Goodreads Librarians Group discussion
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Issues with Quotes
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Policy on Authors adding their own quotes?
Riona wrote: "not-as-witty-as-he-thinks-they-are quips all added by the author himself, it just seems like such a waste."
Mel wrote: "I agree that it's tacky for authors to add their own but eh. But in this case yes, I definitely think that is spam and their added quotes should be removed (with further permissions denied!)."
How exactly are these comments not an attack on the author himself? It's clear that it's not just about the amount of quotes he has, but also what he has on Goodreads. How is this any different from Nazi Germany burning books? They clearly want him kicked off, and it is censorship. Bottom line!
Mel wrote: "I agree that it's tacky for authors to add their own but eh. But in this case yes, I definitely think that is spam and their added quotes should be removed (with further permissions denied!)."
How exactly are these comments not an attack on the author himself? It's clear that it's not just about the amount of quotes he has, but also what he has on Goodreads. How is this any different from Nazi Germany burning books? They clearly want him kicked off, and it is censorship. Bottom line!
Mod
However, if you continue to hysterically attack the other participants in this thread, I will ban you from this group. Which I notice you just joined today.
Okay guys, Godwin's Law has been invoked, looks like it's all over now!Seriously, I don't have any agenda here except wanting to make Goodreads the best place it can be, and part of that is having clear policies on what is and isn't allowed. Never in this thread have I said that this author should be "kicked off" Goodreads. I don't even know where you're getting that from. I just think there should be some hard limits in place on how much authors can quote themselves. I agree with others who have said that quotes in the database have much more value when they're added by readers.
Geez, take a breath! Riona is expressing HER opinion on what SHE views as spam. Not once did she name or personally attack said author. I have no idea which author we're talking about, haven't seen the first quote and I can tell you *I* think it's spamming.But again, I'll repeat: His exuberance for quote submission has left part of the database inaccessible and should be dealt with. Don't care how 'popular' he is.
Oh, and have some respect for those that actually suffered under the Nazi regime and stop comparing this benign policy discussion to the real pain, suffering and repression that took place there.
Goodreads runs on quotes (most of which are uploaded by the author of said quote), group discussions such as this most idiotic one we’ve got going on here and book shelves. So Riona, what you’re saying is we take one of the three main reasons for Goodreads and throw it out the window because for some unknown reason you happen to dislike this one author, and let’s check here and be sure, oh yeah you’re singling him out from all the other authors who do the same thing! Who the hell cares this much how many quotes he has?
How does no one see that this is censorship? I hope you’ve all been practicing your Nazi march on the way to the bonfire.
Apparently this author has acolytes....
Ones with little or no reading comprehension skills at that.
Mod
Nicole wrote: "Goodreads runs on quotes (most of which are uploaded by the author of said quote)"Um, not really. I'd say the vast majority of quotes are added by fans/readers.
I feel the need to point out that both of the authors who have recently chimed in to fling accusations at me are fans of each other, as well as the author this thread is about, and have liked many, many quotes of each others' and the original author. It's kind of rich to call me the one with the agenda.
I don't want to say the "S" word, but.... I have some suspicions.
Mod
rivka wrote: "I am going to ask that there be no more responses to Amy/Nicole. I'd rather not lock this thread."Fair enough. It looks like they were both banned (or left voluntarily, don't know which) so I guess that won't be an issue.
I hope we can still discuss this issue in a civil manner, though.
Well, I think limits on quotes would be 'not a bad thing' but I think trying to find an arbitrary number of quotes that most agree on might be tough. If the developers come back with some information about how many is too many in terms of page building, that might be the way to go. It's hard to argue with "more than x breaks things". :)
Mod
As do I, which is why I don't want to lock it.
Here's what I think:1) GR's has the right, like any business, to make their own rules and standards. This is obvious as they have set the policy on what is and isn't a book on the website. This is what we'd like to see when it comes to what IS and ISN'T spamming.
