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.
  • ISFDB:Community Portal/Archive: Archive of old discussions on this page.


Contents

Page Protection Alert

Monday, March 17, 2008 - ISFDB's wiki is getting attacked by spammer robots. Al is working on a long term fix but in the mean time the wiki pages that the spammer is hitting are protected from editing by the general public. It's expected that Al's solution will be installed within a week. If you find yourself locked out from editing a page then please drop a note here, or on ISFDB talk:Community Portal, and we will either unprotect the page, or will do the edit, for you.

Note to moderators - When reviewing Special:Recentchanges if you see a page getting spammed then

  1. Protect the page (using the Protect tab). You don't need to give a reason but do need to check the confirm box.
  2. View the page's History, click on the spammer's account
  3. If there are items in history before the spam then
    1. click "user Contributions" (in th left menu bar). You should see a [rollback] link.
    2. Click on rollback - if the page had already existed before the rollback then it'll work and the page is now protected from spams.
  4. If the spammer is the only item listed in the history then it created a new page.
    1. Click Delete and confirm - you don't need to give a reason.
    2. Click Edit and create a new page that has just {{protected}} on it. You don't need to sign this with ~~~~.
    3. Protect the page.
    4. Note that it's better to delete the page rather than blanking out the spam as that also removes the record of the spam from Special:Recentchanges making for fewer red links to the spammer accounts.
  5. Consider protecting the talk page, or article page, so that both are protected as I've found that this particular spammer robot will try the other if one page is protected and then will give up. Each robot account only seems to spam one page meaning that once the page is blocked that account is also blocked.

The reason we don't block the spammer accounts is because the ISFDB server is behind a Squid web-caching server. ISFDB's wiki sees all editors as coming from a limited range of 10.192.168.X addresses and the version of MediaWiki we are using will also add an IP block when you block a user. Thus even blocking a single spammer account causes random non-moderator editors to get blocked from editing. Thus we have instead been protecting the wiki pages the spammer targets. It's not easy to upgrade this particular wiki as it's fairly out of date and the ISFDB Python code is accessing some MW database tables directly to validate accounts, see if you are a moderator, and to handle the comment/notes from titles and publications to the wiki. The new ISFDB server will have the current MediaWiki code meaning we can install modern add-ons to deal with spammers. Marc Kupper (talk) 17:02, 18 Mar 2008 (CDT)

With the upgrade to MediaWiki 1.12.0rc1 I've unprotected all of the ISFDB pages other than the protected template itself and a few deprecated pages that should not be edited. MediaWiki 1.12.0rc1's improvements include a simple captcha in order to add a link to an external site and a captcha in order to create a new account. Hopefully those two will keep the spambots at bay. Marc Kupper (talk) 19:21, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Intended Order of Work

Work is progressing on feature changes to the ISFDB, but just to make sure we're all on the same page, I'm posting the general priorities of what I intend to work on. In general, I want to make sure (in the following order) that all data can be edited (it currently isn't), that we support all required bibliographic features needed to make this a serious bibliographic site, that we make the editing of data as easy and error free as possible, and that data is displayed in an informative yet easy-to-read manner. As such, here are the priorities that I am assigning to each area of work:

  1. Fix any showstopping bugs.
  2. Finish port of ISFDB to MySQL/Wiki. This includes:
    1. Removing last vestiges of static html pages. After doing the author directory last month, the only real static area left to look at is publisher information.
    2. Finish editing tools. This would include awards and publishers.
  3. Add features considered necessary for solid bibliographies. These include (but are not limited to):
    1. Translator support
    2. Direct linkage of serials and reviews to titles.
    3. Possible additions to the publication table, such as editions, printings, or non-author roles.
    4. Other requested bibliographic features
  4. Error detection support.
  5. Changes/Enhancements to the display code.
  6. Internationalization.
  7. Dissembler overhaul.
  8. Minor Bug Fixing.

That's the order I consider important to minimize rework and to address current problem areas. Feel free to post here any order changes you would like considered, or any major feature areas not included above. Alvonruff 12:20, 24 Jan 2008 (CST)

