User talk:Albinoflea

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Cartoons - Tales of the Unanticipated

Welcome. The methodology for doing cartoons is "The title should be "Cartoon: " followed by the caption, in the original case, between quotation marks. If there is no caption the words "no caption" should be used without quotation marks." This pub has a examples of both types. You can answer on this page.--swfritter 12:37, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, found the cartoon guidelines after I had submitted this. Both of the cartoons (on the fep and p 56) should be listed as Cartoon: no caption. It also appears (and I don't believe this is my doing) that the Review for Hemingway's Suitcase is not sorting correctly due to an incorrect date.
In a case like this, when a Pending Edit is held by a moderator, do I go back in and Edit the Pub to make the requested corrections or does it get worked out here? Thanks for the help, Albinoflea
I normally would have approved the submission and made the suggestions but since you are a new editor I wanted to make sure that we made communications first. The decision to approve or hold and communicate is considered on a case by case basis. Unless the moderator states otherwise it is better to wait for communication with a moderator. I also changed the title from "Tales of the Unanticipated, Winter/Spring/Summer 1991" to "Tales of the Unanticipated, Winter-Spring-Summer 1991" which is our standard way of listing multi-period titles. I might note that when you enter new titles into a pub the dates are replicated from the pub date if you leave the new content date empty. For some reason there are some contents dated 1990 for this pub.--swfritter 17:09, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
OK, that makes sense.
This was a edit for me, I was just adding in the interior art to an existing Pub, so I can't vouch for the title or the dates, but it's all good information to know. Albinoflea 20:42, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

Starshore

I added a wiki page for the magazine and placed the issues in a magazine series. Should make it a little bit easier to find the mags.--swfritter 12:55, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for this; I was aware that it needed done but couldn't find instructions on how to accomplish it. Albinoflea 03:15, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
On this page you will find a link to this page. Dynamic grids for magazines are new. Rather maintaining them in HTML on the magazine wiki page I used a link to the dynamic grid.--swfritter 17:23, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
Great, I was wondering why I couldn't easily see if there were other issues of this title available, when I could for other magazines. Albinoflea 20:42, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

Robinson's Sixty Days and Counting by Easton Press

I believe you meant to remove the cover art when you created this record for the Easton Press edition. Also, I've had to go back and close the html on several of your submissions. You don't have to close lines (</li>) but you must close links (</a>) and lists (</ul>). Thanks for contributing. Mhhutchins 15:27, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

Yes, must have missed that when I cloned the previous pub; I've added and linked a proper scan of the Easton edition. Sorry about the sloppy HTML, I'll try to be a bit more detail oriented. Albinoflea 22:27, 27 August 2010 (UTC)
Er, sorry, not quite. If you want Image:60-days-and-counting-easton.jpg used on this publication, you still need to edit the publication record and enter the actual image URL, which in this case would be http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/6/62/60-days-and-counting-easton.jpg. See Help: How to upload images to the ISFDB wiki, Particularly step 6. By the way i think HTML "li" tags are for "list items" just as "ul" tags are for "unnumbered lists". Thank you. -DES Talk 22:53, 27 August 2010 (UTC)
I did edit the pub and insert the link as outlined; I believe you approved the edit. It is showing the new image properly now; was that my doing or yours?
I cleaned up the HTML with a new edit; hope everything is OK now. Albinoflea 04:21, 28 August 2010 (UTC)
I did approve your edit changing the image URL, that got the displayed image working correctly. I made no changes beyond approving your edit. The HTML looks fine at this time. Willem H. appears to have approved your edit to the HTML. Thanks again for your contributions. -DES Talk 12:19, 28 August 2010 (UTC)

Pirate Writings #8

I've accepted the submission updating this issue but moved the ISSN from the ISBN field and placed it into the notes field. You may still see some magazines using the ISSN in the ISBN/Catalog # field, but the standards have changed since those were entered. There are several unlinked review titles also. Do you know if these are speculative fiction books? If so, you can create a record for them and link them to the review record. If they're magazines or graphic novels, the review record should be dropped and an essay record created for each. If you need any assistance in doing this, just ask and I'll gladly help. Thanks for contributing. Mhhutchins 05:46, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

OK, thanks for clarifying.
This page still says "For magazines, it is allowable to enter the ISSN." http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/index.php/Help:Screen:NewPub so I imagine that should be updated to reflect the new standards. Who takes care of that?
Looking at the review section again, it appears that the unlinked titles are mystery novels. Should I create entries for these? Again from http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/index.php/Help:Screen:NewPub "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." And if I don't create entries for them, do I need a separate essay record for each book, or does the essay record for the whole review column suffice?
Thanks for the help. Albinoflea 07:34, 29 September 2010 (UTC)
It's better a create an essay record for each. There's a chance that any of the three authors might someday write speculative novels and we'd have a record of these reviews in the db. I will create an essay for the three reviews. You can look at it afterward and see how it works for any future entries. Thanks. Mhhutchins 16:04, 29 September 2010 (UTC)
OK, I see what you did, that makes sense. Thanks. Albinoflea 22:15, 29 September 2010 (UTC)
It would also have been acceptable to create NONGENRE records for each of the reviewed books. Rules of Acquisition #16 allows "Otherwise ineligible books (but not comics, games, manga or films) reviewed in SF magazines". Which way to go is an individual judgment call. -DES Talk 02:49, 30 September 2010 (UTC)
Hadn't noticed the NONGENRE hiding in the pubtype dropdown. Thanks for pointing this out. Albinoflea 15:00, 1 October 2010 (UTC)
You are right the help was out-of-date. i have corrected it. Thanks for pointing this out. -DES Talk 14:19, 29 September 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for updating the help, DES. Mhhutchins 16:04, 29 September 2010 (UTC)
Thanks DES! Albinoflea 22:15, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

Adding contents to an existing pub

Hi. I noticed you entered the contents of The Martians by hand. Do you know about Import Contents and Export Contents? You can use these to duplicate contents from an existing publication into another one. All you need to know is the tag of the publication at the other end of the operation. That can save a lot of merging effort. The tag is the series of letters and digits after the "?" in the link to the publication. It is also listed as a field when you Edit This Publication. --MartyD 10:31, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, I had seen the Export Content and Import Content links listed in the Editing Tools but did not know what they were used for. It definitely would have saved me some time last night; sorry if it caused you some extra work as well. Albinoflea 16:36, 2 October 2010 (UTC)
p.s. I did the merges, except for If Wang Wei Lived on Mars and Other Poems with If Wong Wei Lived on Mars and Other Poems ("Wang" vs. "Wong"). That might need to be a variant. I see Locus agrees with the "Wang" spelling, but many verifications agree with the "Wong" spelling, including your own verified THMRTNSHBF1999. Perhaps you could double-check and if necessary add that into the discussion you started on the help page? —The preceding unsigned comment added by MartyD (talk • contribs) 06:39, 2 October 2010
Well, that is interesting and probably something that wouldn't have cropped up if I hadn't re-entered by hand. I have the UK edition here and the spelling Wang is correct. (It's a reference to an actual Chinese poet named Wang Wei, so I guess that's not too surprising.) When I get home I'll have to check the Easton and Bantam editions, but I suspect from what I'm seeing in the Google Books preview that Wang is also correct for those editions as well. Albinoflea 16:36, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

Variant titles

I was just about to approve those variant titles you had submitted but I see you canceled them. :-)

Initially I'd held off on approving as I tend to normalize titles and so was writing a note to you plus doing some research. For example, one of the titles you wanted to do a variant on was Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. I generally would change the title to The Dark Knight Returns as "Batman" is the series name. I was looking at the help pages and decided a strict interpretation would allow for

  • Batman: The Dark Knight Returns
    • Variant Title The Dark Knight Returns

and so I was going to approve the VTs you wanted to set up. Often in ISFDB we will see the title record with The Dark Knight Returns and the publications under that will be named Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, The Dark Knight Returns, etc.