Sure there will need to be a case by case basis, but there should be a hard line, say x amount of quotes per x book. Like someone divided the amount of quotes by the amount of books and found that the amount per books almost exceeded 1 per page.
2) I have no problem with authors promoting their work, but when they go to far or enlist other "friends"/accounts to do this to excess, they are obviously exploiting the system WHICH IS NOT OKAY.
3) IF this is causing errors in the system and making sections hard to load on certain web devices, then I agree that something should be done. I already get a ton of GR's is over capacity errors and gateway errors.
I'm not saying the servers need some kind of upgrade, because the site should run fine, but that some things are causing more issues than good (such as trying to separate 1 illustrated adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea from the 200 POD/crap publishers).
On a final note: I think everyone has a right to their opinion and that this author probably thinks... well it's my quote page, I can post as much as I want. Author's seem to mistake GR's as a promotion site rather than a book archive and try to do things against policy (like delete/update books/covers).
I'm not saying authors should have no rights, but that they need to understand that GR's is a SERVICE that they are using for free to communicate with their fans, not a free advertising agency.
rivka wrote: "Amy wrote: "Shakespeare, one of the most quotable authors ever, has fewer than 3000 quotes in the database. It takes some hubris to consider oneself more quotable than Shakespeare. "I think this comes under:
"Can one desire too much of a good thing?"
To quote or not to quote, that is the question?! ;-)
It does look like one of his books is almost entirely quotes and all of those have been added
I agree there is a limit when this turns in to spam but what the limit is is more difficult. I think it is not just a number but who is adding the quotes if there are 300 hundred quotes added by 60 different people - that's one thing - implies to me that 60 people liked the quotes / found something memorial about them.
300 quotes added by the author - an attempt at free self promotions / advertising.
(the numbers are just examples)
Agreed that it would make sense for the percentage of quotes added by the author to be taken into account, at least once it passes a certain number. An author adding, say 50, of their own quotes when no one else has isn't a very big deal, but if an author has added 1000 and other users have added merely 25, well that's spammy.And as for a hard line, I think the point where it breaks the site and makes things inaccessible should be it. I have no idea what that number is, personally, but that's when it becomes more than spam and turns into a real problem.
Perhaps some ways to add limitations without putting in a hard cap would be a good idea. Something like only 20 quotes attributable to a single author can be added per day across all the users of the site. Or any one individual user can only add 20 quotes per day regardless of the author they quote. That would make it harder to do spammy type things without additional accounts and since GR does have policies about multiple accounts, that can be handled.
Just tossing out some suggestions to maybe make it better.
Yea, a cap on how many quotes can be added by a user each day would be nice, but a hassle to implement I imagine. I mean, what normal user adds more than 30 quotes a day. That is a lot of your life right there.
I have to admit this comes off pretty spammy. I don't mind authors adding their own quote every once in a while, but 6,000 seems excessive. How to deal with it though? I can see this could be tricky. Since (so far) it's a one time case, maybe a plea to the author to reduce the amount of his quotes to something more reasonable? I'd point out that the excessive quotes is only going to hurt him in the eyes of readers anyway.
Put a limit on the number of quotes an author can add him or herself. I would say 500. Let's face it, this is pure self-promotion and limits should be placed on self-promotion. If enthusiastic readers want to add additional quotes, that's fine, but put a higher limit on quotes from a single book, and another limit on all quotes related to one author.
Spammy? Maybe (he's not pushing these quotations out to anyone, so the argument can be made that this is technically not spamming). Shamelessly self-promoting? Absolutely. Annoying? YES.Against GR T&Cs? I don't think so. It does say that the quotation needs to be from a "notable person," but we seem to define that fairly broadly here. Removing these quotations on that ground would require coming up with a set definition of the word "notable" and evaluating the work of all authors with quotations. As we don't have that definition, the criterion seems to be (and correct me if I'm wrong) just any published author. I'm not saying this is the right way of doing things--I'm simply suggesting that he has not violated any existing GR policy...which isn't to say that a new policy shouldn't be created in light of this.