Looks good: not necessarily my preferred order, but close enough. If you can spare some time to tell us what some of the intentions are in more detail it would be good - e.g. what will the dynamic publisher pages give us? Will editing Publishers mean we're going to have to start canonicising certain publishers? What about imprints? Translator support sounds useful, but is it at title or publication level? Can we have "Narrator" as well? It should be similar to Translator but even more likely to be pub-level. Direct links of reviews looks good - recent work means that we are matching far more than before, and we don't want those undone as somebody "corrects" the review - but sometimes a review states the exact edition, could there be an optional link to a specific pub as well, if that's what the review is actually about? What are the display improvements - e.g. are you dealing with the ever longer, messier pages of results, or doing something about variant displays? What does "Internationalization" actually entail? BLongley 14:30, 24 Jan 2008 (CST)
One of my current problems is that everyone has a particular area that they are interested in, and I just don't have the time to defocus across large numbers of projects simultaneously. So rather than try to answer all the questions you've posed (not that I have the answers anyway), I'd like to focus on areas one at a time. I'm currently working on awards editing (which will also entail cleaning up some of the columns that are no longer needed), and that's pretty noncontroversial (except what year should be attached to a particular award). So I think the next area to gather input on would be potential changes to the publication structure. Some areas of interest are:
  • Roles - This would encompass ideas like Narrator, Illustrator, Editor, etc. I personally think that a translator creates a new work (title) that can be published in multiple formats (publications), but that's something that should be debated.
  • Fields - Do we have all the necessary fields? For instance, most libraries (which obviously track physical objects) record a publication's dimensions. Do we care about that? People have mentioned tracking editions or printings as separate fields. Are there other fields we should support that we currently do not?
  • Publishers - We currently do not have the ability to edit publishers (like we do with authors), merge them, have supporting fields like web sites, dates of existence, or related bibliographies. We also don't link imprints to publishers like we do with pseudonyms (or even variant titles). This is an area that needs to be designed before writing code, and we should get some consensus on how it should work. There are similarities between Publishers and Authors that we can borrow from.
We can fork off a separate wiki page to discuss this particular topic if we wish. Alvonruff 14:58, 24 Jan 2008 (CST)
I'd suggest you provide a little more detail about your intentions JUST for the items at the top of the list then: "I'm going to do this unless anyone objects" is a nice stimulant. I'm not going to argue about awards, but if the next item is Roles then we can all argue^discuss that while you deal with the first problem. Or Fields. Or Publishers. Work on one, let people discuss the next, and if it gets too complicated break it up and move it down the list. This is what I'm using tomorrow afternoon for MY 2008 workload plans: not sure if it will work, but we can try. (Project management? Program planning? I've heard of them... and know people that will sell you such services... it's usually better to just let something get DONE though.) BLongley 17:43, 24 Jan 2008 (CST)
If no one objects, I intend to create a sub-page for the roles discussion, another for the editions/publications/printings discussion, another for the editable publisher info discussion, and a fourth and final one for discussion of revised/related/based on info and how we cna best capture it. I will link the new sub-pages here. -DES Talk 15:26, 25 Jan 2008 (CST)
Back in December, when it looked like Al may have only a couple of weeks of ISFDB time, I thought that the "low hanging fruit" approach was the best way to get the most bang for the buck. However, now that it looks like Al may be able to spend more time on the project (what's the emoticon for "fingers crossed"?), a more structured approach that will help avoid defocussing sounds like a better deal overall.
As far as creating sub-pages goes, we may want to use the currently existing ISFDB Feature List namespace or, for more extensive discussions, the "Project" namespace. Structurally, it sounds like we may want to do a few different things:
  • Identify any additional data elements that we want added, e.g. printing numbers, recommended ages for juvenile titles, translators/narrators/etc.
  • Identify any additional relationships between existing data elements, e.g. the proposed "relationship" functionality between variant titles and the "based on" relationship for fixups. We may want to look into the standard data elements used by libraries (i.e. the MARC21 standard) and see if any of them are applicable in our case
  • Identify any additional codes that we want to add to our standard tables, e.g. do we want to add anything to "ss"/"nt"/"nv"? Similarly, what are the codes defined for the previously mentioned "roles" by the MARC21 standard?
  • Possibly create new tables of allowed codes for certain fields, e.g. the binding field, and make our data entry forms use drop down lists instead of free text
  • Analyze which database fields are currently used for more than one purpose and create new fields for the abused data elements when necessary, e.g. "Catalog ID/ISBN" and "storylen/jvn"
  • Identify which fields need to be changed to multiples, e.g. add the ability for multiple people to mark publications as Physically Verified
  • Analyze whether any ISFDB fields should be moved to another database record, e.g. do translators belong in the Publication record or in the Title record?
  • Identify any additional functionality that we may be missing and whether we need to add more fields/records to support it or whether we can do within the existing framework, e.g. we may be able to add support for Author level reviews without changing the database structure.
As far as show stopping bugs go, I am not sure we have any at this time. We seem to have a data loss problem associated with pseudonymous reviews, but it's fairly limited and can be identified/fixed after the fact. The only major way for our editors to accidentally cause logical data loss is to change Contents level data in a publication, which then changes that Title in all other Publications -- not the desired outcome in well over 80% of all cases. I have also seen evidence that Author Merge has been used to merge pseudonyms with their respective canonical names, but I can't tell how widespread the problem is until I run some searches. Other than that, our data integrity is generally improving as the ISFDB:Data Entropy demonstrates. Ahasuerus 06:15, 26 Jan 2008 (CST)
Pseudonymous reviews is a problem, but not a major one as ONE of the review entries is still completely valid, I think. It might be worth a script to check for some pseudonymous reviewers we haven't noticed yet. But I can point people at "Fred Patten" Author and "REVIEW" Ttype in Advanced search if they want to start cleaning some. BLongley 18:25, 28 Jan 2008 (CST)
The ISFDB Feature List lacks prioritisation data, so isn't quite up to our needs. If Al wants "Roles, Fields, Publishers" in that order, I've no problem with that. Roles could be comparatively simple to record (add "Translator", "Designer", etc, columns to pubs), more complex to display. Fields likewise: it's easy to add printing number, far harder to USE it. Publishers - well, that's a minefield indeed, but one well worth tackling I think. BLongley 18:25, 28 Jan 2008 (CST)
That's right, one way to handle roles would be to simply add individual columns for each additional role ("translator", "narrator", "designer", etc). However, that could lead to a lot of additional (usually empty) columns in each record and we would have to ask Al to make programming changes every time we added a new role.
Another, hopefully more flexible, approach would be to do what most libraries do and use a table of allowed codes a la the MARC21 list of "relator" codes. If we chose the latter approach, then we would have 0-to-many "role-person" relationships for each record. Our editors could then choose from a drop down list of "jacket designer", "narrator", etc and moderators could add additional items to the "list of allowed roles" (after a Wiki discussion) the way we can add new Verification sources now without having to touch the software. Whether this is something that Al could implement easily -- well, that's a different question :) Ahasuerus 20:39, 28 Jan 2008 (CST)
One of my chief personal desires as far as ISFDB goes would be to be able to run my own copy for development/testing. Last year I set it up on a win-2003 server but am missing a copy of MediaWiki that matches the one used on ISFDB. Where can I get a copy of MW 1.4.5 plus is a database backup available that contains the MW tables that are normally not included in the backup.gz? I'm thinking of rebuilding the development machine on Linux but which version is TAMU using? While I had MySQL and some of the Python code running on win-2003 had had to butcher the build scripts to do it. I'd rather run ISFDB "off the shelf" so that changes can be sent back to Al or others interested in this project for integration. Related to this is should I use PHP 4.4.6 and MySQL 5.0.27? When I installed I took the current versions that were available. Marc Kupper (talk) 03:20, 3 Mar 2008 (CST)
The full ISFDB backup is about 1.5 Gb in size and compresses down to almost 600Gb. I download it weekly, import its contents into MySQL, then delete the history of all Wiki pages as well as all XML formatted submissions and all user specific information. I then export the results to a 100Mb backup file, zip it up and post the resulting 23Mb file for public consumption. If Al doesn't mind, I could create a custom version that would include, e.g., Wiki page histories, but I would need a place to upload it to. Ahasuerus 20:56, 3 Mar 2008 (CST)
It's more important to get the MediaWiki 1.4.5 code. Once that's located we could then work on a version of the backup that's substantially stripped of wiki page histories but does include all of the tables. The only reason I can think of for getting a full backup is to see if a script can be figured out that safely deletes all of the spammer accounts and the spam. For pages that did not have content it's easy - just delete all of the records so that even an undelete is not available. Marc Kupper (talk) 23:28, 3 Mar 2008 (CST)
At http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download_from_SVN a tool called "SubVersion" or SVN is described, with which old versions of MedisWiki software can be downloaded. At http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/branches/ is a link to download a copy of release 1.4. i am not quite clear on whether one can get exactly 1.4.5 (which was a bugfix release accordign to relase notes) or only a version that also includes later bugfixes, but it should probably be close enough for the purposes desired. I hope this is helpful. -DES Talk 09:58, 4 Mar 2008 (CST)
There is also a tag for 1.4.5. The 'branch' 1.4 should have the latest version of 1.4. At the bottom of this page there is an example how to download REL1_6_2. --Roglo 12:22, 4 Mar 2008 (CST)
I think the MediaWiki drop I made last year is on an old laptop. If I find it I'll post it on the download page. I don't have a problem with releasing a full backup, but we should at least remove the email strings to conform with the Privacy Policy, and it would be a good idea to zero out the password hashes. Alvonruff 13:09, 4 Mar 2008 (CST)

Project namespace

(unindent) The "feature" namespace seems to be devoted mostly to detailed specs on specific features already on the requested feature list -- what we need here is more general, IMO. I think that one or more pages in the project namespace might be a good way to handle this. I have no problem with that order either, except that roles and fields may interact a bit, perhaps they should be discussed on the same page? -DES Talk 18:42, 28 Jan 2008 (CST)

Sounds reasonable -- go right ahead! :) We can always rearrange things later and set up a bunch of redirects if we decide to change the page layout. Ahasuerus 20:41, 28 Jan 2008 (CST)
Very well, i am about to create ISFDB:Proposed Design Changes. -DES Talk 11:00, 29 Jan 2008 (CST)
David, you mentioned the Project namespace a couple of times. While I understand that ISFDB is the same as a Project, Project:Community Portal is this page for example, I'm not aware that there is anything special about this namespace other than it's common to MediaWiki servers and thus templates, etc. can be copied to another MW server without needing to edit it. Am I missing something or why did you bring up this namespace? Marc Kupper (talk) 02:59, 3 Mar 2008 (CST)
Nothing special about it -- it is the conventional place to put pages about "projects" such as discussions about how the ISFDB ought to be changed/improved, how we should better handle various issues, etc. I was just saying that we needed to discuss these issues and one or more pages devoted to such a discuss would IMO be a good idea -- the page that resulted is ISFDB:Proposed Design Changes, but it could have been called soemthing else or designed differently. such pages had to be put in some namespace, under some name, and it seemed to me that the project/ISFDB namespace was appropriate, because such a page was about the design of the ISFDB. -DES Talk 09:11, 3 Mar 2008 (CST)

March 1, 2008 backup posted

By popular demand, the 2008-03-01 backup has been posted one day ahead of schedule. Ahasuerus 00:16, 2 Mar 2008 (CST)

Namespace Status

Note: I am posting the following message on Al's behalf. Ahasuerus 13:42, 2 Mar 2008 (CST)

My ability to post in the wiki is pretty limited due to a separate Internet issue, so I'll try starting a new, shorter thread.

