User talk:MartyD/Archive - January 2010

This is an archived set of entries made to my talk page Aug 2009 - Jan 2010.

Removing the white frame from Amazon images.

Sometimes Amazon will place a white frame around its cover images, as in the link you just added to this pub. Fortunately, there's a trick in removing it. At the end of the URL of this image you'll see "._SS500_.jpg". If you remove everything between the lower dashes and leave one of the dots, you get a frameless image. Pretty neat, huh? MHHutchins 03:10, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Very neat. MartyD 11:44, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Using the Library of Congress Catalog #

The ISBN field is only for the ISBN or catalog number for paperbacks (pre-ISBN). You can place the Library of Congress catalog number in the notes field. You might come across some pubs that record the LCCN in this field, because that had been the practice in the past. Lately we're trying to remove them from that field and place them into the notes field. I removed the number from this record, and it was already in the notes. Thanks. MHHutchins 18:09, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Ok, thanks. I had put it as-printed in the notes, since LOC has it zero-filled. I didn't realize it wasn't wanted in the catalog number. MartyD 18:24, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Using gutter codes to date pubs

You're aware that the gutter code indicates the printing date of a publication. We use this code only if there is no other means of obtaining the publication date. In the case of this pub we know that it was published in March 1970. Printing usually precedes publication about 6 weeks. This book was the March 1970 selection of the SFBC. If we know the date in which a title was the selection of the month, that is the date that we use. Here's a page that can assist in the entry of SFBC editions. There's also listings that link to the SFBC page that we are slowing filling out as the dates become available. Thanks. MHHutchins 21:20, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

That how-to-enter-a-SFBC-publication page is certainly handy.... And I'll be sure to use those other sources. MartyD 11:41, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

The Braintree Mission

I see in your notes for this pub that there is no gutter code present in this book club edition. The only publisher that I know who used gutter codes to indicate printing was Doubleday, from 1959 to 1987 in both their trade and book club editions. BOMC (Book-of-the-Month Club) was not part of the Doubleday book clubs until they were combined in 2000. MHHutchins 19:16, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Forgot to mention: if a book contains roman-numeraled pages include those in the page count. For example, the last roman-numeraled page is xiv and the last numbered page is 475, then the page count would be "xiv+475". Thanks. MHHutchins 19:19, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for catching it. Sloppy cloning. Added the content but forgot to update the page count. Updated now. MartyD 19:57, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Inferno

Can you check this again please, it's showing a bad checksum? BLongley 20:38, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Didn't notice the warning. The ISBN on the bar code on the back transposed the 1 and 7 (should be 671, not 617). Spine and copyright page have it right. Thanks for catching it. --MartyD 00:56, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

There's no warning on submission unfortunately, nor on approval - it's only AFTER approval that ISFDB will show up a big red alert on viewing the publication. I tend to check any new publication after approving it to see if it gets that alert, but not always (if the queue is long, and the editor is experienced in my opinion). If you want to test an ISBN before submission, I recommend Marc Kupper's utility. (Which actually does a little more than it says it does, but still won't help spot completely inappropriate ISBNs, which is something I'm working on cleaning up at the moment.) BLongley 22:06, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Title remove from Whispers II

One of the drawbacks with some submissions is that the moderator is unable to tell what publication from which you wish to remove titles. Is it the Doubleday hc edition or the Jove pb edition? I verified the Doubleday edition personally, so I can vouch that the art is in that edition. Perhaps the art wasn't reprinted in the paperback edition? Thanks. MHHutchins 20:08, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

The Jove pb edition. I just added it, and I figured I'd save myself some work (unknowingly at your expense) by cloning the hc one. The Jove edition has no artwork other than the cover, and it also has no afterword. Once the removals are processed, I will re-check it one more time. Thanks. --MartyD 20:15, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

One thing I tend to do when cloning publications is to mark the contents I do not want to keep with a page number of "na" or "del" or "remove" or something that makes it clear which items I intend to keep and which can be dropped. In my Pre-Moderator days it helped guide the Mods and they'd sometimes do the Remove Titles for me. Nowadays, of course, they leave it to me to clean up my own messes, but if I forget to do so hopefully it's a good sign of my original intent. BLongley 22:16, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Makes sense. Thanks for the suggestion. --MartyD 22:45, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Dating on the SFBC listings

The dates given on the SFBC wiki listing are not the month in which the books were published. In fact this is less a list of books published by the SFBC, than a list of the SFBC selections. That's why sometimes you'll see seasons or "Special" cycle as the date. The database's publication record for the book club edition of The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted will give the month and year in which the book was published (mailed to club members), the same (usually) that Locus1 will give. It was officially the Fall 1987 selection of the book club, so that's what is indicated in the wiki listing, which is a different animal from the database. It's not necessarily intended to duplicate information that can be found in the database itself, although there will be overlap, of course. The introduction to the SFBC wiki listing provides further info on the list's purpose. Thanks. MHHutchins 15:06, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, I thought it was unknown "when" in the fall, vs. being Fall as a specific issue time. I should have read more carefully. --MartyD 16:01, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Further Stories from Lord Halifax's Ghost Book

I understand that Halifax is not the originator of the tales, but did he write these versions? You have each piece as by him. So wouldn't that make this a collection instead of an anthology (one writer v. several writers). Also are the section headers actually in the titles of each piece, i.e. does "Apparitions: The Ship in Distress" have that complete title on the page on which the story appears? We ordinarily don't prefix story titles by section titles. Thanks. MHHutchins 03:17, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

First of all, thanks for doing all the approvals and reviewing. I'm certainly open to suggestion and/or direction and doing some of it differently....