Yes, if the number of quotations are in some way hindering the GR servers then something should be done.
I agree with Jessica above--what about a general message saying that the number of quotations is preventing general quotation maintenance to be completed and ask that he combine/cut down on them himself? As Amy correctly noted (despite her unnecessary vitriol), his quotations (not a majority but still quite a few) have been added by many people. Surely this shows that at least those add value to the GR community.
Certainly he hasn't violated any GR policy. The question is, now that we see an author who has put up thousands of quotes from his own books, do we need a new policy. The fact that maintenance can't even be done on his quotes because there are so many of them points to "yes."
rivka wrote: "Using an alternate login simply means I will ban both."LOL, you go girl! Love it; why do sockpuppets never believe moderators will notice suddenly new logins ranting on same issues?
I think for now, yes the author needs to be contacted by staff and asked to cut down their quotes by AT LEAST HALF (which would match him to Shakespeare)Sure, he hasn't broken any rules. That is why he hasn't been straight deleted, warned, banned, whatever.
I think that there needs to be a little stricter policies on GR authors that apply to heavy/inappropriate advertising:
* Adding a book to 50+ lists (when they don't apply)
* Posting links/info on multiple groups
I'm sure there are more things that I can't think of.
If authors clearly know that inappropriate behavior is inexcusable, maybe they will not do it... or at least do it on other accounts that can be banned/deleted.
Lobstergirl wrote: "Certainly he hasn't violated any GR policy. The question is, now that we see an author who has put up thousands of quotes from his own books, do we need a new policy. The fact that maintenance ca..."Not sure dealing completely with reasonable people, but if author is not behind the sockpuppetry/nazi/bookburning crap that crept in, surely letting them know there are database issues with his book product pages no longer being accessible for editing/maintenance/loading stuff would make him amenable to limiting the quotes?
If not, terms of service aside, I am still convinced (not a lawyer) there are some copyright issues in question that unfortunately get murky since author holds the copyright.
But, the what database can/can't handle is something that is reasonable to put in future Terms of Service.
And copyright laws a good justification for limiting user quotes even if murky when it comes to limiting authors.
Goodreads limits how many members you can friend per day so see no reason cannot also limit how many quotes per day (definitely how many quotes per author, notable or book per day). Hopefully a similar programming issue. Not even touching on censorship issue because can always load another day; just obviously a restriction to aid in database performance and prevent spamming or sockpuppet manipulations.
Can't even imagine the limits would even be noticed by most members.
If the number of quotes is affecting the site at all, I would agree there is a need to create a policy about this. Does seem odd to me to have more quotes than Shakespeare.
Lobstergirl wrote: "Certainly he hasn't violated any GR policy. The question is, now that we see an author who has put up thousands of quotes from his own books, do we need a new policy. The fact that maintenance can't even be done on his quotes because there are so many of them points to "yes.""Exactly. I think others have stated this issue more clearly than I did in my first post. When an author has added such an exorbitant amount of quotes that it essentially breaks a section of the database, that's a problem and should be addressed. The developers should take a look at how many quotes per author the system can reasonably handle, and a policy should be in place to enforce that.
I don't know how many that number is, and I'm not a programmer so I can't even guess at the resources needed. However, consider the amount of quotes that some of the most famous/popular/quotable authors have listed on the site -- Oscar Wilde at 1,569; J.K. Rowling 1,448; Shakespeare 1,921; Jane Austen 1,207, Stephenie Meyer 1,036. (Please note I'm not making any value judgement here, and hope the conversation won't devolve into a discussion of that. I'm just noting some of most-often quoted authors in the GR database.) I'm fairly certain these were all added by readers, since neither J.K. Rowling or Stephenie Meyer are Goodreads authors and the rest are all long dead. I certainly hope zombie Shakespeare isn't adding his own quotes to the system under a sockpuppet account, at least.