I have updated the namespace numbers of all affected pages via direct SQL statements. I don't trust the php scripts since our version of MediaWiki is very old (yet another problem), and even if I did we don't have shell access to the system, and those scripts require being run from the command line. So the pages are in the correct namespaces now, which should prevent any dataloss problems.

There is still the issue of the Wiki links, which are not all working properly. The old versions of the articles were not in a real name space, so a magazine like Analog had an article title of "Magazine:Analog". Now that it has a real namespace, the Wiki software prepends the namespace to the article title, so access to that page is of the form <namespace>:<article_title>, or in Analog's case: "Magazine:Magazine:Analog". In order to fix this, the pages need to be moved. So far, I have moved all Publisher:Publisher:Title articles to Publisher:Title. I have moved magazines starting with 'A' from Magazine:Magazine:Title to Magazine:Title.

The move process will leave a redirect page. Eventually we will remove those as well. For now the publisher.cgi bibliography looks for TITLES of the form Publisher:Title - it doesn't know about namespaces, only titles. Publisher:Publisher:Ace has a namespace of 'Publisher' and a title of 'Publisher:Ace'; when it is moved to the correct title, it will have a namespace of 'Publisher' and a title of 'Ace'. Since the publisher bibliography is looking for the TITLE of 'Publisher:Ace' it will no longer find it - but it will find the redirect. I would change the online tools, but unfortunately MY PASSWORD DOESN'T WORK TODAY!

Can anything else go wrong at exactly the same time? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Alvonruff (talk • contribs) .

Al had e-mailed me with something similar this morning but then I saw that he was posting here. I'm not sure what he's working on at the moment. I've cleaned up the Easton Press / James Gunn articles I added yesterday and am working on the DAW list pages at the moment. Marc Kupper (talk) 13:58, 2 Mar 2008 (CST)
I modified the cur_namespace field in the mw_cur table via a web MySQL interface for all pages that started with Author:, Bio, Fanzine:, Magazine:, Publication, Publisher:, and Series:. When that was completed I still didn't have WEBdav access to TAMU, so I started moving some pages in the Magazine and Publisher namespaces via MediaWiki interfaces. Once that became immensely tiresome, I rechecked my password status at TAMU, and it was finally up. I then made some custom python scripts to remove the pseudo namespace strings from the affected titles. I then modified the ISFDB apps so that they know about namespaces. I did not track down any temporary wiki pages that may have been made in the last couple of days.
So anything that had a pseudo-namespace this morning, is now located in the proper namespace and has had its pseudo-namespace prefix removed. I don't vouch for any other pages in the system at this time. Alvonruff 15:52, 2 Mar 2008 (CST)
Thank you very much. I apologize if in any way my moves and posts on the namespace issue contributed to this being done in a way that caused more work than was needed -- I have tried to help in the cleanup. I think all talk pages for pages that were in pseudo namespaces have now been moved to the proper names, and all references/wiki-links to them have been corrected. It looks aas if Marc Kupper has deleted a lot of the redirect pages created during various moves, adn has done a lot of moves to get things where they properly belong. Thanks also to him and anyone else who helped. -DES Talk 17:10, 2 Mar 2008 (CST)
When it rains, it pours :) Thankfully, the impact was primarily on the Wiki side and regular data editing/lookup were not affected. But now we have real namespaces, so the headache was worth it :) Ahasuerus 17:46, 2 Mar 2008 (CST)
One thing I ran into with the DAW list is when a page is modified/saved that Wikimedia expands the templates and builds an internal table of links. As I used templates in the DAW list the "what links here?" things were showing links from pages that had no links. I ended up needing to do a nonsense edit to add a character to affect a "modify/save" that caused the internal links table to get rebuilt for each page. The SFBC pages probably should get moved to the Publisher namespace and we will run into this as it also uses templates for the table of links from page to page. Marc Kupper (talk) 17:54, 2 Mar 2008 (CST)
Yes, that is a standard and well-known effect of editing a template -- a dummy edit on pages that transclude the termplate may be needed to correct the 'what links here" list.
If you like i will move the SFBC pags and their templates to Publisher:SFBC. -DES Talk 18:33, 2 Mar 2008 (CST)

Fantasy Book Magazine, 1980s incarnation

This was, according to locus, a "Semi-pro zine", but at least two well known SF authors (Alan Dean Foster and Esther Friesner) had work published in this magazine. I have created a wiki page: Magazine:Fantasy Book (1980s) -- the parenthetical is because of the existence of Magazine:Fantasy Book which was published from 1947-1951 and appears to be a completely separate magazine.

That's right, the two magazines were not related except for the fact that they were both semi-prozines. I am sure that the folks behind the 1980s incarnation were familiar with William Crawford's classic/collectible/etc magazine and re-used the title as an homage. Ahasuerus 14:15, 8 Mar 2008 (CST)

Some of the info from the two authors above indicate that specific shortfiction titles were published in specific magazine issues, but full contents and other bibliographic info for those issues is not available at the moment -- should woefully incomplete entries be completed, or should we wait until more complete info is available? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by DESiegel60 (talk • contribs) .

I have approximately half of the issues (perhaps a bit more) in my collection, but I won't have consistent access to them until at least June. It's a borderline professionally looking magazine (think Locus 10-15 years ago), so I am sure that we will eventually want to enter and verify its contents. In the meantime, there is no harm in creating partial entries, but we could also use secondary sources like Miller/Contento as a stopgap measure. Ahasuerus 14:15, 8 Mar 2008 (CST)
I followed the link from Sources of Bibliographic Information to Contento, and they don't appear to have anything more than a list of issues, unless I didn't look in the right place.
By the way, the sources page lists the wstcity pages as a source -- does this mean it is acceptable to enter contents based on covers and contents listings from there? and do we have permission to link to cover images from that site? Is there a comprehensive list of the sites from which we do have such permission somewhere? -DES Talk 14:33, 8 Mar 2008 (CST)
We don't have permission to link to cover images on westcity, but wouldn't want it anyway. Look again at the images. They're all watermarked with the westcity logo. About Fantasy Book: I have most of the issues. Between the two of us, Ahasuerus and I should eventually have them indexed. I'll place it on my projects list. In the meantime you can use alternate sources (Contento, Ashley, NESFA indexes), but please note those sources in your submissions. MHHutchins 15:40, 8 Mar 2008 (CST)
Turns out I only have the 11 issues from March 1984 through September 1986. Hopefully Ahasuerus can fill in the gaps. :) MHHutchins 15:57, 8 Mar 2008 (CST)
Hopefully, it won't be another Thrust-like case! ;-\
As far as "a comprehensive list of the sites from which we do have such permission" goes, there is a list on the Help:Screen:NewPub page in the "Image URL" section. Also, the online version of the Miller/Contento Index doesn't have contents level data, but the CD version does and we have a few editors with access to the CD. Ahasuerus 18:13, 8 Mar 2008 (CST)
The CD edition usually comes out on an annual basis - probably around April. I generally don't enter data from it unless I can verify it from another reliable source (Day or MIT). There are occasional discrepancies and Contento/Miller quite often replaces the credited (and sometime mis-credited) author names with canonical names.--swfritter 18:47, 8 Mar 2008 (CST)

