Goodreads Librarians Group discussion
note: This topic has been closed to new comments.
Questions (not edit requests)
>
Amazon destroyed the author's database.
message 651:
by
Greg
(new)
Jul 02, 2023 10:14AM
So no word from Jaclyn since May 18th regarding the many, many issues and things continue to get worse. How should that be interpreted, I wonder??
reply
|
flag
Greg wrote: "So no word from Jaclyn since May 18th regarding the many, many issues and things continue to get worse. How should that be interpreted, I wonder??"She has commented in other threads.
EDIT: I also think she has her job to protect.
Elizabeth (Alaska) wrote: "I have recommended Goodreads to many many people. No more.I do plan to still use it, but I don't know for how long. My primary reading group may go by the wayside and if that happens ..."
+1
I added a book requested on the Adding new books folder yesterday, by the time the user replied today the bot had already deleted the entry. I refuse to add any more books to the database under these conditions.
When you export, your lists will be full of the errors created by bots. Take a good look through them & make corrections on the spreadsheet before importing somewhere else. Discovered this the hard way.
lethe wrote: "Elizabeth (Alaska) wrote: "I have recommended Goodreads to many many people. No more."It is beyond sad how they have ruined a wonderful thing."
+1
Lee (of Shalott) wrote: "When you export, your lists will be full of the errors created by bots. Take a good look through them & make corrections on the spreadsheet before importing somewhere else. Discovered this the har..."
I think my primary interest is in the titles, authors and my shelves, my date read and my review. Not sure they can mess those up.
I found more than 20 errors on authors that were caused by bots since the start of this year & that was only a cursory review of the first 1000 books on the spreadsheet. Numerous titles were also changed to ALL CAPS or strangely truncated. Several valid editions were invalidated, causing data loss & therefore, with all this, errors toward importing elsewhere. Just saying...
Greg wrote: "So no word from Jaclyn since May 18th regarding the many, many issues and things continue to get worse. How should that be interpreted, I wonder??"Jaclyn has significant responsibilities at Goodreads beyond the Librarians Group.
I’m sure there is a lot going on behind the scenes that employees are not allowed to talk about publicly. I’m also sure everyone at Goodreads, including users, would appreciate more staff and resources, but as none of this could have been predicted and there is probably little room to shift those.
ETA: A clearer phrase here would be that none of this was "expected," which better reflects my meaning.
She has been monitoring the group, commenting in other threads here and there, and she has said she will update us as there are updates to share.
Emily wrote: " but as none of this could have been predicted"I think it could have been predicted and I believe Rivka told them so.
The programmers didn't know what was at Amazon, nor how that database was constructed and I believe they were also not completely familiar with Goodreads in such a way to know the two databases are not completely compatible. They jumped in without knowing what they were getting into. That is most certainly a no-no.
Lee (of Shalott) wrote: "I found more than 20 errors on authors that were caused by bots since the start of this year & that was only a cursory review of the first 1000 books on the spreadsheet. Numerous titles were also c..."I just looked at today's export. None of that sort of stuff here, although of course I couldn't tell about Invalid status. (Invalid doesn't affect my shelves and activity anyway.)
A better word might be that no one “expected” this massive level of bad behavior from the database. There was one book I changed all the authors on since they were not the default and they just changed back within hours twice. It’s very discouraging and I have basically stopped adding most new items as Javier stated.
Emily wrote: "A better word might be that no one “expected” this massive level of bad behavior from the database. "You are correct, of course. But we have been asking them to stop the process for a couple of months now because it was already getting worse. I think with the information from some of us who are very knowledgeable about what is happening they might have seen that things should be stopped and looked at with a better eye.
Sadly, I think that what they were saying at the beginning that they wanted GR and Amazon to be the same was spot on.
Elizabeth (Alaska) wrote: "I think my primary interest is in the titles, authors and my shelves, my date read and my review. Not sure they can mess those up."Same. The reason I started using the site back in 2008 was to have a record of exactly what I read and when. The social aspects, which they love to push so hard, are just an extra to me.
Lee (of Shalott) wrote: "I found more than 20 errors on authors that were caused by bots since the start of this year & that was only a cursory review of the first 1000 books on the spreadsheet. Numerous titles were also c..."The export I just ran is full of errors as well. It will need lots of cleanup. Oh, btw, none of the ASINs came through; only the ISBNs.
Dobby wrote: "Oh, btw, none of the ASINs came through; only the ISBNs."
The ASIN doesn't appear to have ever been included in the export. I just looked at one from January 2022, and they weren't there. I have older ones, but I haven't looked at them. [Edit: One from October 2012 doesn't have them either.]
Interesting that you all are seeing lots of errors in the export. I guess it just has lots more information than interests me so I'm not seeing that sort of thing.
Regarding nilclass, I had an occasion to report a couple of deleted editions this morning. Support's response:Thanks for your email. We've had a couple of similar reports regarding this same error message when trying to edit the status of certain books; therefore a report of this issue has been submitted to our developers and they are working on a fix. As soon as this has been resolved, I'll take care of updating the book record. We appreciate your patience in the meantime.