You had also wanted to add a VT to Dreams of Dark and Light of Dreams of Dark and Light: The Great Short Fiction of Tanith Lee. That's valid per what's in the help but the normal practice is we don't include the full sub-title at the title-record level.

The last one was to add a VT to the shortfiction title record Effing the Ineffable for Effing the Ineffable: An Essay. Note that Effing the Ineffable: An Essay already exists meaning that VT should have been done using the "parent already exists" part of the make-variant screen. Usually we try to capture the actual title used at the start of a story. When I see something like "An Essay" as part of the title I'll look at the table of contents, copyright acknowledgments page, and the page headers for the story itself to decide if "An Essay" should be included in the title. Often I'll find that the collection/anthology editor used Effing the Ineffable and so I'll use that and add a note explaining that the title on the first page of the story is Effing the Ineffable: An Essay but that Effing the Ineffable was used in the table of contents, copyright acknowledgments, page header, etc.

I did a quick check and only one title in ISFDB currently uses ": An Essay" meaning most people must be following that practice. 88 of the 126,211 NOVEL titles in ISFDB have ": A Novel". With that one it's possible "A Novel" does not appear often on the title page. --Marc Kupper|talk 04:21, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanations; I saw that you were holding those variants, so I went back and looked at the help pages and decided I was mistaken... :)
I must admit I'm a bit confused about the different situations when the creation of variants is permissible, but re-reading the help I believe the key take-away for me is that to qualify as a variant the pub must actually have been published under the variants, but my variants were in support of reviews of the pubs in question, so they don't qualify.
I believe in this situation I need to edit the pub and insert the actual titles that the pubs being reviewed have been cataloged as then make a note of the variants in the pub note:
If the review uses a non-canonical title which is already recorded in the ISFDB as a variant of the canonical title for this work, simply enter the title used in the review. If the review uses a title which differs from any of the known titles for this book, but which still serves to unambiguously identify the book (e.g. if the review has a misprint, or abbreviates the name of the book), then enter a corrected title, but make a note in the notes field for the publication that the review title was spelled incorrectly, and give the form of the title actually used in the review. from http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/index.php/Help:Screen:EditPub
Is that correct? Albinoflea 04:40, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
I think it is, although I'll let Marc answer for himself. (Note that "Effing the Ineffable" may come under the 'variant already exists' rule.) However, when a title has actually been printed what variants to create, and in particular, what to do with subtitles is something of a judgment call. For example, i don't enter subtitles like "A Novel", "An Essay", etc. even if they are on cover, copyright page, and title page, unless they seem essential to identifying the work. Some others do, in some cases. I don't, however, remove such when already there. Series name prefixs I do generally remove, except when they seem essential to identification or are by far the most common way the work is referred to. For example I retain the prefix on the various "1634: " books. In the case of The Dark Knight Returns the name starting with 'Batman" was so used in publicizing the movie, I might use it. Just a few comments, nothing binding. -DES Talk 13:33, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
A misprint/retitling of a book's title and/or misprinting of the book's author credit based solely on a secondary source (like a review) is not sufficient reason to create a variant and/or pseudonym. Reviews should be linked to the title record as published. If the system doesn't automatically link the review, (because it was unable to find an exact match) you can search for the book and link manually. Misprinted author credits should be corrected with a note in the review's note field, otherwise stray authors without pubs are created. The best approach is to enter the review credits (title, author, reviewer) as stated in the pub. Then after the submission is accepted go back to see if there are any reviews which the system was unable to match. Search for the book title (you may have to cross-check using author search as well if the book's title is misstated.) If it exists use the "link review to title" function. If the search found that the title is not in the database, create a record for the title, making sure the title is actually a book. If the review is for a graphic novel, music recording, film, etc, change the review to an essay. I had linked the reviews of the Frank Miller and Tanith Lee books to the proper title record before I saw this discussion. Mhhutchins 15:45, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
Also, it's worth checking the reviews that have been automatically linked to see if the system got it right. It's not uncommon for a review of a collection or a non-fiction book to incorrectly link to a short story, poem or essay of the same name. BLongley 17:26, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
Very true, and I've changed the link on more than a few (I recently changed all of the reviews of Joe Haldeman's The Hemingway Hoax from the novella to the novel record). I think the system automatically chooses the first title it finds so it's usually the first title entered into the database. Mhhutchins 17:49, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
I seem to see two different ways to go about handling the situation where a pub is reviewed and a non-canonical/non-variant title is listed in the pub where the review was published:
a) Change the title in the review listing to match the canonical title of the pub in ISFDB, then insert a note for the pub containing the review as to the title discrepancy. Links from the review to the pub being reviewed will be created automatically by the system but should be double-checked for accuracy.
b) Enter the non-canonical/non-variant title as it is listed in the review in the review record, then go back and manually link the review record to the pub that's being reviewed using the "link review to title" function.
Is there a general preference or consensus as to which method should typically be employed? Method b would seem to remain truer to the pub itself yet requires an extra step, while method a requires less work but splits the information between two locations. Albinoflea 19:01, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
Definitely A, because B creates stray authors and unlinked reviews. Mhhutchins 19:57, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
Eh? I'd definitely go for B - it's TITLE corrections we're talking about, not AUTHOR corrections. Stray Authors are a pet hate, unlinked reviews less so - but neither A nor B lead to those. BLongley 23:13, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
The author credit was not specifically mentioned, but I didn't want Albinoflea to think the review's title record (which includes the author of the book under review) has to match the review as published. Option B would lead to a stray author, if the author credited in the review is wrong. Sorry if I misunderstood the problem as presented. Mhhutchins 23:29, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
We might be advising on the wrong problem. :-/ I don't adjust titles if I can link them correctly. I'll adjust authors to someone that exists and leave a note. If I can't figure out what it should link to, I'll just leave a note. For secondary sources (where I can't, for instance, be sure which volume of Best SF/F/H is reviewed), that's safest. BLongley 00:15, 12 October 2010 (UTC)
My question didn't address the issue of author linking directly, so thanks to Mhhutchins for bringing it up. Some follow up questions:
1) Just to be sure we're on the same page, are we talking about the author of the review, or the author of the title being reviewed? Or both?
2) Also, if a title being reviewed has more than one author in its ISFDB entry, but the review doesn't mention all of them, is it necessary to add the other authors in?
3) Is the linking of reviews to titles something that a moderator typically does during the review process? Or should I count on going back after it's been approved to do myself?
4) If I need to create a record for a title that was reviewed but is not currently in ISFDB, should I do that before I submit the pub containing the review so that review record is auto-created? I'm guessing the attempt to create the link only occurs when the review record is submitted, so that if I create the record for the title that's being reviewed after I've already submitted the pub containing the review I would need to manually create the link.
Thanks, and sorry for all the questions. Albinoflea 04:16, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

[unindent] No need to apologize. It's the best way to learn (even the Help pages can only do so much.)

