do when a moderator leaves an innocuous submission in the queue for weeks which could easily be accepted by another moderator. This protectiveness of verifications and submissions cuts both ways. (BTW, I looked on Abebooks to see if anyone is selling Volume 3 of Tuck. No luck. But there are sets of all three volumes for $60 and up. This is odd since the third volume was the most recently published and logically would have been more readily available.) Mhhutchins 20:31, 19 April 2013 (UTC)
I have purchased it twice, and both times the seller discovered they no longer had it!! I hate 're-sellers', those that will list anything and think they can quickly get a copy to fulfill an order. Grrrrr. And, in the second attempt, the seller continued to list the book!! And it took nearly four months to get my money back! Thanks for checking, though. Cheers! --~ Bill, Bluesman 21:55, 19 April 2013 (UTC)
I've never had that situation with an Abebooks.com dealer. I usually do an inquiry first, but can tell from the listing whether I'm dealing with someone who actually has a copy of the book. If they say something like "It's in the warehouse, and I'll have to locate it first to answer your question" that's a red flag. Mhhutchins 22:07, 19 April 2013 (UTC)
Both my 'misses' were from AbeBooks. I know the 'tells', but it can still happen. Below: hadn't thought of NESFA, will check that out! They have me on file, so ordering should be simple. Thanks gentlemen. Site is under re-construction so will have to wait ... --~ Bill, Bluesman 02:31, 20 April 2013 (UTC)
NESFA Press sells all three volumes @ $35 each. If you want a new one. They make it a little tricky to mail order, but they frequently will have copies at their table at conventions. --Ron ~ RtraceTalk 22:58, 19 April 2013 (UTC)
Back to the original topic, the [Help] as usual, needs to be amended, at least for the Replacing a Primary Verifier section. Until the issue of automatically notifying existing verifiers can be somewhat automated, I don't think more slots is the answer. An active editor is better as a verifier than one not, or officially retired [Harry]. Personally, I like the fact that verifications can't be changed so easily. One moderator and at least one editor have 'overwritten' more than a few Currey verifications [I spent nearly a month doing Currey so this kind of ticks me off] that I had done without any notification of intent or otherwise. Seems we should have some kind of process? --~ Bill, Bluesman 05:19, 20 April 2013 (UTC)
Re the "How To" - in the case you first cited you could clone the pub, which will start with no verifications, then do your own verifications again on the new pub, then delete the original. This only works with one other (erroneous) verifier - I suppose if there's multiple correct and active verifiers, they could be persuaded to reverify the new pub as well. BLongley 18:34, 20 April 2013 (UTC)

Server downtime

Just an FYI that the whole server crashed overnight and stayed down for a couple of hours, but everything appears to be back to normal now. Ahasuerus 07:53, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

It's been rather slow for me all day. And for the past hour or so, it's been timing out. Or maybe it's just my ISP. Mhhutchins 01:39, 23 April 2013 (UTC)
FWIW, it's been rather stable on my end. Ahasuerus 05:57, 23 April 2013 (UTC)
Working better this morning. Mhhutchins 16:22, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

Martin Booth, sci-fi author

Someone has gone through much effort to add more than a dozen titles (some with pubs, some with stubs) for many nongenre and nonfiction works by this author, who is obviously not "above the threshold". Does anyone have cause to believe that he is, before I start deleting pubs and titles that have no spec-fic content? Mhhutchins 19:06, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

He has no Awards (no wins, no nominations); his Wikipedia page says nothing about his spec-fic writing. Of his 29 listed genre books, only 1 has ever been verified by an ISFDB editor (Hi, Bill!), hence he shows no popularity among this collection of fans. That combination would argue that he is not above the threshold, and his non-genre books should be deleted. Chavey 08:13, 24 April 2013 (UTC)
No objections, so his non-genre books have been deleted. Chavey 01:40, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Title page for Cover Image?