New Series cleanup project

While the servers were resting, I put together a couple of data cleanup scripts and you can see the results on the newly created ISFDB:Data Consistency/Series Numbering Issues page. Keep in mind that while some of the problems are obvious, e.g. a series may start with novel #3 or have 2 novels #4, other problems may not be immediately visible because our software may not display them correctly. For example, if "Series Number" is set to "0", it will not be displayed by the display logic. Also, some Series start with a higher number since "its" earlier books also belong to another series and we don't allow Titles to belong to more than one series. Other than that, have at it :) Ahasuerus 00:30, 11 Mar 2008 (CDT)

If a series number is set to zero, will the zero be displayed in the title edit screen? If not, where will it be displayed and where can it be fixed? (I looked at the title screens of all the volumes that displayed no number in the Amber series, and did not find one that displayed a zero when editing the title data. Does this mean that series is fixed?) -DES Talk 11:17, 11 Mar 2008 (CDT)
When a series starts at a number higher than 1 because it is a sub-series and multiple subseries are numbered continuously, should a note be put on the ISFDB:Data Consistency/Series Numbering Issues page? In the fixed column, or where? (See my note on the Esmay Suzia line for an example of what I thought was a good idea.) -DES Talk 11:20, 11 Mar 2008 (CDT)

We are back! (and so are the spambots)

The ISFDB has been up since about 23:30 server time on Sunday night and we have been under spambot attack ever since as you can see in "Recent changes". Please do not try to block the spam accounts -- due to a known bug in our (ancient) version of the Wiki software, this may block all users! We will have to revisit the issue of protecting certain pages, but the ultimate answer is to upgrade our Wiki software, which will give us the ability to distinguish between humans and bots. Now that the TAMU staff is (presumably) back, Al may be able to get a better sense of when the long promised upgrade may happen. Hopefully. Ahasuerus 23:26, 16 Mar 2008 (CDT)

We had a few dozen spam posts overnight, all reverted/deleted now. The last infestation lasted for a few weeks, on and off, we'll see how it pans out this time around. Ahasuerus 06:11, 17 Mar 2008 (CDT)
Is there anything that can be usefully posted, about what caused so long an outage, and what we can do to avoid it in future? -DES Talk 10:42, 17 Mar 2008 (CDT)
The Cliff's Notes version of the story is that the relevant TAMU's support staff were unavailable due to the spring break. We also ended up with a shiny new blog (http://isfdb.blogspot.com/), but you probably saw that announcement on rec.arts.sf.written. As far as avoiding this kind of problems going forward goes, well, the long awaited TAMU upgrade (if and when it happens) is supposed to give us a newer/beefier server as well as better support. Another option would be moving to another host. Ahasuerus 12:01, 17 Mar 2008 (CDT)
Thanks.-DES Talk 12:23, 17 Mar 2008 (CDT)

Move to new site

At some point we may want to discuss the pros and cons of moving, but perhaps this is not the time. -DES Talk 12:23, 17 Mar 2008 (CDT)

It's hard to tell what we would have done if we had our druthers, but the decision has been rather unexpectedly made for us. This morning TAMU notified Al that the "ISFDB upgrade/relocation project" is a no-go. Consequently, we will be moving to a commercially hosted site shortly. Al is already in the middle of juggling nameservers, bits, bytes, etc. Hopefully, the interruption of service as far as our users are concerned will be minimal... Ahasuerus 15:26, 17 Mar 2008 (CDT)
If there are ways in which we can help, please post. -DES Talk 15:29, 17 Mar 2008 (CDT)
There were a number of e-mail exchanges over on the "ISFDB Moderators" mailing list while the ISFDB was down and some ideas were mentioned, e.g. enabling offline submissions so that editors could continue working while the site is down, but nothing definite at the moment. Al is doing all the heavy lifting and I am helping with moving backup files around because Al's internet connection is not all that it could be. We will have 500Gb of disk space and a fair amount of bandwidth (5Tb/mo), so the issue of hosting our images is back on the agenda, but again, we can't do anything until we have finished moving. Now that the TAMU server is up, we are trying to drag the discussion back to the Wiki, but the ongoing spam attacks are not helping. BTW, thanks for all the spam-busting help! Ahasuerus 23:25, 17 Mar 2008 (CDT)
Any spam-busting I can do, of course, is gladly offered. I am inclined to think that upgrading the wiki should have first priority once the move is complete, because that will enable several spam-fighting tools. In particular semi-protection would deal with most of the spam, particularly if we ad a CAPTCHA for new accounts, which recent wiki versions support, i think. Then we could discuss things like image hosting, including legalities, and whether in the wiki or in a separate area. -DES Talk 01:51, 18 Mar 2008 (CDT)

Request for at least partial Mod status

As lots of pages are being protected again, to help deal with the spambots, i would like to request to have my wiki-privileges set to admin/moderator status. i think i have demonstrated the ability to handle wiki pages and help out on the wiki, and someone without this status simply cannot edit any protected pages.

I understand that you have normally linked this status to that of moderator on the DB itself, and it may be that people don't feel that I am ready to moderate submissiveness to the DB yet. If the wiki status can be granted without the DB stats, that will be fine for now for me. Or, if the two must be granted together, I will promise not to use the DB rights until others here think I am ready to do so. -DES Talk 16:55, 18 Mar 2008 (CDT)

A list of my wiki-edits can be found here. -DES Talk 16:57, 18 Mar 2008 (CDT)

That's fine with me - I'm not a bureaucrat and so can't turn the moderator flag on myself. Marc Kupper (talk) 16:59, 18 Mar 2008 (CDT)
I think David has demonstrated that his extensive experience as a Wikipedia administrator can be usefully applied here, so I support giving him administrator privileges within the Wiki. At this point there is no way to separate Wiki admin privileges from the ability to moderate submissions on the database side, but I am sure David won't use the latter until and unless he goes through the standard moderatorizing process. Ahasuerus 17:48, 18 Mar 2008 (CDT)
The Borg welcomes you David. Marc Kupper (talk) 19:28, 18 Mar 2008 (CDT)
I've always been an assimilationist. :) -DES Talk 19:31, 18 Mar 2008 (CDT)
Admin flag set. Marc has already protected a metric ton of pages, so things should get a little more stable. Signed: Ahasuerus of Borg ("Your books will be cataloged. Resistance is futile.") Ahasuerus 20:02, 18 Mar 2008 (CDT)
I've always liked "'Oh, bother', said the Borg. 'We've assimilated Winnie the Pooh'."
Or "'Your ass will be laminated!' said Dyslexic of Borg." Still, there's no real need for Borg jokes, welcome to the Collective. BLongley 18:46, 19 Mar 2008 (CDT)

2008-03-18 backup file posted

The latest backup file has been uploaded. Now that the spambots have been mostly thwarted, it looks like we are back to normal after what will undoubtedly become known as the Spring Break Fiasco of 2008 :) Ahasuerus 21:04, 18 Mar 2008 (CDT)

Nah, lousy title, it'll never catch on. It doesn't work outside the US. How about "The TAMU Tumult of Twenty-Oh-Eight"? "The ISFDB Downtime Massacre"? "When Harry Met 404"? "2008: A Specfict Oddity"? "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped ISFDB-Editing and Became Mixed-Up Zombies"? BLongley 19:01, 19 Mar 2008 (CDT)

Reality gets stranger than specfict at times

I generally don't forward stuff but this one is amazing from a specfict perspective - YouTube W1czBcnX1Ww is a robotic "dog" that walks more like a goat. Marc Kupper (talk) 18:06, 19 Mar 2008 (CDT)

Walks like a Goat, sounds like a Bee! Does it sting like a Butterfly? ;-) BLongley 18:31, 19 Mar 2008 (CDT)

ISFDB:Privacy policy

One of the new pages introduced by MediaWiki is ISFDB:Privacy policy but I have no idea what to put on the page. I'm doing the thread here on ISFDB1 so that when we cut over to the new server we'll have the Privacy policy page set up. Marc Kupper (talk) 21:52, 20 Mar 2008 (CDT)

