Goodreads Librarians Group discussion
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New Goodreads bot bug
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@Drace, this was already reported a month ago; see here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...From what I understood, staff is aware of the problem and developers are working on a fix.
A lot of ebooks on my shelf have gone coverless. I noticed it's particularly impacting authors who tend to release mainly digital books. Viola Grace is an example. https://www.goodreads.com/author/list...
I'm assuming it'll be fixed in due course and no need to raise a request?
Paraphrodite wrote: "A lot of ebooks on my shelf have gone coverless. I noticed it's particularly impacting authors who tend to release mainly digital books. Viola Grace is an example. https://www.goodreads.com/autho..."
I've sent bug reports/complaints in to Goodreads staff via the Contact Us form once or twice, and though I haven't heard back, it seems to have slowed down and then picked back up. I didn't notice any invalid merges/disappearing covers at all yesterday, but I found two on my bookshelves tonight. Obviously my experiences are not universal - for all I know the bot could be completely ruining every single book other people have shelved - but it felt like there was some kind of a reprieve for a bit there.
My advice for trying to monitor any books you have shelved that the bot is destroying is to view all your books, sort them by format, scroll through all your ebooks, then skip past hardcovers and paperbacks and scroll through all your Kindle editions. I also have a basic copy/paste form that I've been inputting the details of books that have been messed into and sending to staff over and over again so they can fix what their own creation has been ruining, and they've been decently helpful with correcting it. I can post that here tomorrow for anyone who wants to use it. There's still the problem of the edition that got merged losing all of its shelvings because they've been moved to the edition it was merged with, of course, but I don't think anyone can fix that.
I counted about 60+ books on my shelf that have gone coverless. Probably about 80% of them belonged to Viola Grace so her whole book list is a bit of a mess now.
If you want the covers restored please post requests in 'book cover help', no need to provide sources just link to the relevant Goodreads edition.
Paraphrodite wrote: "...My advice for trying to monitor any books you have shelved that the bot is destroying is to view all your books, sort them by format, scroll through all your ebooks, then skip past hardcovers and paperbacks and scroll through all your Kindle editions."How can one sort one's shelved list on format? It may be my mistake, but I don't see that option anywhere...
Edit:
Found it! It's under 'Settings' where you can checkmark format as an extra visible column in table view.
Emmy wrote: "Paraphrodite wrote: "...My advice for trying to monitor any books you have shelved that the bot is destroying is to view all your books, sort them by format, scroll through all your ebooks, then sk..."For me there's a bar at the bottom of the My Books screen with options to turn infinite scroll on or off, checkboxes to sort the books in ascending or descending order, and a dropdown menu with all of the different methods of sorting your shelves. Format is an option in the dropdown.
Thank you, Drace.I don't see the option for infinite scroll though, but i do now also see the pulldown menu with lots of sorting options including 'format'...
Edit
Found the infinite scroll too ;)
It's under the '[qty] per page'
Drace wrote: "Not a librarian, and I know Jaclyn's off of the forums until a future date (not sure when, can't find the post about it), but I thought the Goodreads librarians might want to know about a new screw..."Jaclyn will be off until mid December according to this post (not sure if it's the one you couldn't find or not):
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
Paraphrodite wrote: "I counted about 60+ books on my shelf that have gone coverless. Probably about 80% of them belonged to Viola Grace so her whole book list is a bit of a mess now."Yes, it's a total mess. It's a big task to recover something that the bot has messed. And, aditionally, I have A LOT of empty read dates added too on September (for books I haven't touched for years(,.
Paraphrodite wrote: "A lot of ebooks on my shelf have gone coverless. I noticed it's particularly impacting authors who tend to release mainly digital books....
I'm assuming it'll be fixed in due course and no need to raise a request?"
Since a couple of weeks the Goodreads team has been (and is still) busy recovering ebooks that the bot wrongly merged/deleted with their Kindle equivalent. During the proces of undeleting the previous existing ebook cover is being replaced by the upload of an empty placeholder. In most cases librarians can undo this upload thus restoring the original cover, but sometimes there seems to be no undo option.
I also noticed that for the restored ebooks in many cases the translator is now missing, and sometimes the description is now identical to the Kindle equivalent including praise...
So much damage... :-(
Emmy wrote: "Paraphrodite wrote: "A lot of ebooks on my shelf have gone coverless. I noticed it's particularly impacting authors who tend to release mainly digital books....
I'm assuming it'll be fixed in due ..."