Many older books had very unimpressive covers, which told you little about the book, but rather put their story emphasis on the title page. Wikipedia often shows title pages for these very old books in the place where they usually show some early cover for more recent books. In verifying this gothic chapbook, I did the same thing. The cover itself has only the name of the story at the top, with almost the entire cover taken up by the catalog of other chapbooks available from this publisher. (And most copies of this book have those original wrappers missing.) Is it acceptable to use the title page here instead of the cover? Chavey 08:23, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

I'd say yes - if we choose to take this matter quite carefully, and provided that there is an explanatory note. Stonecreek 17:02, 24 April 2013 (UTC)
Sorry, I have to disagree. It would have been better not to have linked it in the Cover URL field of the publication record. But there's nothing stopping you from uploading a scan of the title page and linking it in the Note field. The uploader should use the proper license tag for "Miscellaneous Publication Content", not the license tag for cover images. If you look at the wiki page for the title page scan you can see how many of the fields are inappropriate to the image, and the license doesn't apply. Instead, this license should have been used. It's rather simple to enter:
{{Miscellaneous Publication Content|Pub=<TAG>}}
All you have to do is replace <TAG> with the publication record ID. Of course, you can't use the upload link from the publication record, but the upload file link on the wiki and add the license manually into the summary field. Then you have to use HTML to link the URL of the uploaded image in the pub record's Note field. Mhhutchins 17:47, 24 April 2013 (UTC)
I corrected the license for the title page, and moved that to the notes. I scanned in a copy of the actual cover and loaded it. I scanned this slightly larger than normal (700 pixels high) since that was the smallest size that allowed the cover text to be readable. (The copyright on this cover expired well over 100 years ago, so I am hopeful that this is a justified exception.)
On a related note, I created the publication series that this book belongs in, and in the notes for that I added a list of the other 47 books in the series. These are all "gothic bluebooks" (a.k.a. "Shilling Shockers"), and we officially have "an inclusionist bias" towards Gothic fiction "with supernatural elements". Still, it seems it would be extremely difficult to decide which of these had "supernatural elements", since they are pretty rare. So I don't know whether to add them as additional books (erring on the side of inclusion) or leave them listed only in that publication series unless we find evidence that they actually belong in the database. Recommendations? Chavey 07:59, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

Author birthplaces fixed (patch 2013-69)

Author birthplaces should no longer error out when the value of the field is longer than 64 characters. Ahasuerus 20:53, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

Development update - 2013-05-02

Just a heads up that the site that we use as our publicly accessible software repository (SourceForge) is in the process of upgrading their (not ours) software. There appears to be a glitch affecting their hosted copy of the ISFDB software, so I am currently waiting for them to get back to me.

It won't have any impact on the main ISFDB server (and we also have a full copy of the ISFDB software that these folks host), but it is affecting the development process. Hopefully the problem will be resolved shortly. Ahasuerus 05:55, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

The problem has been resolved and their version of the ISFDB software has been successfully upgraded. I have installed a simple patch on the main server (which fixed a minor database problem with no impact on user-experienced behavior) and everything worked fine.
Also, please note that the numbering scheme for bugs and FRs has changed, so we will need to change the affected Wiki templates once we process the current backlog of submitted changes. Also, the URLs for Bug and FR lists have changed, although the old ones should still work for now. Ahasuerus 05:01, 3 May 2013 (UTC)
Can you give us the URLs? I would be lost if my bookmarks stopped working and I couldn't pester you anymore :-) Chavey 15:53, 4 May 2013 (UTC)
If you use one of your saved URLs, you should be automatically redirected to the equivalent new page, e.g. an FR-related URL should redirect you to https://sourceforge.net/p/isfdb/feature-requests/ and a Bugs-related URL should redirect you to https://sourceforge.net/p/isfdb/bugs . As an added bonus, the new interface lets you view up to 250 artifacts at the same time, so you can have all ISFDB FRs displayed on the same page, something that was not possible with the old interface, which limited you to 100 artifacts per page. There are other minor improvements, but the main reason why we upgraded was that we didn't have much choice in the matter -- the old interface was about to be decommissioned. Ahasuerus 16:23, 4 May 2013 (UTC)
I seem to remember that the old interface allowed comments on tickets, these are apparently gone now (or are they just not publicly visible, or am I just misremembering this?) Fsfo 11:10, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
Good point -- some of our project-specific settings didn't get converted correctly and I had to recreate them manually. Please try again and let me know if you can create new Bugs and FRs and/or add comments to existing ones. Ahasuerus 18:51, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
Adding comments still doesn't work for me - In the main ticket view, there is nothing under "Discussion" (in other projects, there is a text area + buttons for entering comments). Fsfo 13:50, 11 May 2013 (UTC)
OK, I think I got it now. Also, please note that all comments from anonymous users will be queued up for moderator approval since we had quite a few spammer attacks earlier this year. Ahasuerus 08:25, 12 May 2013 (UTC)