1) The author of the review should be entered as stated, regardless of whether it's a pseudonym or misprint. The author of the book under review should match the ISFDB record for the book. 99% of the time it does so don't worry about that until after the submission is accepted. Just enter it as stated and check the pub after submission to see if the authors link properly. Only then should you worry about correcting the review (for the author being review, NOT the author of the review, which I stated above should be entered EXACTLY as printed.)
2) It's not necessary to have all of the pub's authors in the review record for the system to match it, but if you know the book has multiple authors and the review falls to mention all, it would be nice to add the missing authors (but not mandatory).
3) As a moderator I will do it for newer editors, while letting them know how it should be done. Other moderators may handle it differently, because generally it is not the responsibility of the moderator. If you're entering the publication and intend on doing a primary verification of it, it would be better if you did the linking.
4) I usually check to see whether some obscure item from an obscure publisher has an ISFDB record, and, if it doesn't, I will create a record for it, before I submit the publication with the review. That's just me, because it saves me from doing the link manually. But it does require opening multiple tabs (or windows), researching, etc. and other editors may not be feel it's worth the effort. It's a personal thing, so it's up to you about which method you use. Don't create records for films, music recordings, comic books, manga, graphic novels, and non-genre works for authors below the "threshold". Make the review into an essay including the name of the work and its author(s) in the essay's title. Mhhutchins 17:34, 12 October 2010 (UTC)
On your last point I slightly disagree. I automatically create records for non-genre or nonfiction works (but not films, comics, Magna, graphic, novels, etc) reviewed in genre pubs, even if they are by authors below the threshold, to avoid dangling reviews. RoA #16 specifically makes such works IN. -DES Talk 23:20, 12 October 2010 (UTC)
Nothing in the rules require that I create a record for such a book. I'm not going to go into the database and remove such title records, but I don't see the point of including a nonfiction book about the planets by a scientist (who's never written a work of spec-fic) when a graphic novel based on a Jim Butcher story is far more closer to spec-fic yet is excluded based on the same set of ROA. The review is recorded because it's in a genre magazine, but that doesn't mean I have to create a pub record for the book. In fact, I'd rather there be a stray author than a non-genre nonfiction book record. My method of changing the review into an essay ensures that neither are created. Mhhutchins 23:33, 12 October 2010 (UTC)
BTW, sorry to be filling up your user talk page with this discussion, Albinoflea. Any further discussion will be taken to the Rules and Standards page. Mhhutchins 23:35, 12 October 2010 (UTC)
(after EC) No, nothing requires you or anyone to create such a record. I happen to disagree that a stray author is preferable to a record for an otherwise OUT book. There was a public discussion that led to the adoption of this RoA earlier this year, and the consensus seemed to be (IIRC) that stray authors should be avoided even at the cost of extra records. In any case, I think you should not be telling Albinoflea "Don't create records for ... non-genre works ..." when the most recent consensus and the RoA indicate otherwise. If you had written "Feel free not to create records for ... I always covert such reviews to essays" I would have no objection. -DES Talk 23:44, 12 October 2010 (UTC)
Albinoflea, this indicates the some of the ways in which people here disagree, as well as the ways in which they agree. I hope it is instructive. -DES Talk 23:44, 12 October 2010 (UTC)
And hopefully not too disconcerting. Those of us left active have had far more serious spats, but we're still here. BLongley 00:01, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

[unindent] As Mhhutchins said, no need to apologize. You're asking all the right questions,Albinoflea. I do differ from some opinions expressed above by other moderators: e.g. in (1) I'd adjust Reviewer names (and leave notes) as well as Reviewee names for an obvious misprint - I hate stray authors that much. Sometimes that's an important difference between Fan-Writing and Professional writing. e.g. Dave Langford versus David Langford. For (2), I do worry that reviews sometimes credit the editor of even a single-person collection. Correcting such makes me think I'm corrupting what the review actually says. (3) I agree - it's not the Mod's job. We're overworked already. :-( BLongley 00:01, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

Don't worry, it's all good; I moderate for a few other sites and I know how things can get. Not only do interpretation of the given standards vary, but the rules change with time so it's a constant struggle to mod the new submissions while attempting to bring earlier submissions into accordance with the new guidelines.
I also work in a library, and if you've seen the mess that is WorldCat you know that there's plenty of variation among the catalogers, and they've got the monstrous Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules to fall back on.
Anyhow, I appreciate all of the work you guys do; this site is a terrific resource, and like most sites that rely on user-generated content there's a few core people behind the scenes that make the site great due to the effort they sink into it. Thanks. Albinoflea 00:17, 13 October 2010 (UTC)
Yet another question: If a review is later re-published as an essay under a different title, is it still possible to have one be a variant of the other if their pub types are different? Albinoflea 05:05, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

Linking reviews to title records

OK, a bit confused again. I had a pub approved, which contained a review. I created pub entry for the pub being reviewed, and it was also approved. I'm going in to link the two records using the Link Review to Title function, and I'm getting the following message in a bright yellow box.

Error: Title record does not exist.

If I'm doing this correctly, the pub's record number is 333036. There's no help page listed on the Screen List page for the Link Review to Title function, but that's the only thing that makes sense to plug into the only field on that screen; I did try the pub's tag instead, and that threw a Python error: 

<type 'exceptions.ValueError'>    Python 2.5: /usr/bin/python                                   
Thu Oct 14 11:14:31 2010                                                                        
                                                                                                
A problem occurred in a Python script. Here is the sequence of function calls leading up to 
the error, in the order they occurred.                                                              
/var/www/cgi-bin/edit/submitlinkreview.cgi in ()                                                
   50                 sys.exit(0)                                                               
   51                                                                                           
   52         if int(title_id) == int(parent_id):                                               
   53                 print '<div id="WarningBox">'                                             
   54                 print "<h3>Error: Review record can not be linked to itself.</h3>"        
builtin int = <type 'int'>, title_id = '1183524', parent_id = 'HGWLLSNLVP1984'                  
                                                                                                
