Entire record mangled

[Carola]

Hi,

This book (ISBN 9780582434462) was hit by the amazon_catalog nonsense.

I've encoutered a lot of (previously 100% correct) ruined records over the past months (ouch ouch ouch!). I recognise them instantly because I know all the metadata for books on my shelves were 100% correct or I wouldn't have added them ;-)
I'll be honest: it's still unclear to me what I should do about it. I've looked for an overarching thread but the only one I can find is the long one that is closed. So, the question: can I just change it all back? In this case the changes are pretty extreme, more than just the title, and I don't own the original book anymore to double check. Can I just use the information in the change log?

This is what the change log says:

amazon_catalog updated the book NLLB: I'M THE KING OF THE CASTLE by Susan Hill
title: 'I'm The King Of The Castle' to 'NLLB: I'M THE KING OF THE CASTLE' (undo)
description: 'Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, this tale is linked in its poignancy and humour to Lord the the Flies. This edition is part of a series of pre- and post-1914 works chosen especially for 14-18 year olds. The series features fiction, anthologies, poetry, plays and non-fiction.' to 'Hooper had known, from the very first moment he had looked into Kingshaw’s face, that it would all be easy, that he would always be able to make him afraid.”This tragic tale of two isolated children explores the nature of cruelty and the power of evil.' (undo)
format: 'Hardcover' to 'Paperback' (undo)
publication_year: '2000' to '1995' (undo)
publisher: 'Longman Publishing Group' to 'Pearson Education' (undo)
language_code: 'en-GB' to 'eng' (undo)
publication_month: '8' to '1' (undo)
sort_by_title: 'i'm the king of the castle' to 'nllb: i'm the king of the castle'

[annob [on hiatus]]

I would use the 'undo' button in the changelog to revert all those bad edits.

As for stopping the bot from butchering valid book data, all we can do is to report it to Support (staff).

[Carola]

Great, I'll do that than, thanks! What is the best way to report these cases?

And did I understand correctly from the long thread (I didn't read all of it) that at least those automatic bot imports have been stopped?

[annob [on hiatus]]

The only way I know to reach staff is through their contact form:

https://www.goodreads.com/about/conta...

Personally, I'm really frustrated, angry and sad about the damage the bot has been programmed to do. Unfortunatly I've not seen any sign it has been made to stop, or do fewer bad overwrites. So anyone who sends in complaints/reports helps making our voices heard (I hope).

[Liralen]

The bots are no longer supposed to overwrite librarian/user edits—so if, for example, you put a correct description in now, the bots can't overwrite it to say 'Used Book Excellent Condition No Dust Jacket'.

But they can still overwrite information that has been automatically imported—so if there was previously a full, imported description for a book (and a librarian hasn't touched it) but a retailer has listed that book (with the same ISBN) on Amazon with a description that just says 'Excellent Book', the bots might overwrite with that.

There's no guarantee that the bots won't again be given free rein to overwrite librarian edits, but at the moment fixing things they break is at least some protection against the bots breaking things again.

[Carola]

Argh yikes. Yeah, every time I see a perfectly good (perfect, actually) record vandalised by a literally mindless bot... I feel you. So much hard work going down the drain. You fix one and you turn around and there's a new one. Absolutely nothing about this is efficient or good or helpful, ugh.

The most frustrating thing to me is the lack of information and the hush hush about it. I've tried finding more information about it so many times and aside from that one long now-closed thread there's barely anything, just lots of mentions of the bot ruining records.

[edit] The above was a reply to annob. Thank you Liralen for the additional information!