After quite a bit of searching, I still haven't found an author other than the one in the OP who exceeds 2,000 quotes. From that perspective, 6,000 seems grossly excessive.
...Am I the only one who thinks that if the site can't handle something which isn't against policy, then that failure is a bug? The combine quotations page should ideally load no matter how many quotes there are. A policy limiting the number of quotes allowed would be a hopefully temporary workaround for this bug, not a fix for it.
I'm having difficulty even imagining how much time it takes to type in 6,000 quotes. I find it onerous even to type in several. Especially if the book has a tight spine, and you're trying to keep the book open with your elbow as you type....
Deborah (Debbie Rice) wrote: "If not, terms of service aside, I am still convinced (not a lawyer) there are some copyright issues in question that unfortunately get murky since author holds the copyright."I don't think it's murky at all. I mean the author holds the copyright. Can a person who holds the copyright infringe their own copyright? Doesn't make any sense to me. Anyway, I think the copyright thing IMHO is detracting the topic at hand in the sense that copyright infringement is the not the correct concern here.
I believe yes there should be a cap, but I don't know what kind of a cap there should be. I am partial to Monique's suggestion of limiting a certain amount of quote added per day.
Cait wrote: "...Am I the only one who thinks that if the site can't handle something which isn't against policy, then that failure is a bug? The combine quotations page should ideally load no matter how many qu..."It's not a bug if it's something the system was never built to do in the first place. It's an issue of someone flooding the system massively, and causing something to break. And now that it's known that that'll happen, I imagine someone will take a gander and put a cap on it so that it cannot happen any longer. TOSes get changed as things change & develop & new things happen, you can't expect everything to be covered in it from day one.
Lobstergirl wrote: "I'm having difficulty even imagining how much time it takes to type in 6,000 quotes. I find it onerous even to type in several. Especially if the book has a tight spine, and you're trying to keep..."
Since they're his own works, I imagine he has the text files right there and is merely c&p'ing them in.
Cait wrote: "...Am I the only one who thinks that if the site can't handle something which isn't against policy, then that failure is a bug? The combine quotations page should ideally load no matter how many quotes there are. A policy limiting the number of quotes allowed would be a hopefully temporary workaround for this bug, not a fix for it."This is a fair point, but I still really don't see the need for six thousand quotes. Not every sentence that comes out of someone's mouth is a quotable masterpiece. Let the readers decide which ones are suitably memorable, at least. Would it be fair to remove those quotes that have only been added/liked by the author and not any users? I'm not planning on doing this without an okay, just throwing an idea out there that could potentially lighten the load.
Lobstergirl wrote: "I'm having difficulty even imagining how much time it takes to type in 6,000 quotes. I find it onerous even to type in several. Especially if the book has a tight spine, and you're trying to keep..."
You and me both.
Mel wrote: "Since they're his own works, I imagine he has the text files right there and is merely c&p'ing them in."Still, copying and pasting thousands of times must take a while. Maybe he wouldn't have to market in such an in-your-face way if he spent that time working on his writing.
Lobstergirl wrote: "I'm having difficulty even imagining how much time it takes to type in 6,000 quotes. I find it onerous even to type in several. Especially if the book has a tight spine, and you're trying to keep..."He IS the author. Maybe he can remember what he wrote the first time.
Cait wrote: "...Am I the only one who thinks that if the site can't handle something which isn't against policy, then that failure is a bug? The combine quotations page should ideally load no matter how many qu..."Not so much a bug - it's a matter of the database unable to search through all the records to find/collect the 6000 quotes, build the page(s) and return them to the requestor within the amount of time allotted before timing out and sending back the "fail" page (504, 502, etc.).
Personally, I think using this as the basis for setting the limits on quotes is not only perfectly justified, but a way to keep the amount of complaints to a minimum, as it can't be argued that we are arbitrarily practising "censorship".