<type 'exceptions.ValueError'>: invalid literal for int() with base 10: 'HGWLLSNLVP1984'
Do not use the publication record number in this function, it will not work (or will work incorrectly). Instead use the title record number. A review is generally considered to be a review of a given title, and not merely of one of its publications. From the newly created publication record, click the "Title reference" link. This will put you on the title record display page, where all publications of the title are listed. The record number for the title is in the browser address at the end. This is the number to use in the "Link review" function. Note that this is the same number that you would use in a "Make Variant" with an existing parent -- the process is not unlike making a variant title. I hope this is helpful. -DES Talk 16:33, 14 October 2010 (UTC)
In the example above the title record number is 1183499. -DES Talk 16:34, 14 October 2010 (UTC)
See also Help:Screen:LinkReview, now in the screen list but always linked from the top of the Link Review display. -DES Talk 16:41, 14 October 2010 (UTC)
Ah, OK, you're exactly right, I was confusing the pub record number with the title record number. Albinoflea 18:44, 14 October 2010 (UTC)
The title record for the Wells book would have linked automatically with the review record (because I remember accepting the submission adding the pub before you updated the magazine containing the review), but they didn't match exactly. (You've since moved the colon in the title record to match the review.) Now you'll need manually link the review record to the pub's title record: 1183499. Mhhutchins 21:25, 14 October 2010 (UTC)
Yes, got tripped up by that extra space before the colon... and I thought I was being so careful...[sigh] Albinoflea 21:41, 14 October 2010 (UTC)
OK, so I've been going back though my various submissions to make sure any reviews I entered are correct and properly link to their pubs. I came across a review I had entered from Critical Wave #29 and after further investigation believe that the title being reviewed is a comic or graphic novel is therefore not eligible for inclusion. I was going to remove the review, and re-enter it as an ESSAY entry as a non-genre review as someone above suggested; however, when I use the Remove Titles From This Pub function I get the following warning:
WARNING: Unable to locate the title reference for this publication.
Removing titles while in this state is dangerous. Check to make sure the publication type is correct (collection, novel, anthology, etc.). Then come back and remove the title in question.
The Help:Screen:RemoveTitles page doesn't mention this, so I just wanted to check to see what the best course of action was before I proceed. Albinoflea 22:06, 16 October 2010 (UTC)
That's a bug in the FANZINE pub record type. Ordinarily the title reference for a magazine is the editor title record, but for some reason I can't explain, the editors given in pubs with the fanzine type aren't given the same reference title as editors of magazines. Go ahead and ignore the warning and drop the review from the pub. Mhhutchins 23:34, 16 October 2010 (UTC)
OK, thanks for clarifying, I've submitted the removal request.
I didn't see anything related to this in the bug tracker in SourceForge, should it be added? Albinoflea 03:26, 17 October 2010 (UTC)
Oddly, the review is still appearing in the list despite the removal being approved; I've re-submitted. Albinoflea 02:28, 18 October 2010 (UTC)
Can you tell us which review of which title is still appearing in which list? I suspect that this might be a case where people remove a review title and reenter it as an essay, but don't delete the review. The false review doesn't get deleted automatically. I've fixed a few dozen recently from locally-run scripts, but it seems people are missing that step quite often. BLongley 23:27, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
It wound up taking the second time around. I can't see the details, but the relevant entries in my Recent Edits list are: 
2010-10-16 22:37:05     TitleRemove     Mhhutchins      Critical Wave, #29
2010-10-16 23:21:55 	PubUpdate 	Mhhutchins 	Critical Wave, #29
2010-10-18 00:03:10 	TitleRemove 	Mhhutchins 	Critical Wave, #29
I'm assuming the time/date stamps refer to when approval occurred, and not the time of my original submissions.
Now that I think about it I believe that what transpired was that I submitted the TitleRemove request and the PubUpdate edit containing the re-entry of the review as an essay about the same time; however, during the editing of the pub record the review still showed because the original removal had not yet been approved. So, when Mhhutchins was working through the queue, he approved the removal first, then he approved the pub edit, which still listed the review thereby recreating it in the system. Since this happened within a short period of time, by the time I back around to checking the pub record the review had been re-created and so looked like it was never deleted. I guess this could be confirmed by looking at the title record IDs for the two TitleRemove operations, where they would be different numbers if this sequence of events took place; if they were the same it would indicate that the original TitleRemove didn't take.
In the future I'll wait for individual steps in the process to be approved before moving on to the next step. Albinoflea 01:40, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

Bridal Gown Shroud

Hi. Is the Bridal Gown Shroud you submitted "SF"? The description I found on Amazon suggests it is not. See the "Definitions" and "Rules of Acquisition" sections here for details. If you have the book and think it fits, that's good enough for me -- just checking. --MartyD 01:31, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

I do not have a copy and cannot be sure; the subject headings applied in OCLC (Feminism and the Arts, English Fiction 20th century) are too vague, and the titles of the works listed on Google Books aren't of much help either. My submission was entered in order to tie up a review from Critical Wave #29, and the author does have other pubs in the system. My ultimate justification was Rule of Acquisition #16:
In - Otherwise ineligible books (but not comics, games, manga or films) reviewed in SF magazines. This is done to avoid creating "dangling" reviews pointing to non-existent titles.
Albinoflea 03:20, 17 October 2010 (UTC)
That's in fact a perfectly good reason. I accepted the submission. Thanks. --MartyD 10:25, 17 October 2010 (UTC)
In such a case a novel might be recored as type NONGENRE, but we don't have good support for non-genre collections (or short fiction). I added a title note and a tag. -DES Talk 20:46, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

Kim Stanley Robinson's Me in a Mirror

You have verified this pub containing Me in a Mirror and this pub containing The Man in the Mirror. There is another Me in a Mirror that has the same date as the first one, but states it's a variant of The Man in the Mirror and has no publications. Are these stories truly variants of each other? If no, then that blank record should be deleted. If yes, than I would think Me in a Mirror should be the parent as it's the first published version (i.e. still delete the blank record and make the other Me in a Mirror the parent of The Man in the Mirror)? Thanks. --JLaTondre 15:27, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for catching this, they are variants so I've submitted a delete request on the blank record and will rework the parentage as you suggest. Albinoflea 05:06, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

Fifty Key Figures...

Hi. For your Fifty Key Figures in Science Fiction, I changed all of the content entries from NONFICTION to ESSAY. NONFICTION is only for books (like NOVEL), not for shorter works -- for those we use ESSAY. While I was at it, I added "(Fifty Key Figures in Science Fiction)" as a qualifier to the "Introduction" and "Contributors" titles. For standard/generic content titles, the parenthetical qualifier helps distinguish one from another on the author's bibliography page. --MartyD 02:27, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

Ah, thanks for that, will make a note for the future. Albinoflea 04:04, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

The Future of the Jovian System

See this question about the above piece appearing as two different types. --MartyD 13:25, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Marblehead

I have the submission to add this title on hold. Though I can find a trade paperback record on OCLC and Amazon, no such luck with a hardcover (Amazon notes it as unavailable and there are no copies for sale there or AbeBooks, usually a good sign it's vapourware). The ISBN you put in is 9780977452750, which doesn't hit anywhere. Do you have this edition? --~ Bill, Bluesman 21:31, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

I took the ISBN from here : http://www.lulu.com/product/hardcover/marblehead-a-novel-of-hp-lovecraft/5118279, so I'm guessing it is a POD title? It's reviewed as a HC in an issue of Locus I'm working on, but no ISBN given. In this case would it be best to leave the ISBN out? I'm only submitting so as to avoid a dangling review. Albinoflea 22:22, 21 February 2011 (UTC)
Sorry to butt in, but because it's a POD book, it's rare for such records to appear in OCLC (libraries would not likely order a POD title). It's possible that Lulu manufactured books aren't available on Amazon because they have their own POD imprint. I say keep the ISBN as is, but record the source for your data, something you should always do if you're not working from the book in hand. (I do seem to be harping on that a lot lately, but editors tend to drift away from the standards when not reminded.) Mhhutchins 22:29, 21 February 2011 (UTC)
Beat me to it! I'll accept the submission, and add a note. Thanks! --~ Bill, Bluesman 22:32, 21 February 2011 (UTC)
Result is [here] --~ Bill, Bluesman 22:38, 21 February 2011 (UTC)
Thanks guys, it looks like from their About page that Ramble House has been one of the POD pioneers, it may be worth adding some sort of note to their Publisher entry? Most of their stuff looks like mystery reprints, but there's some stuff that is relevant to ISFDB. Albinoflea 02:50, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
We have the note "Print On Demand(POD) publisher", is there anything more we could add usefully? BLongley 16:01, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
Was that note there yesterday...? I must have totally missed it.
Aside from their mention in the RoA there's not much on the wiki about POD items and tips for handling them, although in this case really the issue was with me not documenting my source as Mhhutchins pointed out above. Albinoflea 17:15, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
Oddly enough I just noticed on the homepage that today is Lupoff's birthday... Albinoflea 02:50, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Locus

Thanks for updating the April 2007 issue, and much thanks for following the standards that I unilaterally created and used for the first 400 issues (and the 2008-2011 ones). The one problem (if you look at the record) is that the magazine reviews aren't link. The database's system for recording and creating magazine records is different than that used for book publications. Unlike books, magazine records don't have title records. They do have editor records, but those should not be used to link reviews. And can't be used in most cases because editor records are usually merged into one-year groupings in order to create magazine series and issue grids. Currently, there's no way to get around this. Because they don't link to the issue being reviewed, I simply choose not to enter them at all. But that's no reason to remove the review records. I am concerned that someone else will come along and try to link them before they realize it can't be done, and then delete them altogether. An unlinked content record bugs some editors! Again, thanks for entering this issue, and I hope you get a chance to enter any others you may have in hand. Mhhutchins 03:21, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