How are deleted ebooks being restored? I thought that wasn't a possibility since librarians can't move ISBNs/ASINs.
At the start of this whole nightmare I asked staff to move ISBNs to separate merged editions, but I gave up pretty quickly. Even when I was asking them to make sure that the ebook's ISBN-10 was also the ASIN as per Goodreads policy, they ignored me and left it blank, and as a result the bot re-merged the newly separated editions. Which gives you an idea of just how bad the thing has gotten.
As a result I'm not asking staff to create new editions to undo the merges until we have confirmation that the bot has 100% stopped doing this.
Drace wrote: "How are deleted ebooks being restored?..."It's something that cannot be done by librarians. I assume the Goodreads developers have made sort of a script that restores the bot-deleted/merged ebooks from their deleted status.
At least, as a librarian I can see mutations of that nature made by 'Goodreads' in the librarian log.
Do you have any links to books where the restoration has happened? Just want to see what it looks like in action.
This is an ebook from my READ-list:https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...
These is the EDIT DETAILS info
and this is from the LIBRARIAN CHANGE LOG
On the second screenshot you can see that I reverted the empty image upload via the UNDO option
Doesn't look like the separation has happened for any of the ebooks/Kindle editions that got merged for me. I wonder if I send staff a list of them all they'll set the bot after them?
The way I noticed it was that ebooks from my book lists suddenly appeared coverless.Being a librarian (again) I was able to undo most of the empty placeholder uploads (though not all). I've been busy with it since approx. two weeks ago, when every few days my lists showed some 30 missing covers which I recovered.
But I also see Kindle editions on my booklists that should in fact be ebooks instead...
I noticed the Goodreads bot is running a script it seems to fix the broken covers at least (if you look at their edits from the last several hours, they're all for reverting the image change).https://www.goodreads.com/librarian/u...
So they're fixing that part at least but I don't know if they have a solution yet to undelete all the editions they merged.
Sent an email to staff asking if they're able to have the bot undo specific merged editions if I link them. Here's hoping the answer is yes.
Drace wrote: "Sent an email to staff asking if they're able to have the bot undo specific merged editions if I link them. Here's hoping the answer is yes."Assuming they've fixed the bot doing the deletions then yes they can. I had some undeleted early on during the issue but the bot ended up redeleting them so I've been waiting until the bot doing the deletions was fixed before sending in any more.
Melanie wrote: "Drace wrote: "Sent an email to staff asking if they're able to have the bot undo specific merged editions if I link them. Here's hoping the answer is yes."Assuming they've fixed the bot doing the..."
Yeah, I gave up asking staff to separate editions when I realized that if they didn't fill the ASIN field on an ebook the bot would just merge it again. Just waiting on a response for now.
So I sent an email asking staff if they could use the bot to undo bot merges, and it seemed like the person who responded had no idea what I was talking about. They asked me to confirm that I wanted the editions separated, and then said that once an edition is deleted it cannot be restored whatsoever. Didn't acknowledge me talking about the bot undoing its merges whatsoever.Would be nice if Goodreads staff could all be on the same page about what they're doing behind the scenes, but I suppose that's too much to ask.
I spent over 6 months cleaning up a profile for an extremely popular author who had been given the default profile. I had support move him and then went about correcting his works. I started keeping a word doc to keep track of all of the requests I had to support. There were a few support members whose stuff I always hod to send back and hope someone else who be on shift to answer it. Thankfully, the vast majority know what they are doing. To this day when something isn't corrected properly I can usually guess who handled it before I even look at the log and email.
Drace wrote: "So I sent an email asking staff if they could use the bot to undo bot merges, and it seemed like the person who responded had no idea what I was talking about. They asked me to confirm that I wante..."Developers/staff have known about the GR bot incorrectly merging editions for over 6 months and have never acknowledged any ability to undo these bot deletions/merges because they don't utilize the book status system and instead perform a hard delete when merging. You can see the old discussion about this here ->
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
It appears to be merging Kindle and ebook editions at random even though they are separate editions and those merges should not happen. Deleting the cover art while it's at it, too. Here are the change logs for some books on my shelves where it happened:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/edits/...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/edits/...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/edits/...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/edits/...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/edits/...
I'm letting staff know via the Contact form right after I post this thread, but I figured it might be worth making the librarian team aware of the bug if anyone hasn't already noticed. Maybe give your shelves a look to see if the bot's effed anything up for you. I know there's nothing the librarians can really do about this issue (since separating ISBNs and ASINs is a staff thing), but still worth bringing up I think.