I just went to the combine page for Shakespeare (1921) and the page loaded, but took about 6-7 seconds to do so. I think it's extremely reasonable to set a quote limit in the 2500 ballpark, assuming a combine page will load with 2500 quotes.
(I use 2500, btw, because if you do a search of Shakespeare quotes, it returns 2454, but the "quotes by Shakespeare" link only returns the 1921. And I'll probably get smacked around for this, but I can't imagine anyone more quotable than Shakespeare.)
❂ Jennifer wrote: "(I use 2500, btw, because if you do a search of Shakespeare quotes, it returns 2454, but the "quotes by Shakespeare" link only returns the 1921. And I'll probably get smacked around for this, but I can't imagine anyone more quotable than Shakespeare.) "
Not by me...because that's exactly who I looked up for comparison.
Cait wrote: "...Am I the only one who thinks that if the site can't handle something which isn't against policy, then that failure is a bug?"❂ Jennifer wrote: "Not so much a bug - it's a matter of the database unable to search through all the records to find/collect the 6000 quotes, build the page(s) and return them to the requestor within the amount of time allotted before timing out and sending back the "fail" page (504, 502, etc.)."
A failure to meet a performance requirement is also a bug.
I mean, look, I think having 6000 quotes is ridiculous! A limit on that would be really sensible from a philosophical standpoint. It would clearly also make sense from a technical standpoint: adding a limitation on quotes that allows the page to load faster than the timeout period would fix the bug because the new requirements ("load a page of fewer than X number of quotes without timing out", italics on the new portion of it) would then be met. I think that would be a reasonable fix, personally! But that's a fix to a bug and not a philosophical stance of "Wow, that's a ridiculous number of quotes, buster."
Experiment BL626 wrote: "I don't think it's murky at all. I mean the author holds the copyright. Can a person who holds the copyright infringe their own copyright?..."I just meant that authors assign rights/licenses to publishers or sites distributing their works that may or may not allow them to do things like basically republish the work for free (via extensive quotes) out to the goodreads viewers. Generally, publishers don't license the works where competitors (even the author) can publish within same time frame they are.
Not arguing that copyright has anything to do with the issue; just offering it up as a way to get around the screams of "not violating TOS" or "censorship" issues if that's the holdup on goodreads staff being able to do something about.
I think it's unreasonable for anyone to scream "censorship" or whine about terms of service if something is clogging the database or impacting site performance. Just offering up a dodge.
Frankly, both on the quotes issues and others, the "over capacity" issues goodreads has been having is sufficient justification for a lot of changes to Terms of Service if programmers have a good handle on what will help with database load.
If programmers managed to get the gr servers to load the 6,000+ quote pages without timing out -- likely would still not be able to fix because few member computers would handle anyway and at best would just hang for hours trying to load. Or such a long load time could trigger malware checkers into thinking was a problem and would get blocked...just a big mess that no one needs. It's an unreasonable amount of quotes and would tie up an unreasonable amount of librarians' time.
Riona wrote: "Still, copying and pasting thousands of times must take a while. Maybe he wouldn't have to market in such an in-your-face way if he spent that time working on his writing...":D
Cait wrote: "A failure to meet a performance requirement is also a bug."
Not if the requirement is unrealistic, when even Shakespeare only comes up to 2500 quotes, there's no realistic need to create a database that can handle more than twice that amount for a single person - hell, I don't think we've got even that much Bible quotes.
And one has to wonder what an author could need 6000 quotes of his own writing for.
At this point I don't think even the author could merge/delete his quotes. This is something that would probably need the staff to do, since you can't even bring up the combine page.I also noticed he has 74 photos. I know that this isn't a big deal, but who needs that many photos? When I look at his page I feel like I am looking at a MySpace page, not an authors page. The photos are mostly jokes and have no context to books at all.
