Keith’s Comments (group member since Sep 19, 2008)

Keith’s comments from the Goodreads Librarians Group group.

I'm do SQA for a living; this is less bother than it is second nature. Thanks for the fix. I'll try adding that quote again in a few hours to confirm it.

ETA: fix comfirmed; quote added; thanks extended.

This might be more appropriate of the Bugs forum, but the behavior might be somewhat intentional, so I wanted to check here first.

I attempted to add the following as a quote, in a manner which I have used many times before, most recently 09 March 10:48AM PDT:

"You must on no account attempt to use the squares given in the Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage until you have succeeded in the Operation. More, unless you mean to perform it, and are prepared to go to any length to do so, you are a fool to have the book in your possession at all. Those squares are liable to get loose and do things on their own initiative; and you won't like it."

The link inside the quote is a standard, internal Goodreads book link including the vertical-bar and numerical edition qualifier, intended to clearly indicate to which book the author of the quote is referring. That link style worked four days ago. Attempting to save today produces the following error message:

1 error prohibited this record from being saved:

 Body may not contain Web addresses (URLs)

The rule, as expressed in the error message, is quite sane given the problems we have with linkspam; however, it appears to me as if the logic checking for such links has gotten overzealous, or else it's checking against the parsed quote text, rather than the input text. The body, as entered, does not actually contain a URL, and anything linkable internally should be safe, I would think, unless I missed some big news.

Did we really intend to block internal links in quotes? If so, can I ask why? That seems like one of *the* most useful places to have internal links, especially for author links when quotes are entered *about* other writers (most especially when the quote just refers to a last name, leaving the precise author ambiguous unless linked to a profile). FWIW, while the above is a book link, I tested for author links as well before posting, and those produce the same error message.

Banjomike wrote: "Quote of the Day for February 23, 2014"

Existing variants attributed to Chalmers and Kant have been merged, tagged, and corrected, though of course I can't do anything about the QotD version.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/43294

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/971875
duplicates QotD:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/17335

Sarah wrote: "Although as a separate note - in some cases kcw will create a physical book sans isbn/isbn13 because those isbns already exist in our catalog but have conflicting author/title information."

Are we still reporting such errors here?

https://www.goodreads.com/book/edits/...

Imported by kcw (along with one similar edition) without ISBN/ASIN, but does not appear to be a duplicate unless I missed something, which is entirely possible as my eyes are blurring from sitting too long in front of this screen. ;-)

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
into
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

On the matter of kcw import errors, this may be of interest:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/edits/...

The author names were all rather heavily appended with academic credentials. I fixed the primary, but left the secondaries as evidence for now.

Bookworm R wrote: "I know I have seen cases of public domain versions that will say something along the lines of this is an OCR version and nothing else, no book description. I don't think it is a new issue, but one that could be used to remove that type of wording and maybe just use the default description, hoping the default is at least about the book. "

Personally, I find that particular descriptor useful: it tells me that this is the worst available edition of the book, riddled with errors, possibly missing entire sections of text, and I almost certainly don't want to buy it if there is a different real edition available.

When hand editing, I will sometimes supplement these non-descriptions with the default description or something more directly relevant, but I almost always retain some indication that it's a machine/OCR edition because that is relevant data. I wouldn't want to see that relevant data stripped by another machine.

Casey wrote: "After looking into this, we found out that the disappearing ISBN13 issue was happening because some books imported from..."

As I wrote in another thread in which Casey is not visibly participating:One other case where ASIN comes in handy (for links to Amazon sales pages if nothing else) is where an ASIN has been assigned to a pre-ISBN book sold as used, especially for books old enough to have more than one pre-ISBN edition, such as Remembrance of Things Past which I could swear had an ASIN when I created it, but which doesn't show even a field for such a record in the Librarian Edits now.

Sarah wrote: "GR policy for ASINs: We are not currently tracking ASINs for any books other than Kindle Editions."

One other case where ASIN comes in handy (for links to Amazon sales pages if nothing else) is where an ASIN has been assigned to a pre-ISBN book sold as used, especially for books old enough to have more than one pre-ISBN edition, such as Remembrance of Things Past which I could swear had an ASIN when I created it, but which doest show even a field for such a record in the Librarian Edits now.

I find stuff like this constantly. Glad to belatedly see that there's a place to report it.

I would think "With References" is the same translation version and should be combined. The revision may or may not be a new translation version; both are specific to JW, so I suspect the latter is just a newer edition of the former, but I am not a subject-matter expert on JW exegesis, so I will defer to anyone who is. (ETA: which is to say that I think they should all be combined, but I'm not positive and suggest waiting for some consensus.)

Got it, and I see the others are now already merged with each other.

Do we have a standardized way of interlinking various pseudonyms with the master "real name" profile yet? I haven't seen anything about it, though I know it's been discussed periodically.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

are probably all GR Author Marsha Hinds

Steve Cypert is
Steve V. Cypert GR Author

(I've been fixing quotes, and I'm working on his now.)

I was just cleaning up the Douglas Adams quotes again and found, unsurprisingly, that the "deadlines" quote has once again been duplicated and attached to H2G2 here: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/731870

I went to merge it into the correct quote:
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1398
but I get the following error message:
"Cannot combine quote(s): 1398. One or more of those quotes has been selected as a quote of the day."

Does anyone have permissions to override that? Otherwise, I think not being able to merge into a QotD is, after a sufficient number of days, going to cause major headaches and qualifies as a bug.

And when did QotD start? Where's that even visible? How do they happen?

If you look at http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/... you'll see that most of the quotes ate linked to non-primary authors.

I add quote links for non-primary authors all the time. that is, in fact, a large part of the reason why I bother adding the other authors on all my books. This is the first such failure I've encountered.

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/846383 was first published in the scholarly volume linked, and otherwise remains buried in Collection #17 of the Morris Library at SIU Carbondale.

Unfortunately, Crowley was a prolific author, and has more works than can appear in the drop-down list of books on the Add a Quote page (223 against a limit of 200, even after my best attempts to combine editions), so I was unable to attach this quote to its proper source.

Is there some back-end work-around for this, accessible only to those with better access privileges than super-librarians? If so, could someone do that? It seems generally bad not to cite one's sources, and in fact that one of the things I tend to focus on fixing when I have time.

Please and thank you.

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...

I'm sure it's been brought up before, but is there no way to handle these constant ebook imports of existing GR authors without a dot after middle initial programatically? This is becoming repetitive, boring, and Sisyphean, and does not seem to me like a good use of rivka's time. 300-400 such edits a month, plus all the non-GR authors that are silently handled by Librarians, just strikes me as silly.