See Privacy Policy :-) Ahasuerus 22:06, 20 Mar 2008 (CDT)
Why don't we move the existing policy to the expected location under the latest version of MediaWiki, so that when we cut over, it'll automagically appear? Alvonruff 15:24, 21 Mar 2008 (CDT)
Done. -DES Talk 15:48, 21 Mar 2008 (CDT)

ezine policy

The dust may have settled on the ezine issue and the ISFDb Policy Page needs to be updated to reflect current practice: ezines are included if they are downloadable and have been assigned an ISSN. Although my personal preference is for a broader policy, applying the same standards to downloadable magazines as print magazines and even perhaps including website only zines, I intend to update the policy sheet only to reflect the current standards: downloadable with an ISSN.--swfritter 11:15, 21 Mar 2008 (CDT)

I thought that the policy was that any ezine that was downloadable, stable in its issue contents, and seemed likely to be reasonably persistent was includable. I took the ISSN as proof of issue stability, and strong evidence of persistence, but not as a sine qua non of ezine inclusion. Please note that I have added multiple issues of baen's Grantville Gazette. None of these have ISSNs. Some -- mostly the ones also issued in print form -- have ISBNs. Some have DOIs -- or more accurately they have strings in the form of DOIs, but which seem not to have been registered a valid DOIs. -DES Talk 11:30, 21 Mar 2008 (CDT)
Any discussion should probably be on the Policy Talk page or Rules and Standards. I find your definition acceptable but based upon the extensive discussions on this subject matter I only felt comfortable adding ezines with ISSN's. I would like to add Aeon magazine which is currently at issue 13, has made the transition from semi-pro (3 cents a word) to pro (6 cents a word), is regularly issued and available at Fictionwise, has well recognized authors but does not have an ISSN. With Grantville Gazette totally blurs the concepts of ebook anthology and ezine.--swfritter 12:41, 21 Mar 2008 (CDT)
Fair enough. I will copy this to the Policy Talk page, as it seems to me this is a matter of inclusion policy, rather than bibliographic standards -- the latter seem to me more focused on how we enter and display data that we have agreed we want in the DB. -DES Talk 13:05, 21 Mar 2008 (CDT)
BTW, it is usually better to use wiki links to pages in the wiki, rather than URL links -- they make "what links here" work properly. Not a big deal though. -DES Talk 13:05, 21 Mar 2008 (CDT)

2008-03-24 backup file uploaded

The 2008-03-24 backup file has been uploaded. The next one is unlikely to be created until 2008-04-07 or so due to an unusually busy travel schedule. Ahasuerus 23:37, 24 Mar 2008 (CDT)

Encyclopedia of Speculative Fiction

Is anyone here using Encyclopedia of Speculative Fiction?

I had just did a search for an author and found http://authors.wizards.pro/authors/writers/edward-p-hughes. The bottom of the page says

No, I don't use it, although "wizards.pro" keeps turning up in searches where it shows a typo HERE is propagated to several other sites. It seems to be a purely Wiki version of what we're doing - i.e. it's not going to give me the chance to discover that "Barclay Shaw" is a price via SQL. I can do more via the database here, so I'm not tempted to move over. BLongley 18:29, 25 Mar 2008 (CDT)
At one time there were a few Web spiders that periodically crawled the ISFDB and made the data available on unrelated Web sites in various formats. "wizards.pro" seems to be the most prominent one at this point, although I occasionally run into what appear to be snapshots of various ISFDB pages (and variations thereof) as of 5-10 years ago elsewhere. Ahasuerus 23:36, 28 Mar 2008 (CDT)

Analog Magazine Page

Could a moderator unlock this for a short while please? Thx, rbh (Bob) 16:31, 28 Mar 2008 (CDT)

Hurry quick. Stay away nasty spambots.--swfritter 20:36, 28 Mar 2008 (CDT)
Done! Quick, close the door! rbh (Bob) 21:57, 28 Mar 2008 (CDT)
Re-protected.--swfritter 22:04, 28 Mar 2008 (CDT)

Developer Question

Hi, I've written a small program for managing my (html-based) ebooks that I'd like to incorporate your data into indirectly by querying over the web, but I've found no mention or plans of a web-based API. Is it considered acceptable to just 'scrape' the pages for the information I'm interested in? (I'm definitely making every effort to cache the results of all queries in order to use the minimum of both your bandwidth and server resources) Are there unpublished plans for a web API in your future? Relatedly, do you need any development help? My spare time is limited, but I'm willing to pitch in somewhat - I've got several years of python experience. --PaulJ 14:51, 29 Mar 2008 (CDT)

Greetings! We don't have a Web-based API at this time, but we post the backup file of the underlying MySQL database on the ISFDB Downloads page every week (give or take), which is probably the easiest way to get to the data programmatically. Would that work for you? Ahasuerus 14:56, 29 Mar 2008 (CDT)
Well, I'd rather scrape pages since that way I always get the 'freshest' data without having to keep doing the download/update process on my end. Also my needs are pretty simple - I'm just doing an isbn->series(name,number) lookup for a couple hundred books initially and then a trickle of them as I get new ones. Are there any plans for a Web-based API? I'd be more than happy to lend a hand with it if so, or to help with design and implementation if there's no plans but you think it's a good idea :) --PaulJ 20:16, 29 Mar 2008 (CDT)
That's a good question for our programmer, Al. I'll drop him a line, thanks! Ahasuerus 22:58, 29 Mar 2008 (CDT)
Hi Paul. Something I've thought about is the concept of watchlists. If someone was interested in a couple hundred books they would watchlist them and get notified as there were updates. For a long time Al was the only one that could do meaningful ISFDB development as the current server is based on a rather old version of MediaWiki. However, a new ISFDB server is coming on line where we have upgraded to the current MediaWiki. There's still a few bugs being worked out but we are getting to the point where people can set up test/development systems to play with ideas that could then get merged into the main source tree. That said - I suppose the first priority is to get some test systems set up. :-) Marc Kupper (talk) 02:44, 30 Mar 2008 (CDT)
Re: watchlists, how about RSS feeds? On arbitrary objects or collections of objects, of course. Then you could do a search and use the RSS link that the search creates for you to watch for changes in the results of that search. Or you could subscribe to book/author/series RSS feeds individually. --PaulJ 22:20, 3 Apr 2008 (CDT)
Hm, how is the MediaWiki related to installation of the ISFDB? If you need just the data on publications, you can live without Wiki (or use online Wiki). --Roglo 13:23, 30 Mar 2008 (CDT)
For the most part they are not related but the following parts of ISFDB use the MediaWiki MySQL tables; Login, author display (for link to Bibliographic and Biographic wiki links), publication display (for Bibliographic wiki link), Series display (for Bibliographic wiki link). Your login (or lack of login) also controls which options are shown to you on all pages. I'd need to test to see if the login state is stored in cookies or the MediaWiki database. It's not clear if/when the WebAPI is made public if anonymous data extraction will be allowed or if the code will require you to log in. Marc Kupper (talk) 03:51, 2 Apr 2008 (CDT)
Certainly it is useful to have MediaWiki and ISFDB together but we do not have backups of the Wiki, so it won't help much for browsing the data off-line. From my experience, the application is working with backup installed without MediaWiki (i.e. the code looking for wiki data doesn't cause errors) and initially I didn't realize that mw_user, mw_user_rights tables are from MediaWiki. I used to create mw_user_rights (the fields required by ISFDB code), insert some minimal data into these two tables and comment out the password check but finally I wrote a script to setup a moderator's account. I can paste the scripts into wiki or upload them to sf.net, if anybody is interested in them. One problem I have is that in localdefs.py, HTMLHOST defines both were the static files are (e.g. stylesheet) and were the server with wiki is, so that if I want the on-line wiki links, then the styles are downloaded, too. --Roglo 04:46, 2 Apr 2008 (CDT)
At present there is support for two Web API calls. The current XML submissions (such as NewPub, PubUpdate, etc) are support via a REST implementation that calls for embedding those submissions within an IsfdbSubmission tag. Additionally there is a REST implementation to extract publication data via ISBN. Both of these APIs are currently used by Dissembler. These have not been made public as yet, as we should have registration support to prevent abuse. Only registered users can currently edit the ISFDB, and without a registration key, it would be trivial for someone to spoof submissions using known moderator logins.
The registration support would be pretty rudimentary. It would require a new MySQL table that contains user IDs and registration keys. There would need to be an edit application that generates a key for a logged in user, or displays the current key for a registered user who has already generated one. The REST api would have to be updated to check for the key, and the IsfdbSubmission tag would then have a child tag for the registration key. Once that's done, then we can publicize the API (and I can make the REST API part of the source distribution). Alvonruff 08:45, 30 Mar 2008 (CDT)

Nominating Davecat for moderatorship

Ref: Moderator Qualifications#Becoming a moderator for the nomination process.