First, let me say that having entered in a single full issue of Locus I have a new found appreciation of the amount of work you must have spent entering the 450+ issues you taken care of... thanks for that! Unfortunately this was the only issue I have at the moment that you haven't gotten to already, but if I acquire more I'll be sure to lend a hand.
I looked for information about linking to magazines that were reviewed in the Guidelines and didn't find anything beyond a discussion in the rules and standards section that seemed to indicate what you've spelled out more clearly above. Given the current state of affairs, I can see why some editors would be reluctant to include them if they're not linked, because without links they would be difficult to track down in the system and wouldn't contextually appear on that pages where they would serve the purpose for including them to begin with.
Is your advice then to leave these here since they've already been entered, but in the future to omit them?
Perhaps some note should be included on the [Contents/Project Scope Policy] or the [Reviews section of the EditPub page] regarding this? Those were the first places I looked, and I assumed that if it was frowned upon it would have been mentioned there. Albinoflea 05:03, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
It wouldn't hurt to leave them in the record for now. If you enter any more issues, just skip those reviews. The reason there's no stated policy about inclusion is that it's not very common for one magazine to review another. This was usually reserved for fanzines who were reviewing the prozines. When the ISFDB was created (I wasn't around then), it was policy that fanzines were not to be included in the database. Shortly before I came, fanzines began to be entered and any previous restrictions were changed. Unfortunately, any fanzine specific problems were never dealt with, and this was one of them (although it's uncommon you will occasionally see reviews of other magazines in the prozines as well.) I'll see what I can do to make the current situation more clear in the Help section of the Wiki.
With the current db structure I can see only a single solution to the problem: an editor can enter the titles of the specific stories that are being reviewed, which I have done sporadically, and only in a few exceptional cases. It's tough enough entering a record that reviews upwards to fifty books in a single issue. Can you imagine also entering review records for an additional 20-25 short stories? Once I've completed entering the remaining issues of Locus, I may (strong "may" there) go back and enter the reviews of short stories. This would include mentions of stories in collections and anthologies, not only magazines. That is, if I haven't burnt out... Mhhutchins 05:45, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
Fair enough; I'll follow your lead on this. I imagine that with the database as large as it is now, there's too much torque working against any deep changes in structure.
I suppose the trick to entering short story reviews would be making the decision as to what merits being called a review; the stories that are mentioned usually only get a sentence or two. Nevertheless, I imagine in some cases it would be valuable information to capture, so I can see why you'd keep it on your long-term to do list. Albinoflea 06:24, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
It might be worth a Rules and Standards discussion with possible software Feature Request off-shoots, as leaving out contents also bugs the more fastidious magazine editors. I think the compromise at present is to enter reviews of Magazines and Fanzines as Essays - WHAT is being reviewed can be entered in title notes for the essay, or more controversially as bracketed additions (search for "Barbed Wire Kisses" for examples). The latter style has also been used for Media Reviews (search for "Mutant Popcorn"). Linking to magazines CAN be done to some extent with the current software situation but it's one-to-one: a column that mentions several magazines can't be linked to them all, and the merging of magazines by year (which IMO is taken to extremes at times, it was only intended to reduce the length of some Editor's pages) means that even a simple case of reviewing multiple issues of the same magazine will not always work if they're spread across a year boundary. I'm sure we could develop something better if it's really desired. BLongley 15:56, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Nature, August 11, 2005

Please recheck the starting page for the Robinson story in this issue. Mhhutchins 02:00, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Page count for Nature is by volume; this issue is paginated from 753 to 888. I attempted to make note of this with the Volume 436, pp 753-888 note, but will make it more explicit. Albinoflea 03:00, 2 March 2011 (UTC)
Thanks. I missed that note. Mhhutchins 03:52, 2 March 2011 (UTC)
It's ISFDB policy to exclude cover images for non-spec-fic magazines, so I rejected the submission updating the pub. The image will also have to be removed from the database. Here's the Help page giving the policy for entering such publications. Mhhutchins 03:56, 2 March 2011 (UTC)
Thanks, didn't realize there were separate rules for non-genre magazines. How do I remove the images from the database? Is that the same as removing them from the wiki? (I don't see a way to do that either.) Albinoflea 04:20, 2 March 2011 (UTC)
Sorry, I had the wrong wording there. Because I rejected the submissions the images never made it to the database. They're still on the wiki though. I'm not sure if non-mods can delete images. Go to the wiki page for the image. If there's no link under File History called "Delete All", just let me know, and I delete it. Thanks. Mhhutchins 04:43, 2 March 2011 (UTC)
I don't appear to have those permissions, so if you could delete it, and also the one I uploaded for the Jan 6 2000 issue, that would be great. Thanks. Albinoflea 04:58, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Modifying verified publications

Hi. I approved your cover additions to The Memory of Whiteness. Please remember that when modifying verified publications, you should notify the primary verifier(s) on their talk pages. For covers and notes, it's fine to notify after the fact. For data field additions or changes, you should try to check with the verifier first (not all verifiers are active, so sometimes you have to just go the notify-after-the-fact route for all changes with those folks). It's a bit tedious, but it helps identify different publications. I dropped a note on Orcax' talk page about the cover addition. Thanks, --MartyD 10:49, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

OK, thanks for adding the note, will try to be more consistent about this in the future. Albinoflea 01:29, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Envisioning the Future

Can you confirm that the pieces by Rabkin and Robinson in this pub (pages 191 and 199) are fiction and not essays? Thanks. Mhhutchins 22:41, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

I just found a copy of the Robinson piece as published in Nature and it appears to be a facetious review of two fictional books. The title as given in magazine appears to be editorial and not authorial. I've also discovered that the piece was reprinted in Night Shade Books' The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson, although the ISFDB record for the pub doesn't list it. Can you check your copy to see if the piece actually appears in that book? Thanks. Mhhutchins 23:14, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
I have updated the ISFDB record for the issue of Nature in which the Robinson piece appeared, and have confirmed that the piece is fiction. I still need to know if the piece by Eric S. Rabkin is fiction. It's the only piece of fiction by him in the db. Thanks. Mhhutchins 23:24, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
The Robinson piece in question does not appear in my copy of the The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson, although a second piece he wrote that appeared in Nature as part of the Futures series Prometheus Unbound, At Last is collected there. (This is true for both the ARC and HB that I have access to.) I'm curious though as to where you might have seen it reported that it was included.
I had questions about the Rabkin piece for the same reasons you did; but its general format actually matches that of the Robinson piece, where two books, Science Fiction: Literal Narrative and the Adolescence of Humanity published by the Lagrange Historical Collective, Oxford, Europe in the year 2999, and SciFiUniverse: How We Became Human published by La Familia Crick, Heinlein, Mars, also from 2999 are "reviewed". So, in my opinion if the Robinson piece is speculative so is the Rabkin piece. In the Introduction, Barr writes "Rabkin imagines a far future that functions as a power fantasy for science fiction critics. His imaginative text, a next millennium review of two works about science fiction..." Albinoflea 02:00, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

