Month: November 2003

Changes mainly of interest to MusicBrainz Users

Moderation Search

Previously it was only possible to list moderations using one of a number of
fixed means: for example, “New Mods”, “FreeDB Mods”, “Artist Mods”
etc.  Now, all of these have been replaced a rather flexible
Moderation Search facility.

Moderation Search allows you to find moderations according to any
combination of the following criteria: moderation status, automod flag,
moderation type, moderator, vote cast (by you or anyone else),
artist (including “my subscribed artists”), and moderation ID (range).
You can also query by album, or by track.
Finally you can choose whether to show them oldest to newest, or the other
way round.  The number of possible combinations is
simply astronomical.

The old, fixed search types (“New”, “FreeDB” etc) now simply pre-fill the
search form with the appropriate values.  So for example, you can run
one of the preset searches (say, “My Failed Mods”), and then click “Advanced
Search” to customise your current search in whatever way you please.
There’s a new page which lists
the presets.  If you like you can set a new
preference to cause the “Moderate” link in the top navigation bar to
go to that page instead of running the “New Mods” query.

Some other points of note:

• Many more queries than before are possible.  For example, show me
  moderations by (some moderator name) which I haven’t voted on yet; or, show
  me (some moderator name)’s automods only.
• Many of the moderation URLs have now moved.  Hopefully all the links on
  the site have been updated, but if you do hit an old link (e.g. in an old
  “subscriptions” e-mail) you should get redirected.
• The “subscriptions” e-mails now contain an extra link, which is
  effectively like “New Mods”, but for your subscribed artists only.
• There’s now a page where you
  can search for moderators (so you can include them in your
  search).  Interestingly this is currently the only place in the whole
  site where you can effectively “browse moderators”.  No doubt a page
  dedicated to doing just that will be added some time in a future release.
• Sometimes your moderation searches may “time out” – just like normal
  searches (for tracks, etc) the search is cancelled if it’s still running
  after 30 seconds.  If this happens, try narrowing down your search,
  maybe by using the “moderation ID” filter (e.g. only where the ID is at
  least 530000).

Add Album

The manual “Add Album” pages now have “Guess Case” and “Guess Sortname”
buttons.

Other Changes

Previously only two statistics were recorded for each moderator; a count of
“accepted moderations”, and one of “failed moderations”.
Now the “accepted” count has been split into two, one for auto-moderations,
and one for the rest; and the “failed” count has also been split into two,
one for “failed vote” moderations, and one for the other types of
failure.  For example, see your own profile page.

When moving an album to another artist, the original artist is no
longer shown in the search results (bug #576354).

Each moderation type has a name, and just to ensure that the name of each
type is unique, two of the types have been renamed.
Previously there were two types of “Add Track” (one used up to
17th August 2001, and one used thereafter); now the former is called
“Add Track (old version)”.
Additionally there are in fact two types both known as “Merge Albums” (one
for single-artist albums, and one for Various Artists).
The latter is now called “Merge Albums (Various Artists)”.

The “auto-notes” added by the Album Editor (e.g. “The first of a set
of 3 moderations”) were previously recorded against the moderator’s own
name; now, they are added by the ModBot.

If you use the “compact” album listing, then manually switch to a “full”
listing, the expand/collapse links now work, instead of switching you back
to a “compact” listing.

There is now a new moderation suggestions report, called “Superfluous Data
Tracks”.  Thanks to our script/report writer,
Matthias Friedrich, for
this.  This report lists albums which include a final “data track”,
but have no Disc ID.

Also in the are of suggestions reports: the “bad entries” report
now does HTML-escaping properly.  The “unknown” report also now does
this; it also runs much more efficiently, shows counts of how many tracks
and artists it found, and correctly includes the page footer.

Voting more than once on a moderation sometimes caused that moderation to
show up twice when it should not – this is now fixed (bug #829524).

New and Changed Documentation

• CVS Modules
  – this page lists all the modules in CVS, and for each one gives a brief
  description and includes the current development status (current,
  obsolete).
• The MusicBrainz Components
  diagram has been updated to show the Relatabe TRM Signature Server.
• How TRM Generation Works and
  Dissecting a Tagger Session
  describe the workings of the Tagger in more detail.

Changes mainly of interest to MusicBrainz Server Programmers

Added help text to the INSTALL file and to MBImport.pl, stating that
the current live SQL scripts must be used to import a live dataset.

RDFDump – the RDF dump file (link) is now valid XML. Previously it tried to
put long lines of hyphens (“—–” etc) within a comment (bug #829181).

Bugs and RFEs Closed

• 576354 Source artist isn’t filtered out
• 829181 RDF dump not valid XML
• 829524 Changing vote makes duplicate moderations appear
• 829525 Add a “Website bugs” category (invalid)
• 833562 Last entry of split to various artists is guessed incorrect (duplicate)

Dave Evans