Displaying Links to External Web Pages

(copied from a Talk page)

We have an FR to "[a]dd links from Author pages (Summary, etc) to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (3rd edition) and Goodreads." I have been mulling it over lately and my current thinking is that the best way to do this is not to keep adding new fields for "recognized" sites the way it's currently done for Wikipedia and IMDB, but rather to change the way external links are displayed on the Summary page(s). For example, John Bellairs's page currently says: 

Wikipedia Entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bellairs
IMDB Entry: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0068662/
Webpage: http://www.bellairsia.com/
Webpage: http://h2g2.com/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A533387

Instead, we could change the display logic to something a bit more user-friendly, e.g.: 

Wikipedia-EN, IMDB, Webpage 1, Webpage 2

This approach will make it almost trivial to add support for additional "recognized" sites such as SFE3, Goodreads or whatever else may come down the pike. We can also replace SFE3 links with SFE3's image (SFEnew.png) if their editors prefer it that way; ditto Goodreads etc. As an added advantage, this approach will make it easier to distinguish between Wikipedia-EN, Wikipedia-FR, Wikipedia-DE, etc since they will be clearly labeled that way on the page. Eventually we could fold the Wikipedia data entry field and the IMDB data entry field into the multiply repeating "Web Page" field, but that can wait. We also have an FR to add a field that would clarify the nature of each site, e.g. "author's site", "fan site", "author's blog", which can be implemented on top of the proposed change.

Thoughts? Good? Bad? Unspeakable? Ahasuerus 03:32, 5 May 2013 (UTC)

I think that's a great idea. Chavey 17:46, 5 May 2013 (UTC)
Good idea. I thought the same myself when I started seeing multiple Wikipedia pages entered for an author, and the 'special' status of Wikipedia links became obviously broken. I'd also quite like to see more use of IMDB - not so much for authors, but for awards and novelisations. BLongley 17:55, 5 May 2013 (UTC)
I agree that it's a good idea. Mhhutchins 19:31, 5 May 2013 (UTC)
Sorry for catching up late, but I would welcome this change also. Stonecreek 10:04, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
Good idea; I like especially the possibility to distinguish between the various Wikipedias. --Pips55 20:08, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
Thanks, folks, it sounds like we have a consensus then. We will presumably want to change Title, Publisher and Publication Series pages in the same way. Ahasuerus 03:20, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
I wish we could add notes and links to title series as the way we do publisher and publication series. Mhhutchins 03:42, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
That would be FR 31, FR 123 and FR 125 :-) (note the new numbering scheme for FRs.) Ahasuerus 04:18, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

Harlan Ellison's "Spider Kiss"

Genre or non-Genre? "How unhappy was Harlan Ellison that a 1982 reissue of his rock 'n' roll novel Spider Kiss had been labeled SF?" begins the post on File 770. It's an enjoyable read, and might possibly be worth linking to on the "Web Page" link associated with that title. (But I'll leave that up to others.) Chavey 01:10, 7 May 2013 (UTC)

Interesting anecdote, but I don't think it's worth linking to the ISFDB. Even if you showed me Ellison's arrest record for assault. Mhhutchins 01:25, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
I think I agree with you. It does seem likely that he's overstated the event. But it certainly does tell us that he believes this book is non-genre :-) Chavey 03:16, 7 May 2013 (UTC)

Does a new catalog number qualify as a separate listing?

The book Stories of the Supernatural, by Dorothy L. Sayers, is listed as having catalog # 50-170 printed on the front cover. I have a copy of this book that is indistinguishable in all respects from that one, except for the catalog number "50-300". My guess is that I should list this as an "assumed 2nd printing" (there is no statement of printing or publication date in either book), but I wanted to check if I was right. Chavey 21:38, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

Most definitely. If your copy has a new catalog number, it's a new printing, which means it requires a new record. Looking at Dragoondelight's record, I see he made a mistake. The catalog number #50-170 was published in 1963, according to his quoted source. The second printing (yours) was published in 1967. I'll correct his record, and you can clone it to create yours giving Tuck as the source for the date. Mhhutchins 00:09, 12 May 2013 (UTC)
Thanks much! There was no indication in the book of the date. Chavey 04:06, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Display of a title's record number