Locus #555, April 2007

I've done a second primary verification of this issue, making a few changes. The page count was changed from 70 to 72 (magazine page counts differ from books in that we include the covers, not just the last numbered page). I separated the column "Locus Looks at Books: Divers Hands" into four separate records for each of the inclusive reviewers. (It's a personal quirk, and may not even be ISFDB standard, but I hate to see one piece credited to more than one person when it's clear that each person wrote their contributions individually.) The "Books Received" and "British Books" columns were changed to credit the compiler (they're credited in the short paragraph at the beginning of each column). Also, the obituary for Paul Walker on page 67 was added. Thanks. Mhhutchins 15:15, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, sound good... best to be consistent with the other Locus entries you've contributed. Albinoflea 19:51, 3 April 2011 (UTC)
Working on another issue of Locus which also has Terry Bisson's This Month in History included; can you suggest a better way to list this other than in the pub notes? Albinoflea 23:18, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
I knew I'd eventually have to get around to solving this issue. Creating a record for each one seems like overkill to me. What do yo think about just one record per issue, without any pagination? Then we can go back and add the page numbers in the note field of the pub record, and then place the title record into a title series. I'll do an issue and let you see what I'm talking about. What issue are you entering? Mhhutchins 00:00, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
I did three issues (#540, #541, and #542). But now that I've entered them as essays, I'm re-thinking that they're really fiction. What do you think? Mhhutchins 00:11, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
I changed them to shortfiction. Mhhutchins 00:27, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
I'm currently entering #521.
I agree that they're fiction, and glad to see you put them in a series. One record per issue seems fine, although there's a part of me that doesn't care to leave them unpaginated... but if we're putting all the page numbers in the pub note then that works well as a compromise; that's what I did for #555 when I was working in that, I just didn't put a title record in for it.
Perhaps a series comment is in order? Albinoflea 02:11, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

Chapterbooks...

...are container types, such as anthologies and collections. When adding a single story chapterbook, you should also create a record of the content, which is usually a SHORTFICTION record with the same title, by the same author. (If you know the word count, you can give that in the length field. as short story, novelette, etc.) Would you like to update this record, adding the content, or would you prefer that I do it so you can see the results, before and after? Mhhutchins 21:32, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

Ah, did not know that... took a stab at it given your description, let me know if that is correct. Just trying to line things up for Locus #492, where it was one of the reviewed titles. Albinoflea 21:45, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

PKD Bibliography, Revised

I'm thinking the Afterword and Annotator's Note in yours are identical to the original edition, and have merged them. I'm not so sure about the compiler's introduction. Is there anything in it that would indicate the changes in your edition? According to a reader's comment on Amazon, there's only three corrections in the whole book, and that it's a xerographic reproduction of the original. Mhhutchins 00:28, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure that it's xerographic, but it certainly doesn't seem like much changed at all.
The compiler's introduction starts off : "This bibliography attempts to cite all the published works of Philip K Dick through late 1984." Perhaps he just changed the date...
The note at the end of the Acknowledgements which I partially quote in the pub note reads : "This printing incorporates a small number of bibliographically important corrections, specifically in items 7-BOOKS (Counter-Clock World), 73-STORIES (The Mold of Yancy), and 141-STORIES (The War with the Fnools), and corrects the dates of the Univers series of French periodicals (actually paperback in format.) It was not possible to retypeset the entire book, so the many items of information about foreign editions which readers have kindly sent in are waiting for some future completely revised edition." Albinoflea 22:42, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

Author's legal name

I accepted your edit of the author data for Manchu, but changed the legal name from "Philippe Bouchet" to "Bouchet, Philippe". The rules are explained here. --Willem H. 08:38, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

Thanks Willem, I'll make note of it; haven't done many Author edits to date. Albinoflea 00:54, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

Before They Were Giants

I added some notes to this verified pub and changed the publication date from 2010-08-24 (a leftover from Amazon) to 2010-09-00. I'd also like to make "Planet Stories (Paizo)" a publication series (this is #28). Hope you can agree. Thanks, --Willem H. 19:42, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

All sounds good to me, thanks. Albinoflea 21:18, 2 May 2011 (UTC)
Also check out this image... I'm guessing pre-publication artwork. Albinoflea 06:07, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

Update to The Wild Shore

I have your submission to update this pub, but malformed HTML in the notes field is not allowing me to accept. I will have to do a hard reject just to get it out of the queue. You can resubmit, but make sure the HTML is correct. Another issue: I see you're changing the page count from 377 to "[6]+377+[1]". Will you be adding content records for the maps? (I have a second printing of that edition.) Usually we don't use such notation unless we intend on adding content from unnumbered pages. Of course, you may have added it in your submission, but the bad HTML prevents me from reading anything after "OCLC: " in the note field. Thanks. Mhhutchins 03:33, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

Dammit... I would give my left arm for a "preview before submit" function. Sorry for the gaffe, I'll resubmit. Albinoflea 03:52, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
Yes, it's very easy to make a mistake with HTML. Sometimes I wish there were a better way of linking. Mhhutchins 04:13, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
Yes, and unfortunately web design is a large enough portion of my job description that I have no excuses on this one. Albinoflea 04:35, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
I've since learned that I can resize the pub note window when I'm writing the note, so that I can see what I've typed without scrolling, which is a big help.Albinoflea 21:43, 14 May 2011 (UTC)
As for the page count, there were already entries for the maps, and I had assigned pages to them. But in general I have been adding bracketed-unnumbered page counts for all my submissions. The Help pages in the wiki don't specify that this is a special purpose notation:
Sometimes a publication will have unnumbered pages before page 1. You may record this by entering the count in [brackets]. For example [6]+320 would be a publication with six unnumbered pages and then 320 numbered pages. At times you will need to count backwards from the first numbered page to see which is page 1 and then would count the unnumbered pages that are before this. Likewise, you may record the count of unnumbered pages at the end of a publication. For example, [6]+320+[4].

But perhaps it has evolved as such over time? Albinoflea 03:52, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
Actually, I'm not sure if anyone ever used it for anything other than adding content for unnumbered pages. Otherwise there's really no value in the effort. Another thing, I wonder why you linked the OCLC record. In most cases, clicking on the Worldcat link under "Other Sites" will lead you directly to the OCLC record. The only time I can see using it is for non-ISBN records, or when OCLC has several records and you wish to link to a specific one. My purpose in bringing this up is not to nitpick, but to make sure you're not taking extra steps that don't reward the effort. Thanks. Mhhutchins 04:12, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
I honestly never really noticed the Other Sites links; didn't realize that they linked on ISBN. I can see where that would be useful, but also (like you mentioned) where there are several records it might be helpful to disambiguate. (For instance the Grafton MM version of Pacific Edge I added info to earlier shares an ISBN with the later HarperCollins version with different artwork... ) I must have got the idea from the wiki:
When a publication appears in Worldcat, it is a good idea to list the Worldcat record number (shown as "accession number" in FirstSearch records). When data is derived from Worldcat as a source, this is essential.
The simplest way of doing this is: "OCLC: nnnnnnnnnn".
A basic link can be provided like this: OCLC: <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/12345678">12345678</a>
I guess in general as I try to learn the ins and outs of the ISFDB I've been following the documentation, erring on the side of whatever listed method provides the most data... Albinoflea 04:31, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
That's a pretty good rule to follow. That last bit from the help wiki about WorldCat was definitely written before the "Other Sites" links feature was implemented. I'm sorry the documentation is so out of date and somewhat wonky. I wish I had the time to go through every page and clean it up, but that would take up so much of my ISFDB time that I'd never do any moderating, not to mention working on my own projects. And unfortunately, no one else has taken up the banner to clean up the help documents. Another trouble with making changes in the documentation is that discussions usually wind up with no clear decision, even though what was discussed eventually works it way into becoming the de facto standard. Mhhutchins 04:48, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
That's OK, I know documentation is everyone's least favorite thing to do. And with all the scripts they've been running for you lately I'm surprised you have the time to moderate. :)
And I guess if I've performed close to 300 edits so far and you guys have only seen fit to slap my wrist 20 or so times the documentation can't be all that bad. Albinoflea 05:01, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
Well, we seem to scare off a lot of editors before they've got as far as you. You do realise you're one of our Top 100 Contributors already? BLongley 22:35, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
And it's quite humbling to realize that even having broken the the ranks of the top 100, I've still only submitted 1/400th of what you guys have managed... Albinoflea 21:43, 14 May 2011 (UTC)
Well, we've been around a bit longer. ;-) I hope you're still enjoying it enough to keep going though? BLongley 23:27, 14 May 2011 (UTC)
Up to 59th now. I hope your time spent getting a local ISFDB copy working hasn't put you off. And please DO add your comments on the process - the page is so out of date it assumes people are on Windows XP or suchlike. BLongley 22:25, 11 June 2011 (UTC)
Moving on up! And no worries about the local copy, the only way we learn is to leave our comfort zone every once and awhile. I'll add whatever I learned to the Windows install page so hopefully it will be (slightly) less painful for the next person in queue. Albinoflea 17:18, 13 June 2011 (UTC)
Please do - as you can see from Development#Developers_and_Testers, we haven't got many people coding or testing. Feel free to add yourself to the list when you think you can help. BLongley 19:21, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