Nomination statement

I nominate Davecat (talk • contribs1) for moderatorship; he has accepted the nomination. Davecat has 2333 edits and counting. He has been doing some very detailed and comprehensive work on Analog including Project Gutenberg records associated with that magazine. He has actively participated in numerous discussions and gives his opinion freely. At the request of the currently traveling Ahasuerus and on my own behalf I gladly place this nomination.--swfritter 18:45, 31 Mar 2008 (CDT)

Support

  1. Support, as nominator.--swfritter 18:45, 31 Mar 2008 (CDT)
  2. Support I generally don't have much to do with the magazines but I do monitor the general discussions and Dave appears to be ready to join Al's merry band of moderators. Although some caution would be prudent when he deals with areas unrelated to magazines.Kraang 21:04, 31 Mar 2008 (CDT)
  3. Support More moderators the merrier. Dave certainly has the knowledge to approve his own submissions, especially within his chosen specialization. And I feel he'll be able to spread out to other areas at his own pace. MHHutchins 21:53, 31 Mar 2008 (CDT)
  4. Support Magazine editors and moderators are in short supply. It feels like it has been over 6 months since the last moderator was nominated and sometimes the backlog backs up. With the amount of work involved in magazine entries, I often make partial entries (all entries from the TOC and illustrations, then reviews) and have had to wait up to 3 days to finish. Another moderator will help! Thx, rbh (Bob) 22:51, 31 Mar 2008 (CDT)
  5. Support I've approved a lot of Davecat's submissions and find the quality of his work to be uniformly excellent.--Rkihara 10:31, 1 Apr 2008 (CDT)
  6. Support Lots of good work over a number of months; good working knowledge of the magazine maze; good communication skills. Ahasuerus 13:52, 3 Apr 2008 (CDT)

Oppose

Comments/Neutral

  1. Neutral Leaning towards Support - we don't really overlap often, although as I like my Short Fiction we no doubt will work together again. I'll leave it to the Magazine Mods though, as the things he apparently does particularly well are not really my area. BLongley 18:16, 1 Apr 2008 (CDT)
  2. Neutral Leaning towards Support - As with Bill, we David and I don't overlap often. I do recall approving submissions at times and have also never had a reason to drop a note on his talk page. Marc Kupper (talk) 03:56, 2 Apr 2008 (CDT)

Outcome

Nomination is successful as per the consensus above and is closed after 5 days. Administrator flag set on Davecat's account. Congratulations! Ahasuerus 20:32, 4 Apr 2008 (CDT)

Modified rapture ...
I'm honored (and, for Bill, also honoured). I expect to feel my way slowly on this. Thanks for the vote of confidence & comments. -- Dave (davecat) 12:14, 6 Apr 2008 (CDT)

Nominating Roglo for moderatorship

Ref: Moderator Qualifications#Becoming a moderator for the nomination process.

Nomination statement

At Ahasuerus' request Roglo (talk • contribs1) is nominated for moderatorship; he has accepted the nomination. Roglo has 1526 edits and counting. Based upon his contributions he brings a unique knowledge of foreign language works. At the request of the currently traveling Ahasuerus I place his nomination--swfritter 18:45, 31 Mar 2008 (CDT)

Support

  1. Support, as surrogate nominator. Although we work in different spheres and I am not totally familiar with his work. But it would be a little unseemly for even a surrogate nominator to do otherwise than support. Based upon what I see on his talk page he is a thorough editor and a good communicator.--swfritter 18:45, 31 Mar 2008 (CDT)
  2. Support All the submissions I've approved have generally been without issue and his work on the Stanislaw Lem page put it in excellent shape. I believe Roglo has a good knowledge of how the database functions and will have no problem approving submissions, his and others.Kraang 21:37, 31 Mar 2008 (CDT)
  3. Support I've not had any major problems with Roglo's submissions. His progression from a neophyte to a consistently knowledgeable submitter was surprisingly fast. And just take a look at his user page! The man has plans, and we need to give him the access and means to fulfill them. MHHutchins 22:02, 31 Mar 2008 (CDT)
  4. Support Although I know little of his work with foreign language works, we certainly need specialized coverage as well as general coverage. Thx, rbh (Bob) 22:51, 31 Mar 2008 (CDT)
  5. Support I've had no problems with his submissions except when he's more learned in foreign languages than me (OK, that's pretty easy) but I appreciate his work and also like the look of some of his proposed projects (Phil Dick, Publication series, etc) and am happy to let him get on with them. BLongley 17:53, 1 Apr 2008 (CDT)
  6. Support as the nominator-in-absentia who worked closely with him on Lem's bibliography and some other projects. Roglo has a long history of programmer level contributions to open source projects, knows Python and has a local copy of the ISFDB database running, which has enabled him to come up to speed quickly. Ahasuerus 13:57, 3 Apr 2008 (CDT)

Oppose

Comments/Neutral

  1. Neutral I am abstaining, since Roglo works mostly in areas that I am unfamiliar with.--Rkihara 10:48, 1 Apr 2008 (CDT)
  2. Comments I'd like to see Roglo START communications more often, especially when his projects overlap with other people's. BLongley 17:53, 1 Apr 2008 (CDT)
  3. Neutral leaning towards Support - I have not had a chance to deal with many Roglo submissions but from what I see on the talk page he's well on his way to understanding the system well enough that he won't press the bright yellow "press here" button right away. :-) Marc Kupper (talk) 04:15, 2 Apr 2008 (CDT)

Outcome

Nomination is successful as per the consensus above and is closed after 5 days. Administrator flag set on Roglo's account. Congratulations, Robert! Ahasuerus 20:34, 4 Apr 2008 (CDT)

Thank you all for your support and kind comments. --Roglo 11:58, 5 Apr 2008 (CDT)

2008-04-06 backup file uploaded

...and we should be backup to our more-or-less weekly schedule for a while. Ahasuerus 01:03, 7 Apr 2008 (CDT)

Combine downloadable ezines with print magazines?