All the work that has been done to separate adaptations from the original works has been pointless. Everything is lumped together now, especially when the author is not the same on every edition, either because the original author is listed on Amazon, or because the change from original author to adapter has been overwritten by a bot.
And something else: I merged an author profile yesterday (or tried to) and thought it wouldn't be an issue since there were somewhere around 300 books listed on that profile. It took forever, and didn't go through completely because I hit my daily Librarian edit limit before it was done, so there must have been many, many invalid and/or deleted editions on that profile.
Arenda wrote: "All the work that has been done to separate adaptations from the original works has been pointless. Everything is lumped together now, especially when the author is not the same on every edition, e..."Well that's frustrating. So not isolated accidents but purposeful. Bummer.
I am currently going through my shelves and only looking at title and author, I've so far noticed several titles changed to all-caps and author names changed from Firstname Lastname to firstname-lastname or lastname-firstname.The odd thing is that those wrongly formed author names appear on the record, but when I click on them they lead to "Page not found".
ETA Spoke too soon, I now came across one that does open an author page.
(I'm on page 15. Still 63 pages to go.)
lethe wrote: "The odd thing is that those wrongly formed author names appear on the record, but when I click on them they lead to "Page not found".""Page not found" for such wrong author profiles happens when that author is listed on one edition (or a few editions) of multiple combined editions, where the other editions have the correct author.
[This is one of the things that can happen when combined editions don't all have the same author.]
When it is incorrect capitalization, punctuation or order of first and last name, merging into the correct author profile is easy.
When the wrong profile has two author names in one (like author and illustrator, or author and adapter), the disambiguation page from that author profile is usually the best way to find the edition(s).
But, I've also come across wrong profiles where the disambiguation page was empty, and I wouldn't be surprised when there are invalid/deleted editions attached to that profile.
Arenda wrote: "lethe wrote: "The odd thing is that those wrongly formed author names appear on the record, but when I click on them they lead to "Page not found".""Page not found" for such wrong author profiles..."
Thank you for the info, brilliant as always :)
Arenda wrote: ""Page not found" for such wrong author profiles happens when that author is listed on one edition (or a few editions) of multiple combined editions, where the other editions have the correct author."It happens also when editions have been marked Invalid. I have found many of these in the past few weeks.
lethe wrote: "Arenda wrote: "lethe wrote: "The odd thing is that those wrongly formed author names appear on the record, but when I click on them they lead to "Page not found".""Page not found" for such wrong ..."
I forgot to say: to edit/merge such profiles, change "show" in the URL to "edit"
ETA: and for the disambiguation page, change "show" in the URL to "disambiguate"
Elizabeth (Alaska) wrote: "It happens also when editions have been marked Invalid. I have found many of these in the past few weeks."Thanks for confirming. That's what I suspected already.
Arenda wrote: "I forgot to say: to edit/merge such profiles, change "show" in the URL to "edit"ETA: and for the disambiguation page, change "show" in the URL to "disambiguate""
Thank you!
Freso wrote: "Maybe time to organise a strike or other action similar to the Reddit and StackOverflow ones? Doesn’t seem like we’re getting much information from MGMT despite tons of flagged edits and support requests and whatnots. If we collective decide to just do no editing for some days, maybe they’d be willing to talk to us?"I have rethought my response to this. I don't think a strike "for just a few days" is appropriate. As I said in my first response, all the edits would just be waiting.
As long as the bot runs, my work will be minimal - mostly not at all. My librarian edits page says I have done 675,000 edits. I'd be happy to try to make it another 675,000 if Goodreads wanted done what librarians do. But they don't.
ON STRIKE
(and, sadly, probably not for "just a few days")
lethe wrote: "Arenda wrote: "I forgot to say: to edit/merge such profiles, change "show" in the URL to "edit"ETA: and for the disambiguation page, change "show" in the URL to "disambiguate""
Thank you!"
Yes, indeed! Thank you so much.
Lee (of Shalott) wrote: "Remember this?https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
Sigh."
Haha. Before the purchase.
Lee (of Shalott) wrote: "Remember this?https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
Sigh."
The good old days.
Thanks for all the good info Arenda, lethe, Elizabeth & everyone.Much appreciated.
Right, so since the end of June and up till today, over 100 of my books got wrongfully obliterated (mostly Japanese Kindle editions). Only just realized that when discovered in time, perhaps there's a way for Librarians to revert the status from "delete" back to "public". Some of these editions aren't perfect (having ASIN and ISBN13 at once), but some were actually previously corrected (having either ISBN13 or ASIN extracted into a separate edition), and they still fall victim.ATM, たもつ 葉子's 真夜中のオカルト公務員 series has a lot of those "formerly fine but merged and deleted for no apparent reasons" editions. I think 紗与イチ's FOGGY FOOT series was just corrected recently so yeah.
(25 of my books got hit today, I have no idea if they could still be salvaged but I know the 100+ are like without hope (when it comes to reverting, only manually recreating and I don't think anyone is up for doing that when it could all just be wrongfully deleted again.)
Help would be appreciated, and just so it's clear, I don't want to be pessimistic but I don't actually bank on receiving successful help, alas it doesn't hurt to ask.