Ellipses

At the end of titles, ellipses should be entered as [space][period][space][period][space][period] (example). At the beginning of titles: [period][space][period][space][period][space] (example). In between words: [space][period][space][period][space][period][space] (example). This is spelled out somewhere in the help. (This is in regards to this story. Mhhutchins 22:10, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

Sorry about that; it was a direct cut and paste from the website. I'll be on the lookout from now on. Albinoflea 18:29, 14 May 2011 (UTC)
It's not a major worry, but we did discuss this a while ago and more-or-less decided (in our strange democratic way) that we should go with what the old help said, despite many entries to the contrary. I think Ahasuerus has changing the "..." titles on his "things to do" list, but as individual submissions going through Moderator approval - which would be as welcome as "X, the Y Fairy" submissions usually are. :-/ BLongley 20:29, 14 May 2011 (UTC)
Does the system perform any "sanitization" of user-submitted entries? It seems like automatically substituting the "canonical" [space][period][space][period][space][period] for [period][period][period] or the ellipsis (U+2026) character in a user's submission for the title would eliminate this problem, at least for new entries. Albinoflea 21:01, 14 May 2011 (UTC)
There's very little. The only thing I can think of off-hand is that if a user enters a 4 digit date, then they'll get a warning that it should be in YYYY-MM-DD format, and it will add "-00-00" automatically. But this does sound like a potentially agreeable FR. BLongley 21:39, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

Feel free to add a Feature Request

On another talk-page, you said "It occurs to me from a User Experience stance that the page that is displayed after a submission is made, (which now just typically shows a chunk of XML), could be employed to prompt for some of these types of follow up tasks." This sounds like a good idea, if a little vague: I've added many improvements to the follow-up pages for Moderators, mostly linking to the screens that they might want to look at next. I'm happy to do similar for any other screens, if you can clarify what's useful. (I get "Moderate submission" and "Return to Viewing" links which suit me, but it's been so long since I couldn't moderate my own submissions that I'm rather blind to what non-moderators might want.) BLongley 22:25, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

OK, let me think about this and I'll make a few proposals.
I think the big challenge/opportunity is to try to help the new user start to think like a veteran, which in my mind means thinking through the consequences of a submission. You might think you're just editing a pub, but in reality you're also creating a dozen new title records, author records, review records... and this process is not at all transparent to the casual user.
Maybe reviews will need linking, titles merging, variants made, primary verifiers will need contacting, etc, etc, etc. But the big problem is that many of these secondary things can't be started until the submission has been approved by a moderator, so there's a certain lag. Anything that can be done to help users navigate this process will ultimately help retain new users and ease the burden on current moderators.
Still a bit vague I'm afraid, but I get your drift. We could do things like check whether you've added a new author and encourage you to edit that new author's details, once it's created. Maybe spot whether a review won't automatically link, so you can go find the book reviewed. The delays involved in waiting for moderation will always cause problems, I think, but there must be some types of edit that could be improved. Keep thinking! BLongley 21:47, 14 May 2011 (UTC)
Well, yes, it's still vague but that's why I said I'd think about it... ;)
How difficult would it be to list the secondary records that are also created by an edit/submission? Albinoflea 22:00, 14 May 2011 (UTC)
Fairly difficult. When it comes to multiple records created by one submission, even the moderator doesn't get easy links to all new records created. If you can read SQL, then you can spot things such as new author creation, but not all moderators are coders - in fact, our top moderator freely admits he doesn't read any of that "jibberish". It might be wise to reduce those messages - e.g. I just approved one new publication to check how bad it is, and there's 24 SQL statements listed. To update 6 tables. A bit much really: that can probably be done better, although it's useful for newbie ISFDB programmers like me to see those for debugging purposes. But the stuff displayed for non-moderators could be shorter and more useful. BLongley 23:16, 14 May 2011 (UTC)
OK, what if we take a different tack; the submitpub script already generates the XML, which contains a summary of everything that's going on with a submission, it's just not terribly easy to look at or make sense of.
Could this XML be transformed into something that was more helpful to the end user? For instance, list all the <Author>, <cAuthors>, <cBookAuthors>, <cReviwers>, etc. together; with a label that says "The Following Authors and Artists are being created or linked to as a result of your submission" or some such statement. And likewise something similar with <Title>, <cTitle>, etc. And maybe some sort of encouragement that they should check up on these things later... (ideally some of these things could also show up in someone's pending or recent edits list.)
I'm not sure that if before that XML is displayed, somewhere behind the scenes the system knows which of these authors and titles are going to match/link and which will won't; I'm guessing not (or not until the Moderator has approved it, which is the same thing for this scenario), so there's no way to distinguish at this point what will need more work from the submitter. I also notice the site's search form is using a POST rather than a GET method, so you can't pass search parameters through the URL, so there's no easy way to programmatically create links for them to see if a particular Name or Title is in the database. But at the very least we would be letting users know that's there's more going on with their submission than at first meets the eye. Albinoflea 18:07, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
The XML is generated without any checks as to the existence of any new contributors, titles, etc. We've "improved" the Moderator screens to point out some things like "new author", "new publisher" etc, and we can copy some of that to the post-submission screens for editors if desired. It's a balancing act - we don't want to scare off editors that think XML looks scary, and we don't want to discourage Moderators that can do bibliography but have no coding skills. Long-term, we probably want a user option that effectively allows you to choose simple, normal or "DEBUG!" messages, where you can hide the XML or hide the background checks for new stuff or show all the sordid details. And we've recently discovered that we're not all that good at performance testing, with such a wide variety of test systems. :-( Still, keep the comments coming! BLongley 19:22, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

KSR's Sixty Days and Counting

Can you confirm that the ISBN of the Bantam edition is also stated as the ISBN in this Easton Press edition? Thanks. Mhhutchins 15:03, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Same situation with Fifty Degrees Below. Mhhutchins 15:04, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
Ah... no on both counts. These were some of my first pubs and I think I didn't clean up the clones very well. I've submitted edits, thanks for catching.Albinoflea

Cygwin

Hi. I noticed your updates to ISFDB:Personal Windows Website, and I thought I'd mention: you don't need to run inside a Cygwin window/shell. I never do. All of those commands work fine from an ordinary Windows command prompt. When (or if) the Wiki speeds up, I will tweak the wording a little to make that clear. Also, if I get a chance tonight (+14 hours), I will see about fixing up the two files that Ahasuerus edited so that the most recent version of the sources will build and run properly. --MartyD 10:15, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