Marc Kupper's suggestion. I will merge them in a couple of days if there are no objections. A related issue: Black Static, the horror sister to Interzone, is both a print and ezine publication. Nobody has entered any print editions and I intend to enter the ezine editions if nobody enters the print editions. The electronic editions get to America a lot faster and cheaper than the print editions.--swfritter 16:31, 9 Apr 2008 (CDT)

Sounds reasonable to me. There are quite a few SF magazines straddling the print/ezine fence (e.g. Omni), so using the Magazine namespace for all of them seems to be the easiest way to keep track of them. Ditto with print/ezine fanzines. Ahasuerus 16:45, 9 Apr 2008 (CDT)
Webzine volatility alert!!! Check out this webzine. They completely lost issue #1 and all backups.--swfritter 17:29, 9 Apr 2008 (CDT)

Data Consistency - mismatches updated

I have re-run my script against the 2008-04-06 backup and linked the updated mismatch pages on the Data Consistency project page. We are still getting new mismatches from partial data fixes and new submissions, but at a greatly reduced rate, so overall the situation has improved significantly in the last 6-8 months. Now if we could clean up R. L. Stevenson's biblio... Ahasuerus 03:28, 10 Apr 2008 (CDT)

List of publishers uploaded

I have uploaded Bill's list of publishers (in CSV format) to our file library at http://groups.google.com/group/isfdb/files . I also added a copy of a nice Web based secondary bibliography of Lovecraft. It's a Word document written in French, but all English language Titles are in English, so it's quite usable even if you don't know French. The third file contains connection data for all publicly available Z39.50 servers that IndexData was aware of a year ago. If you are into writing your own Z39.50 clients, it's very useful. Of course, feel free to upload any other documents that you may find useful! (You have to become a member to upload files, but that's easy enough to do.) Ahasuerus 12:56, 10 Apr 2008 (CDT)

ISFDB editing disabled tonight

Just another note to point out that, as per Al's updates to the Main Page, the database will be read only for a couple of hours after 4pm tonight as we move to the new server. Ahasuerus 15:47, 12 Apr 2008 (CDT)

Well, here we are! The furniture is slightly used, but looks OK. The china is somewhat on the cheap side, but should do. Carry on! :) Ahasuerus 02:35, 13 April 2008 (UTC)
P.S. Please note that links from the new ISFDB pages to the Wiki are currently pointing to http://isfdb.org/wiki/, so they will remain broken until www.isfdb.org has been re-pointed to the new location. You can access all Wiki pages directly at http://208.100.59.10/wiki. Ahasuerus 03:14, 13 April 2008 (UTC)
At this point the DNS changes have propagated to some places, but not everywhere - I still see the old TAMU site, but pings from isfdb2.org to isfdb.org go to the correct host. We're getting indexed by Yahoo, MSN Search, and Google (they must launch the bots upon receipt of a DNS change) so the site is a little busy today, as we haven't been indexed by any bots for a while. Alvonruff 14:02, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Van Vogt's Quest for the Future

To quote Mike Schilling's post on rec.arts.sf.written:

_Quest for the Future_ is a fixup novel, not a collection. It combines three unrelated stories, giving them all the same protagonist and adding linking material.

We currently list 4 publications for this Title and 2 of them are verified (by Kraang and Bill). The two verified pubs do mention that it's a fixup, so it sounds like it should be safe to change all 4 pubs to "Novels", but I'll wait a day or two in case there are any issues. Ahasuerus 18:37, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Fine by me. I've moved the notes about the component stories to title level for now, along with Icshi's notes about where the Stories can be found within the book. I've also added coverart, as Icshi granted permission to use his freely. I haven't added the remaining five publications he knows of yet, to save time in conversion, and because he lists my copy as third NEL printing but there's only evidence in it to suggest second printing. (He's probably more right than me and NEL though.) BLongley 19:31, 13 April 2008 (UTC)
OK, I have changed the book's Title record and all Publication records from "Collection" to "Novel" and Removed the three individual stories, adjusting Notes accordingly. Should be all set, hopefully. Ahasuerus 01:04, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

DNS Problems with 208.100.59.10

FYI, when accessing 208.100.59.10 pages, all links now point to www.isfdb.org, which is currently down. I suspect that it's a DNS propagation issue which may only affect some editors. Ahasuerus 22:21, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

It appears that I'm locked out of the main data base. I keep getting the same message "The requested URL could not be retrieved". Earlier today I had excellent access and than it suddenly shutdown. Any suggestions or should I just wait and it will fix itself.Kraang 02:11, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
What URL(s) are you using and when you ping isfdb.org and www.isfdb.org what address to you get? You should be getting 208.100.59.10. Marc Kupper (talk) 07:58, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
I'm using 208.100.59.10 and that gets me to the home page without the nice graphics, but from there everything I try to do gets me this 
 ERROR
The requested URL could not be retrieved

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

While trying to retrieve the URL: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi 

The following error was encountered: 

Access Denied. 
Access control configuration prevents your request from being allowed at this time. Please contact your service provider if you feel this is incorrect. 

Your cache administrator is webmaster@vpr.tamu.edu. 



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Generated Mon, 14 Apr 2008 10:58:57 GMT by virt-squid-00.vpr.int (squid/2.6.STABLE6)
Does this make any sense to anyone and what can I do?Kraang 11:07, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
It looks like your ISP's DNS server, which runs the application that routes your browser's requests to the actual computer running the ISFDB database, is still configured to send you to the old TAMU server, which generates the error message that you see. If you are using Windows, click on Start, then on "Run", then type "cmd" at the "Open" prompt. This will bring up a big box with a DOS-style command line. Type "ping www.isfdb.org" and check the numeric strings that the system displays after a couple of seconds. If you don't see 208.100.59.10, then you can't really do much ISFDB-wise until the DNS changes are propagated to your DNS server :( Ahasuerus 13:02, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
I'm getting 165.91.112.109 which is TAMU's server. Hopefully it sorts itself out soon. Thanks :-)Kraang 13:17, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
> I'm using 208.100.59.10 and that gets me to the home page without the nice graphics, but from there everything I try to do gets me this
There are some server configuration issues with the have of the server wired in too many places. When you are viewing http://208.100.59.10/cgi-bin/index.cgi the ISFDB images should come from http://208.100.59.10/ but instead are referencing http://www.isfdb.org/... which causes problems for you as you can't see the new www.isfdb.org.
Run "ipconfig /all" - what are the results? Specifically, I'm interested in what your DNS server(s) are set to.
Take a look at your etc/hosts file. For Windows this would be in %windir%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts and for Unix it's /etc/hosts. Are there any lines for ISFDB? If so, you can change them to use 208.100.59.10 or better yet would be to remove or comment the lines out (with #).
If you really want to do a hack then edit the hosts file and add
208.100.59.10 isfdb.org
208.100.59.10 www.isfdb.org
Exit/restart your browser and you should see the new www.isfdb.org site. Marc Kupper (talk) 18:54, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

2008-04-14 backup file uploaded

This is our first post-move backup file. It should contain the same data as the old ones, but a number of things have changed, e.g. we have a bunch of new Wiki tables, so please post any issues that you may run into. Ahasuerus 15:48, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

I can confirm the old Entropy scripts still work, at least. I haven't had time to check the new tables yet though. BLongley 22:47, 17 April 2008 (UTC)
Well, the idea was to delete the new Wiki tables as part of the cleanup process, at least until we know what they do. Whether I succeeded is a different question :) Ahasuerus 00:07, 18 April 2008 (UTC)
When will http://www.isfdb.org/isfdb2.tar.gz be uploaded? I'd like to get my ISFDB server to match the production machine. Marc Kupper (talk) 07:47, 19 April 2008 (UTC)
The Python scripts that drive the application are maintained by Al, who uploads (hopefully) stable versions when he gets a chance, so you'll have to bug him :) Ahasuerus 17:45, 19 April 2008 (UTC)
Are the Sourceforge versions out of date then? BLongley 20:23, 19 April 2008 (UTC)
I don't see any versions. --Roglo 20:34, 19 April 2008 (UTC)
Oops - it looks like Al never had time to check in the code. I've e-mailed him. Marc Kupper (talk) 20:45, 19 April 2008 (UTC)
It would be good idea to set www.isfdb.org as the project's website - http://isfdb.sourceforge.net/ is empty. --Roglo 21:02, 19 April 2008 (UTC)
Done - I might as well upload the old code - is there a site that would serve as a good model for how to structure it? Marc Kupper (talk) 01:51, 20 April 2008 (UTC)
For the Downloads section something like this, I think. We have one package 'isfdb2', and release would be the date of the code. I would rename the file: isfdb2-2008-01-27.tar.gz . As the release notes: Info which backup is required (I'm not sure about the exact date; perhaps 'recent'?); pointer to our download page for the backup and installation info, pointer to our wiki for more info. --Roglo 09:44, 20 April 2008 (UTC)
Al has now uploaded the latest version to the ISFDB server, so we are back to normal :) Ahasuerus 16:45, 20 April 2008 (UTC)
Time to update :) But are we going to use sf.net more (e.g. upload patches there)? Upload the code? --Roglo 17:42, 20 April 2008 (UTC)
Roglo, Why don't you just add yourself to the project? :-) Yes, while Al has not been using sf.net I believe that once the code is there that he'll use it. I've never used sf.net which is why I was asking about best practices in uploading the code. For a long time the code was available as a tarball and with Al being the only developer that was fine. There was a desire by others to get involved in coding but building a fully functional development/test system turned out to be quite a challenge. Marc Kupper (talk) 07:12, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Alternate bibliographic sources