鯊 wrote: "Right, so since the end of June and up till today, over 100 of my books got wrongfully obliterated (mostly Japanese Kindle editions). Only just realized that when discovered in time, perhaps there'..."It seems to me better if you start a new thread in the Book & Author Page Issues folder, since we use this thread mainly to complain about the import bots, not for requests.
Also, you will really need to supply links to editions, since if the books have status 'deleted' librarians can't find them without a link.
So. Why is the bot programmed to delete editions? Goodreads is supposed to be a catalog of every book ever published, regardless of its current status of availability.
Elizabeth (Alaska) wrote: "So. Why is the bot programmed to delete editions? Goodreads is supposed to be a catalog of every book ever published, regardless of its current status of availability."That is a very good question. We will probably never receive an answer.
I think what it's doing, is matching the status to that of Amazon. That is probably also why valid books are marked Invalid. I've said before, the programmers were not familiar enough with the Amazon database before they started, and didn't consider how Amazon and Goodreads are different.
And another thing...https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
It seems there is a problem with parsing the unusual formatting for the fonts. Shouldn't there have been a rule made in the code for this? I have come across hundreds of these - the title can be read when editing but the font is clearly specialized & not for the purpose of including special characters for non-English lettering.
Lee (of Shalott) wrote: "And another thing...It seems there is a problem with parsing the unusual formatting for the fonts."
Yeah, the GR bot should catch and translate these HTML character codes. (Every #&xxxxxx; string equals a character, from simple Latin-alphabet letters to fancy fonts and symbols.) Better yet, the bot should skip these types of Amazon listings.
When I was a wee computer science student, way back in my university days, I wrote a language parser, so I know it's not rocket science to recognize content that isn't human-readable. And, nowadays, converters are available for free by the dozens. But the GR bot can't find its way out of a paper bag, so to speak, so I'm not surprised by these types of entries.
I ran the first title through an HTML-to-text converter, and learned that it's a "Bob's Burgers" coloring book. I stopped there, because I'm sure that the other entries are equally unimportant.
Sigh.
Mesembryanthemum wrote: "it's a "Bob's Burgers" coloring book. I stopped there, because I'm sure that the other entries are equally unimportant."But since colouring books are allowed in the database, they shouldn't be skipped.
I don't know if this bug is already known or if this is new, but I just discovered that the bot updated and deleted multiple editions of this book https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1.... As a result, my review from the German Kindle edition has now been added to the English Mass Market Paperback edition, and my bookshelf now shows the English edition as read (instead of the German one that I've actually read). On top of all that, the whole thing was posted as an update on my userpage, as if I had finished and reviewed the book today. But I read it like a decade ago... What the hell is happening? I knew that the bot would screw up editions (and change titles and authors), but now entire books are being deleted and incorrect editions are being added to my bookshelf that I never even read in those languages. This is all a mess. I'm really tired of Goodreads. Instead of improving anything here, it's getting worse every day with the bots.
paperlove wrote: "I don't know if this bug is already known or if this is new, but I just discovered that the bot updated and deleted multiple editions of this book https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1......"I had that when the new bots just started out. About 15 non-English books on my shelves were replaced by the English default. I had to re-add them and then switch editions in order to get the correct editions back on my shelves. A proper PITA.
ETA I don't think they were the latest _catalog and _com bots, but the ones just before that.
paperlove wrote: "This is all a mess. I'm really tired of Goodreads. Instead of improving anything here, it's getting worse every day with the bots."
+1
And now on the left side of the book page it shows the message, "You've shelved multiple editions of this book." (even though this is not true) and then when I click on the three dots and click on "view my shelved editions" I end up on a page with the following error message:Page Unavailable
An unexpected error occurred. We will investigate this problem as soon as possible - please check back soon!
I really don't have the energy anymore. Goodreads has become unusable.
paperlove wrote: "And now on the left side of the book page it shows the message, "You've shelved multiple editions of this book." (even though this is not true) ..."This is terrible. Someone has written bad code & problems are compounding, & worst of all just allowed to continue though we've been complaining about this for MONTHS.
Users (i.e. non-librarians) will notice this as well & already people complain publicly about the site being 'bulky' & unsearchable. There are so many invalid ratty entries why would people even want to start out to use the site, much less continue? I haven't recommended Goodreads to anyone for months now - & I guess I've also lost my faith in its survivability. :(
Can I guess that Amazon told Goodreads to do this? Do they think having Goodreads the same as Amazon contributes to more sales? It doesn't. I would never be able to find more books to lust after at Amazon.
Soon GR will be as confusing, messy, and hard to navigate as Amazon itself.
This topic has been frozen by the moderator. No new comments can be posted.
Goodreads Librarians Group
Books mentioned in this topic
Louis Vuitton: Catwalk (other topics)Louis Vuitton: Catwalk (other topics)
Impact of Inoculum on Startup Characteristics of a Simulated, Anaerobic Bioreactor Landfill (other topics)
The Hamlet (other topics)
Hamlet (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
たもつ 葉子 (other topics)紗与イチ (other topics)
Unknown Author (other topics)
Jo Ellison (other topics)
Author (other topics)
More...
