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Questions (not edit requests) > Change to functioning of 'Not A Book'? Unwanted/incorrect effects?

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message 1: by Renske (new)

Renske | 12223 comments In at least one other topic was already suggested there have been changes to Not A Book. And I just got a very unexpected situation that led to an wrong result. So could there be any information about what has changed?

I was working on a merge request for this work https://www.goodreads.com/work/editio...
As you can see, in the past the webtoon editions had the author changed to Not A Book. (Which is not as it should be done, but mistakes happen).
First I noticed that in the change log the 'all editions' is empty, but 'this edition' gives the normal result.

But the much more serious problem is, when I tried to merge one of the editions it looks it deleted instead of merged. I got send to the homepage with the message 'That book will be deleted shortly. {number] reviews will also be deleted.' instead of getting the page of the edition that is the target. (yes, they are/were combined).
Quite recently there were no issues with similar merges with editions with the author as 'Not A Book'. And I can't remember any warning against such a merge, so I didn't change the author name.

I don't like the idea people now might have lost their review due to an unknown change to the system. And I don't like the idea I might make more mistakes due to unknown changes.


message 2: by Miriam (new)

Miriam | 1831 comments I think this is something GR Staff will need to look into (since they can see the back-end databases).

I do wonder if part of the issue is with one of the editions having a different author name. We know having different primary authors on combined books causes issues, so I wonder if this a side-effect.


message 3: by Renske (last edited Jul 09, 2022 02:46PM) (new)

Renske | 12223 comments I also wanted to warn other librarians something seems to have changed.

Miriam wrote: "I do wonder if part of the issue is with one of the editions having a different author name. We know having different primary authors on combined books causes issues, so I wonder if this a side-effect."

I understand that idea, but I have done these in the (recent) past without issues.


message 4: by ☕ Lachgas ♿ (last edited Jul 09, 2022 03:45PM) (new)

☕ Lachgas ♿  (lachgas) | 9386 comments Nabed records get now automatically removed from series (that was clearly not the case in the past)

And I had to adjust my merge-NAB-process for these 1 click series records.
Usually I went with "add new edition" because I prefer having the record kind of original if NABed (in case of the 1 clicks that "(x book series)" part for example) and author NAB and then separation after checking everything is correct.

But as records with NAB as author seem to be invisible on combine/separate page now there's no way to separate that edition from the rest then.
And as I do not know how/if that would affect the record (because technically it's different authors then) that's not a way to go anymore I assume.

Could delete and redo that myself luckily, would've been a weird thing to explain to staff or supers (not sure if supers would see anything other than librarians).

So, yes would appreciate info if that's now a possible bug or feature.

(I do appreciate NABs getting deleted from series, saves time and seems reasonable)


message 5: by Renske (new)

Renske | 12223 comments It looks just changing the author doesn't help. On this edition https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4... I changed the author name to the old name. But the changelog has still the strange view. And I noticed a field/edit in the changelog I haven't seen before 'classification: 'Public' to 'Not_A_Book'. And it looks librarians can't change that. So more questions how we should handle these editions.


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