Are listings at www.fantasticfiction.co.uk considered reliable enough to base publication entries on? Perhaps if confirmed by OCLC/Worldcat data? I am seeing titles listed there that we don't have here (for relatively obscure authors).

And speaking of OCLC/Worldcat would it ba a good idea to add that as a source that a publication can be verified against? or is there a good reason not to do this? -DES Talk 20:53, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

www.fantasticfiction.co.uk is more or less Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk data with the author and story bios written by hand. As a bibliographic resource (of the works an author contributed to) it should be fine. Dave Wands has also put a lot of attention on series and those are usually accurate.
In general - anything can be used as a source. I frequently use Amazon, Abebook seller listings, etc. but when I do so I always add a citation noting the sources for each field. For example, the basic publication data may be from Amazon with the page number, cover price, and cover artist from Abebook seller listings. If you do this often enough you then you'll be able to spot which sellers just regurgitate Amazon garbage (not even bothering to get their listing to match the physical publication they are selling at all) and which sellers genuinely love books and take care in their seller listings. Marc Kupper (talk) 23:13, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
No site is going to be perfect - only today I found myself wondering why we and Wikipedia have mostly "Hanns Heinz Ewers" and Fantastic Fiction has "Hans Heinz Ewers". Neither is a Canonical source IMO, worth elevating to "Verified against" status. But a STABLE and confirmed as mostly accurate (to the 98%+ level) and widely-enough-scoped source would warrant another Verification source, IMNSHO. OCLC is looking quite useful, but for some fields only - they estimate dates at times, and Publisher info is weak or truncated - e.g. "London: Cape" for "Jonathan Cape" or "London: Panther" for the Panther imprint at a time when they were 20 miles north in St. Albans. :-/ OCLC is good for finding ISBNs (except for series of similarly named titles) that can be used elsewhere though, and foreign variants of titles. However, most good sources I find are very narrow in scope (at best for a specialist SF imprint or publisher and more often for a particular author) and so I mention those on Publisher or Author pages as POSSIBLY worth a look. We can't always find people as GENERALLY fanatic about SF books as us, but it's often not hard to find someone else fanatic about an Author, a Genre, a Publisher, an Imprint, a Series... BLongley 00:29, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
I deliberately AVOID colouring general entries with sources though. If I'm trying to date/price a specific book I have, yes, I'll go into much detail about why I chose that date, that price, that form of Publisher/Imprint name, etc. When it's a case of "ISFDB has a title, author and year ONLY" then I'll often add a publication (preferably the first) to get things started and point people in the right direction. Don't worry, I'm not just making them up, I also tend to use at least two sources - which is why I've left the submission queue a bit messy recently as some good fannish sources need a bit of checking before I'd approve my own edits based on their data. But I don't want to say, for instance, "all the missing van Vogt pubs I entered came from Icshi" and have people accept them based on Icshi's reputation (or mine, if I have one) - I want people to see an unverified pub and go CHECK things. But I'm not intending to send people on Wild-Goose chases, so if I have entered such, you know it's for good reason. BLongley 00:29, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
Oh, and before anyone gives up on Amazon entirely - for books that were around before Amazon even existed, they have some useful data still. The TRUE imprint or publisher might be there - but in the title rather than in the publisher field. Some serial numbers are there too. And often a format - there's many "unknown" format pubs with "hardcover" or "paperback" in the TITLE! Amazon is often a good start for finding things to search on - just don't submit their data unchecked. That's Dissembler's job. ;-) BLongley 00:38, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
Oh, and another thought - sometimes Amazon are good at placing an UPPER limit on page numbers. I'm specifically researching British paperbacks of the 1960s and 1970s at the moment. So I've seen a lot of books Amazon obviously don't really know about with a page count of "192" for instance - where this IS in fact the number of pages inside the book, they just don't know how many were used for adverts after the main text. I'm not happy to use Amazon page-counts in general (I've seen them several HUNDRED pages out) but occasionally I think that "default page-count" for a paperback from a particular publisher for a particular time-period is something worth recording. At least it should tell you that it's going to be "192, less a few pages". (Same with 168 and other suspiciously round numbers.) BLongley 00:54, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
384 seems to be 'default page count' for many books on Amazon ;) --Roglo 06:53, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
Apparently, publishers send their "forthcoming books" data to Amazon before they know how many numbered pages the book will contain, so they just use the maximum number of pages that they had contracted with the printing company for. As Bill said, this number can serve as a useful upper limit which is about 95%+ accurate, but the actual page count will be almost always different. Ahasuerus 00:10, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
As far as OCLC goes, it can be an extremely useful source of information about otherwise hard to find books, e.g. SF published by Christian publishers, especially if you use the FirstSearch interface (note that the URL has recently changed -- see Sources of Bibliographic Information for the new URL), which lets you run combined searches by publisher/year/subject/etc. Of course, OCLC has its issues, including the ones that Bill mentioned, but overall their data is pretty good. Ahasuerus 00:23, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
Two general comments about using secondary sources. First, it's important to make sure that your cut-and-paste worked correctly. I have approved and corrected a number of submissions where the Author was entered in the Title field, the Number of Pages value was missing a digit, there was extraneous punctuation at the end of the title, etc etc. One submission had three typos, all of them seemingly due to cut-and-paste errors.
Second, please make sure to record where the data comes from since it makes other editors' life much easier when two records disagree and we need to determine their source to figure out what's going on. And if you have a typo in your submission, the approving moderator will thank you for making it easy to go to the source and determine what it says :) Ahasuerus 00:23, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

2008-04-21 backup uploaded

...and now I am trying to figure out why the Wiki slows down to a crawl from time to time. Ahasuerus 05:30, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

It looks like our server is experiencing memory problems and the bad RAM module will be replaced on Friday during a brief downtime. Hopefully, it will address our performance problems! Ahasuerus 00:48, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Strange Series Numbers

Just a heads up that one of our editors, Alibrarian (who, unfortunately, is yet to find this Wiki), apparently has a strange problem with cut-and-paste. Sometimes his submission will have a valid Series name, but then it will add a bogus 4 digit Series Number. I am not sure what may be causing these problems (a cut-and-paste from a text editor that uses Unicode?), but the solution is to remove the bogus number. Ahasuerus 00:32, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I think it's on the wish list but having the wiki new message top banner show up in the ISFDB when you are logged in would be nice. Even if you use the wiki it can mean finding out about a message hours earlier. Dana Carson 07:34, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

2 William Blakes?

I wonder if we may be conflating 2 different William Blakes, one a famous poet and the other one a contemporary artist. Would anybody happen to know anything about