I like seeing the title's record number now displayed as part of the record, but uncertain that it should be the first item listed. How do others feel? Mhhutchins

I was just about to post a summary of the last patch which implemented this change and ask for feedback :-) I'll wait to see what others think before installing a number of similar changes affecting pubs, publishers, etc. Ahasuerus 16:39, 12 May 2013 (UTC)
Same thoughts here (perhaps should it be placed at the bottom as it's data of use mainly to seasoned users). Hauck 17:10, 12 May 2013 (UTC)
We could also display the number in parentheses on the "Title:" line or even on the "Bibliography" line at the top of the page. Whatever works best! Ahasuerus 17:21, 12 May 2013 (UTC)
I don't think inclusion on the title line would work, because it adds even more emphasis to it. The number has nothing to do with the work and, as Hauck says, is only a tool within the ISFDB, and external to the story itself. Maybe changing the name to "ISFDB Record Number" will make this clear and moving it below the Storylen line. Just my two cents. Mhhutchins 17:33, 12 May 2013 (UTC)
Sounds reasonable. Ahasuerus 05:08, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
(An aside suggestion: How about a link from it to create a permalink to the record, similar to how OCLC does their records?) Mhhutchins 17:33, 12 May 2013 (UTC)
Oh, you mean change the displayed record number from a plain number to a URL to the same page? Ahasuerus 05:08, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
If you look at an OCLC record, you'll see a button at the top right labeled "Permalink". This provides the user with a clean URL which links to the record. This isn't always the URL of the page you're actually looking at, because this page is the result of a search which quite often displays superfluous characters. (I wish more ISFDB users were aware of the OCLC permalink URL. Many of them only copy the URL in their browser's address window, which makes it harder to work with the raw HTML in a record's Note field.) Since the ISFDB search doesn't work like OCLC's, and only displays a simple URL in the address window, there is no need for a permalink. All a user would need to do is copy the URL. Hopefully, they're smart enough to do that without having a button that does it for them. So I withdraw my suggestion with a hope we have users who know how to link to an ISFDB title record. Mhhutchins 05:41, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
I'm not sure I see any particular value in adding that. It's already in the URL for the page, if someone needs it. And it really doesn't have anything to do with the title itself. Chavey 04:19, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
Well, the reason that this FR was originally created was that "New editors have reported that it's not clear that the last part of each displayed URL is the record number of the displayed record". Some editors have also stated that copying and pasting the last part of a URL was unwieldy. Ahasuerus 05:06, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
I think Darrah was referring to my suggestion for a Permalink, not the original feature request to display the record number. Mhhutchins 05:41, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
As an aside, I suspect that we, experienced editors, are no longer good judges of what's intuitive and counter-intuitive in the software since we have been using it for so long... Ahasuerus 05:06, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
And our recent run-in with one particular editor has convinced me that there will be users and editors who will never learn how the software works, regardless of how clear the instructions are. Mhhutchins 05:41, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
It might be more useful to less experienced editors if we made some of the forms that want a record number accept a full URL and parse the record number out of it. --MartyD 10:31, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
Good point, FR 450 created. Ahasuerus 02:57, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

(unindent) The broader issue of "permalinks" mentioned above is a fairly complex one. Ideally, any external links to our Web pages should continue working regardless of what happens to the underlying database: a link to author #100, title #100 or pub #100 should always display the same data. Unfortunately, it's not always the case since we allow author/title merges/deletions, so old links can be easily broken. We could modify the software to remember deleted/merged records and display a "This record was deleted on YYYY-MM-DD" message or a "This record was merged with record NNNNN on YYYY-MM-DD" message, but it's not as easy to implement as it may appear. Ahasuerus 02:57, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

