BoT Suggestions/Discussion thread

[Thenia]

Jesse Norris wrote: "Can that not be automated? Use an api to lookup a book if its not in the database type thing and add a default entry."

The process of adding new information is a lot more complicated than just looking up a book, unfortunately.

I am already using a number of APIs and automated scripts to gather the most up to date and accurate data from a number of different sources, including Goodreads, Amazon, authors' official websites and others, but getting the data production ready still requires some manual intervention and takes time and effort.

While the site utilizes many different sources, it remains independent of them all, which means that if any of them shut down for whatever reason the site will not be affected.

The downside is that building the database up to a point where only new series are missing will take a long while yet.

[Bonita]

Thanks again for all your hard work in this labor of love, Thenia!!

[Adam]

It would be nice if the search boxes along the top of the My Series table were drop down boxes instead of free text boxes.

[Kelly]

As many of you know we have a large backlog of requests that need to be processed. Thenia and I are working as fast as we can - remember this is not our day job - to get everything processed and in the database for you.

One of the things that has been causing some delays lately is that we have been getting duplicate requests from the same users. If you have sent a request PLEASE give us time to take care of it instead of sending another request.

Every request we process requires research on our part before the request can be put on the processing queue that can be quite time consuming. Due to the volume of requests including the backlog we cannot afford to spend our time researching the same requests, so if you are knowingly sending in a previously sent request that might have been delayed for some reason, please make sure that you are also adding a note that it is a duplicate request on your new message.

We also request that each request is a separate message. It might take you a few additional minutes, but it takes us a lot longer behind the scenes when it’s more than one author/book/series in a request.

Additionally, a note of caution: if you send in big batches of requests together they will not be processed all together but spread out throughout requests from other users so that no one user will have to wait unfairly long for their requests to be filled. That means that requests sent in big batches will likely have a longer processing period, which translates to longer waiting periods for the user who requested them.

Currently, any requests that have been sent as of yesterday are now in the processing queue. We promise we will get to them in due time!