It's not like I'm saying that people shouldn't be allowed to have that kind of stuff, but 74? It's just another form of being excessive. Maybe I am confused... I just don't want GR's to turn into MySpace where there is so much flashy crap on a persons page that I want to close it before my eyes bleed.
Gerd wrote: "Cait wrote: "A failure to meet a performance requirement is also a bug."Not if the requirement is unrealistic, when even Shakespeare only comes up to 2500 quotes, there's no realistic need to create a database that can handle more than twice that amount for a single person - hell, I don't think we've got even that much Bible quotes. ..."
I completely agree with this. Every database has it's performance ceiling - obviously the better the software/hardware combination, the higher the ceiling - and it may be that GR's database needs a higher ceiling. Certainly, as more books, authors, readers, quotes, quizzes, etc. are added, it's inevitable. BUT, this instance is hardly, just in my opinion, the ruler by which we should measure that need.
I think it's possible to overwhelm any db, and I'd hold this up as a perfect example of misuse of the GR database - a 6000 record query is, at least at this time, unreasonable. (I'm trying to think of another reason why anyone would need to query the GR db for 6000 records? Can anyone think of anything?)
I'd suggest a multi-faceted response to this:- as has already been pointed out, an absolute maximum number of quotes per author to keep the database functionality working makes a lot of sense
- a data-derived maximum similar to what's been already pointed out by looking at number of quotes for other well-known authors: more objectively, look at the histogram of quotes per author and define a maximum at the tail end of the curve, excluding any obvious outliers. This could be revisited periodically as the quote database grows.
- a large per-user quote quota (oh, that was just too much fun to say) perhaps defined on a larger timescale than a day: no matter whose quotes you're uploading, you can't do more than that. This protects against spamming of all kinds, not just self-promotion spamming.
- a *policy statement* that the quote-upload capability is not primarily a marketing tool, but is primarily intended as a means for readers to share and discover quotes that they enjoy. There are a variety of ways that authors can self-promote on GR, and uploading quotes can be part of that, but keep it in perspective. (This is a domain-specific instance of the deliberately non-quantitative "don't be a jerk" rule of netiquette.) Think of it as protecting the commons.
Authors in general need to be informed that while GR's is about marketing/advertising/communicating with fans, there is a point where you go TOO FAR and that behavior such as that is inexcusable.This author may not have intended to appear to be a spammer/over advertising, but it a few things like this and other authors behavior begs the question... where does the line between a website for users to gather and enjoy books and a free SPAM YOUR BOOKS HERE website?
I honestly HATE authors who over advertise their books. Hell I hate when I watch TV and see the same commercial more than once in a half hour, let along when I was seeing movie previews for that Tom Green movie EVERY commercial break.
Krystal109 wrote: "I honestly HATE authors who over advertise their books. Hell I hate when I watch TV and see the same commercial more than once in a half hour"So much this. I don't understand why they do not understand that people don't like spam!! They will not want to give you money for irritating them!! ugh.
Krystal109 wrote: "...Hell I hate when I watch TV and see the same commercial more than once in a half hour..."One of the 101 reasons I stopped watching T.V. Along with being completely boring, and mind-numbing to watch. Books are infinitely better.
"Subject to the terms and conditions of this agreement, Goodreads grants you permission to use the Service for your personal, non-commercial purposes only. You agree not to engage in any of the following prohibited activities: ...(iv) taking any action that imposes, or may impose at our sole discretion an unreasonable or disproportionately large load on our infrastructure; ..."
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what exactly is your agenda here? Why on earth are you trying so hard to get someone who clearly has become popular on gr kicked off? I mean you are censoring him, and the funny part about it is that you actually have people backing you up. It's clear you are a very angry person with an agenda, but I guess any idiot can get followers. At least when Hitler convinced Germany to go on his tirade he did it eloquently."
Ugh: really?
No one is trying to get this author "kicked off." Some people are just irritated by incessant spamming. And you really should calm down.