I have made the change requested by Michael. If everything looks good over the next day or so, I will make similar changes to the rest of the other pages.
In addition, a minor bug on the Publication Listing page has been fixed. There should be no change to user-experienced behavior although some browsers may load busy publication pages marginally faster. Ahasuerus 05:59, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
Looks good. I'd gotten so used to seeing the title field at the top of the page that it's been disorienting the past couple of days. Mhhutchins 15:48, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
I came wondering why the Bibliography page tor a title had the "ISFDB Record Number." Interesting - I'd personally position it down at the bottom below the "Bibliographic Warnings." As far as I know the record number is only used to link to the parent of variant titles, the {{t}} template, and on Wikipedia the {{isfdb title}} template? Another way to make it less visible is to add a "Show record Number" link in the left sidebar as part of the editing tools. That page would also explain where the record number is used and that you can get it from the URL.
Record numbers are also used when creating pseudonyms, importing/exporting contents, etc. As far as putting them on a separate page goes, I am concerned that it would make it harder to access them during the editing process. Ahasuerus 09:30, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
Regarding "This record was merged with record NNNNN on YYYY-MM-DD." I'd love to see that and/or a simple redirect to the new record. It would complicate the code a bit. --Marc Kupper|talk 06:48, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
It's doable, but somewhat time-consuming. Ahasuerus 09:30, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

Erotic SF cover

I recently added the book From Here to Virginity, in which a middle-aged woman gets a fountain of youth experiment and lives her life backwards. Sort of "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button", only with more sex. I believe this cover would be "R" rated if the book industry used the Motion Picture ratings. Should I "black bar" the bare breasts? Amazon UK does not, but the US has more conservative standards than most countries. Chavey 03:45, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

We had this discussion a few years ago (2008 or 2009?). At the time my concern was that displaying erotic/pornographic images without a prior warning might make ISFDB "not safe for work" and result in problems for some users. (I should note that the image that started that discussion was softcore porn rather than erotica.)
My proposed solution was to link "not safe for work" images from the Notes field with a warning explaining their nature. One editor, David E. Siegel, objected since he believed that treating art differently based on its content would be fundamentally wrong. The discussion sort of petered out.
Now that it's been a few years and we have many more scans of books published in different countries, I don't know if we could realistically establish a universally applicable set of rules defining what is "not safe for work" any more. Perhaps "images showing sex acts"? Ahasuerus 04:29, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
Yes, it would be difficult to establish a threshold much lower than that. I know I had a different reaction to the book above, with a photo cover, than I had to Alien Sex, where it's a realistic drawing instead of a photo. That, IMO, shows the difficulty of establishing a standard. But I think "depicting sex acts" might be a reasonable line to draw. (Although in the fetish communities, what qualifies as a "sex act" could be argued extensively.) Chavey 18:14, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
Since the image on a publication record is a 200 pixel high thumbnail we should be ok. For example, 253699 leaves little to the imagination but you probably have to look at the full size image to figure it out. --Marc Kupper|talk 07:33, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

Link added to the post-verification page (patch r2013-75)

A link has been added to the post-verification page to let verifiers go directly to the Edit Pub page. Ahasuerus 06:58, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

I knew that was a fairly easy FR, but 3 1/2 hours from request to update is impressive! (And yes, I used it within 10 minutes of it being installed.) I also like the new location of the "Title Record #" for TitleRecs. Chavey 07:25, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

"Translations" of non-existent works.

I'm currently entering an Italian publication series of somewhat trashy vampire/horror books. In English, the series would be The Masterpieces Series KKK. Horror Classics. The term "classics" should be interpreted pretty loosely. The stories all claim to be translated into Italian, e.g. from English, French or German, and are all listed with their "original" titles. As best as I can tell, none of those stories actually exist. All of the stories were written by Italian authors using pseudonyms that make them appear to be English, French, or German. Again, as best as I can tell, this is to make them seem "more classic" than they are, or at least hide the fact that no Italian reader had ever heard of them. But they are listed in the books as translations, and fantascienza.com lists them as translations of these various other (apparently) non-existent stories. (None of the so-called "classic authors" have any works listed in the ISFDB.) There are occasional "real" authors, e.g. 1 book each by Robert Louis Stevenson, R. L. Fanthorpe, and Robert Bloch. But most of these appear to be "fake" translations. At present, my notes read like this one, for La notte del terrore, by "Lucas Grom": 

Translation of "Journey into Fear". Translation by Maria Luisa Piazza (aka Lucas Grom).