Seconded. I didn't even know you COULD have a Cygwin window! BLongley 16:44, 15 June 2011 (UTC)
Thanks for the clarification; I just assumed since I had Cygwin open that this was the desired target, but it makes sense that you could run them from Windows as well. I seldom have my Windows command prompt open anyhow, so it's just as easy for me to fire up one over the other...
If you can get those files merged that would be great. We currently use Subversion at work, (and I really only ever update one file over and over again) so I'm not really in a position to advise on how to make better use of Tortoise... but if the goal is to have more testers it might be worthwhile to get the branching process standardized. Regardless, keep me posted and thanks for all the help. Albinoflea 21:26, 15 June 2011 (UTC)
I don't use Tortoise myself, just plain command-line CVS. And I'm not sure that the goal is to have more testers - although such would undoubtedly be useful. When you look at the backlog of Bugs and Feature Requests, we need more Designers, Developers and half a dozen Ahasueruses (Ahasuerii?) too. BLongley 02:39, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
Oh, and what is up with the wiki? Is it the new anti-spam measures that I've seen you guys talking about? Albinoflea 21:26, 15 June 2011 (UTC)
Don't know. Might be a database problem.... I updated biblio/biblio.py and common/SQLparsing.py. If you get those and rebuild, the author summary display should work for you again. --MartyD 00:43, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
Thanks, that seems to have done the trick. Albinoflea 02:20, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
And I just messed with common/SQLparsing.py myself for an Award bug.... :-/ We can play nicely with each other, honest! BLongley 02:42, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
I saw that. I didn't alter any of your changes. All I did was pull forward the additions that were removed. --MartyD 10:07, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
Feel free to alter my changes - I'm usually an "incremental improvement" person and there will usually be an even better solution available if someone with more expertise than me cares to take it on. I do appreciate that we have an awful lot of modules with outstanding changes, and I've just increased Ahasuerus' testing backlog by another dozen or so - but if either of you care to put the "Tester" hat on we might help him out. BLongley 18:40, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
Since I'm not terribly familiar with how everything is connected yet, it might be helpful for me to know what I'm supposed to be testing for with the various submitted patches; something along the lines of "new option available on screen X, try submitting pubs of type Y and Z..." Albinoflea 13:23, 18 June 2011 (UTC)
Good point. I'd recommend familiarising yourself with all the "Moderator" options that you can now try locally. If you spot anything wrong there then either it's an existing problem or a new one, and we'd like to know of either. If you want something more specific, look at the "Edit Award Types" under "Moderator Only Links" and create a new award type and try giving it to titles or people. Then moderate them and approve them, or reject them, then look at how the titles or authors appear after the updates. Check how Recent Rejects and Recent Integrations look. Find all the obscure little-used areas of ISFDB affected. Basically, try out anything you can think of - if WE have to tell you what to test then you might concentrate on only the things WE have thought of, and the problems are almost always in something we HAVEN'T thought of. BLongley 23:30, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

Gothic Studies

You should give a date or issue number in the title field of this pub record and this editor record. You also have the option of placing the editor record into a magazine series. Thanks. Mhhutchins 18:26, 17 June 2011 (UTC)

Don't know how I missed that... I gave to the review and introduction. Thanks for catching.Albinoflea 14:09, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

FReq 3318609: Artwork status as alternate Magazine Issue Grid display

I gave it a go:
Image:CoverGrid.jpg
Is this what you had in mind? I have a nasty feeling that there may be too much stress on our server (and others!) to implement it like that, but if it's really useful we might be able to do it by year, or some other subset. BLongley 20:39, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

I like it, but don't see the need to pull images from other servers. A blank one indicates that we need to add one to our server. Mhhutchins 21:03, 28 June 2011 (UTC)
Wow, that's great, it really does capture the essence of what I was trying to describe!
My initial reaction seeing the borders in gold makes me think of the unverified issues, so I think we would want to use gold for issues that don't have images so that color doesn't take on its opposite connotation. I took your image and modified it slightly:

Image:CoverGrid2.jpg

In this case, imagine white borders indicate ISFDB hosted images, while the dark blue indicate non-ISFDB hosted images. (Using Mhhutchins' suggestion of not displaying the image for stuff on other servers.) Gold indicates an issue we don't yet have an image for yet.
It is hard for me to gauge the impact on the servers, as I don't know how often the issue grid pages are viewed. Restricting the years displayed as you suggest may mitigate this.
A bigger concern on that front would be the Wiki's ability to create thumbnails from uploaded images; for a magazine like Locus with 600 issues we'd see a load of 90 Mb if each image is being loaded at the full 150 kb and being resized by the browser, vs. less than 400 Kb for thumbnails that are only 75px tall. I can't see your code, so I can't be sure, but I notice that in most places I've peeked, ISFDB is not using resized images or thumbnails, so I'm assuming the wiki isn't configured to create thumbs... is that right? Albinoflea 06:01, 29 June 2011 (UTC)
There is apparently something wrong with the thumb generator at the moment. It seems to create empty directory for thumbs, but it doesn't display them for some reason. I don't know enough about it to tell if it's a configuration issue, but I suspect that it may be. I'll need to dig some more.
Taking a step back, there are a couple of separate problems here. First, our bandwidth is limited. I don't know what the current monthly allowance is, but if we go over the limit we will be either cut off or have to pay more money. The last time I discussed this issue with Al, we were nowhere close to the limit, but if we start serving pages full of images, it may change.
Second, we don't know how it may affect server performance. Our performance is already shaky and adding an extra load may push it over the limit. Linking to other sites shouldn't be a problem since it's their bandwidth that we will be abusing. Ahasuerus 06:57, 29 June 2011 (UTC)
You could check how badly we (OK, I) abused our bandwidth yesterday - the processing was on my PC but the Images came from live servers. We can relieve the bandwidth problem by compressing the images on the server-side (although I don't yet know how to do so) but that would of course increase the CPU usage charges (if they charge for that rather than just bandwidth) and may affect other users. I'm going to resist further testing in this area for now - it IS rather pretty but I don't want us cut off! BLongley 07:52, 29 June 2011 (UTC)
In the meantime, while Ahasuerus checks how far we can go with images, I returned to the original questions: "a) whether an issue had artwork, and b) whether the artwork was hosted by ISFDB". It strikes me that while the Image display should be a permanent feature, if we can afford the bandwidth, missing or non-ISFDB cover images are more suited to temporary Wiki project pages. If people want to know what we need/want scanned, just tell me what Magazines they are happy to work on and I'll create such. Or provide the SQL for such for general use - I've posted such before at Talk:Database_Schema, but we should probably have a proper area for "Useful scripts that you can only do offline so far". BLongley 17:01, 29 June 2011 (UTC)
If we can get the thumbnail generation/configuration straightened out, that would save a ton of bandwidth, not just on the issue grid but also on any of the pub display and author display pages that are currently pulling full sized images. I would say definitely hold off on implementation until we can serve thumbs. Regardless, looks like most of the groundwork is done should that happen. Thanks, Albinoflea 20:27, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Robinson's Author's Choice Monthly

I've added notes to the record for this title. Mhhutchins 20:01, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

French KSRs

Made slight modifications to your J'ai Lu titles (mostly made french titles VTs of the english ones per new usage). Hauck 19:27, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

La planète sur la table

Conformed this pub to the new multi-language policy. Hauck 13:39, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

Red Mars Kim Stanley Robinson 1997 -> 1999

There is a mistake with the publication year in this pub (1997, not 99). I correct it. BarDenis 17:47, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

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