Should I be more explicit about my doubt that the original story exists? (I mention that in the series notes, but not with the books.) If so, what should I say? Chavey 19:29, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

I didn't even bother to create a fake original title, like here. Hauck 20:30, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
Ernesto was a bit more explicit (see here): search for 'fake' in notes and you will see a number of occurrences especially in 'I Romanzi del Cosmo' magazine, whose editors were probably affected by the same complex... --Pips55 21:56, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
Thanks, I think I'll adopt Ernesto's approach. Chavey 22:01, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

Spam attacks

Is there a way to prevent this latest series of attacks? There's been more than a dozen in the past 24 hours. Mhhutchins 16:30, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

There are different ways to make it harder for spammers to create new accounts and post spam messages on their Talk pages, but they all have their downsides. For example, we could prevent users coming from "known bad IPs" from creating accounts. However, that's a very long list (provided by third parties) and sometimes it can result in legitimate users being blocked. Maintaining/updating the list and dealing with exceptions can be significantly more time-consuming than blocking individual spammers. Ahasuerus 18:33, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

Missing cover photo

I'm used to covers from Amazon suddenly going missing, but I'm not used to seeing us lose covers that are hosted by us. The book Tomorrow and Tomorrow & The Fairy Chessmen has a broken image link, which claims to be to an image on our site. I'm not sure how that happened. Any idea? Chavey 01:23, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

If you click the "Upload new cover scan" link, you will land on a page which reads, in part: "Warning: You are uploading a file that was previously deleted. You should consider whether it is appropriate to continue uploading this file. The deletion log for this file is provided here for convenience: 
20:14, August 20, 2012 Bluesman (Talk | contribs | block) deleted "Image:TMRRWFRCHSS1951.jpg" (Restore)
Perhaps Bluesman was going to replace our hosted image with a better one, but something interfered? Ahasuerus 02:09, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
I have no recollection of this one [it was almost a year ago....]. I often come across better images or sometimes just crop an existing one. I'll restore the one that was deleted, maybe that will ring a bell? --~ Bill, Bluesman 21:08, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
It was definitely just a re-crop and straighten. Fixed now. --~ Bill, Bluesman 21:15, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
Another mystery solved! :) Ahasuerus 00:24, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

Crossroads Adventure

Crossroads Adventure is a title series, but shouldn't it be a publication series instead? After all, the titles in this series do not share a common setting. If Crossroads Adventure were a publication series, then the titles could be assigned to their proper title series, e.g. Revolt on Majipoor to Majipoor. Darkday 01:56, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea. I think this series was created a long time ago, before publication series were implemented. Ahasuerus 02:16, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

Cover artist "Griesbach / Martucci"

We have half a dozen covers attributed to Griesbach / Martucci, and one attributed to Griesbach Martucci. Our rules state that we should list things just as they are listed in the book, but it seems wrong (IMHO) to list two people as one. Of course we do that when two authors adopt a single pseudonym, such as Lewis Padgett, but this doesn't seem to fit in that category since I think they are making it clear that there are two artists. Apparently, according to these books, this attribution corresponds to Cheryl Griesbach and Stanley Martucci. One cover has been varianted from the "combo name" to both authors. It seems to me the books should just be listed as having two cover artists. (Either way, all such covers should be handled the same way.) I'm not sure how the rules apply here. Thoughts? Chavey 06:26, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

The attribution for the second link is exactly as printed on the flap of the jacket. Not having seen the names before [no recollection, at least] no way of knowing it's two people. If there's more work to be done with the names I'll let someone who knows more about the pair than I do handle it. --~ Bill, Bluesman 21:02, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
Hm. Well, if Deus Irae were published as by "Dick/Zelazny", then I assume we would enter it as by "Dick" and "Zelazny" and then VT'd the title to "Philip K. Dick" and "Roger Zelazny" (and set up pseudonyms.)
I wonder if the editors who entered "Griesbach / Martucci" were not sure whether it was the name of a company or the last names of two different people? Ahasuerus 06:46, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
This style is also used a lot for Person/Company. And also for Organization/Company. Search for names with "/", and you'll see. Without intimate familiarity with the names, how would one know whether it's meant to be two people or person and non-person or even two non-persons? And what if one of the names could be the last name of a person in the field or the name of some other entity, also in the field? I think we should have a standard that's either to enter a slash-separated attribution as a single credit and then variant and pseudonym as appropriate, or we should always enter each piece of a slash-separated attribution separately. Picking-and-choosing based on knowledge or assumptions seems bound to result in errors, both in entry and moderation. --MartyD 10:34, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
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