For collection vs. anthology: I had started it out as collection, but ended up concluding from Help that it should be an anthology. Unlike the stories in Lord Halifax's Ghost Book, some of the stories in Further Stories were published elsewhere. The Shrouded Watcher appeared in the January 1891 Blackwood's and is uncredited there (and NOT, I believe, written by Halifax). Likewise, The Restless Dead in the December 1892 Blackwood's. The Troubled Spirit of Tintern Abbey is described as "privately published in 1910" and sent to Halifax by its author, "E. B.". I don't know what "privately published" really means, but it sounds more formal, and possibly distributed, when compared with the other stories from tellings, letters, and other unpublished sources. The clincher for me, though, was Labédoyère's Doom. It appeared in the January 1882 Fraser's Magazine (see, for example, Poole's Index) with the author MacColl credited (credited to him in Further Stories as well). Then one other weight on the scale is that The Rustling Lady of Lincoln and Other Stories specifically states "sent to the present Lord Halifax" -- that's Edward (in 1937), not Charles Lindley.

As for the sections, you can be the judge! :-) The stories in them don't have the same title page as do the other stories or sections. The sections are sort of mini-collections in their own right, but I couldn't see entering them that way. One, The Renishaw Coffin, is done differently from all of the others. It has an inner title page listing the credits for the three contained works and has a single story-style entry in the main TOC; its contents do not appear in that TOC and are given simple italicized headers and no further attribution information. For all of the other sections, each has an inner title page like so:

The Section Title

First Story Title

Second Story Title

Third Story Title

The first story then appears on a page with the section title right-justified at the top (as is done for the normal individual stories), and the story's title is below it, centered, with small-font attribution information below that (for a normal story, this paragraph appears below the title on the title page). Subsequent stories in the section are separated by a centered star, under which appears centered just the story's title and under that the small-font attribution information. The section title appears in the TOC with a trailing hyphen and no page number, and the contained stories are listed indented under that and with their own page numbers.

So I interpreted the inner title page for a section's being "The Section Title: First Story, Second Story, Third Story" and then just broke up the instances. Maybe I should go back and redo them as collections, but they're not really works. If I remove the section portion of the titles, there's no record of the section despite its title page. Is there something else I could have done that I missed? Regardless, let me know what you think is the best way -- I appreciate the help and feedback. --MartyD 11:22, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

I moved the title aspect of this discussion to Rules and Standards Discussions. --MartyD 14:55, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

Quick question about Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Does "To Helene" really appear on page 383 as well as on page 423 of this book? And is it the same poem? Thanks! Ahasuerus 02:58, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Yes, there are two "To Helen"s. They are different. Each has an editor's note: one says it was for Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman, the other says it was suggested by Mrs. Helen Stannard. There's a similar problem with several "To _____" -- depending on how you count the underscores. Any suggestions for how best to handle it? As you probably noticed, I'm cleaning up the contents.... Thanks, --MartyD 10:34, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

I see that there is a discussion of this issue on the Standards page. I'll chime in there. Ahasuerus 17:45, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

For the "To Helen" case, they have different dates, so I will see if that's distinguishable enough. I added some notes to each title record. The dashes/underscores may be a different story. I haven't really looked into those yet. --MartyD 17:57, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

p.s. Can you explain the "Already Merged" rejection on all of those merges? Did you merge the two Edgar Allan Poe authors instead? I had thought about doing that, but I couldn't tell which titles were attributed to which author record. Not that I'll run into this situation again, but I'd like to know what I could have done instead of merging the individual titles. Thanks. --MartyD 10:43, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

It just so happened that I was cleaning up a recent Fixer entry which included a story by Poe. When I ran "Dup Candidates" for Poe, I found a lot of duplicates and merged them without realizing that you had a most of these merges already sitting in the submission queue. To quote Brian Lumley, Synchronicity or Something :-)

The fact that we had two "Edgar Alla Poe" records on file was a different issue. This can only happen when someone uses "Author Data" to change the spelling of an author's name to something that we already have on file -- the software doesn't check whether there is another Author record with that spelling and lets it through. This is a Bad Thing (tm) since the software assumes that Author names are always unique, so it will only let you access the first Author's Titles and Publications and the other Author's data will become inaccessible. The way to fix it is to change the first (accessible) record's name field to something else -- I used "Edgar Allan Poe1" in this case -- and then the two records become accessible and can be manipulated normally. It's a common "gotcha" and I'll add it to our list. (Author merges are potentially very dangerous and should be approached with care.) Ahasuerus 17:45, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Great, thanks. As long as I didn't do The Wrong Thing, I'm happy. And that's an easy trick to remember. --MartyD 17:57, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Untitled poems

The note you added to this poem's title record reminded me of something. This should be in the help pages but I don't know if it actually is. Many poets don't title their work (most of e.e. cummings' poems aren't titled), so we fall back on the first line as the title. So it's natural for an anthology editor or publisher to use this method. I personally prefer this to the awkward Untitled ("In Youth I Have Known One"). So I think you handled it correctly. Thanks. MHHutchins 18:49, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Author Image

I'm going to reject your submission that links to this photo of Edgar Allan Poe on another website. We have to get permission to "deep-link" (showing an image on one of our pages that's actually on another server.) Also, this image includes graphics that may be copyrighted. If you can find a photo of Poe that you're sure is not copyrighted, save it to your hard drive and then upload it to our server. Thanks. MHHutchins 03:33, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

I'm aware of the need to get permission. In this particular case, I did not ask, but there is this blanket permission on the Edgar Allan Poe Society's site to which I made the link (in the notes section at the bottom of the page):

Anyone is free to use information from this site for any legitimate purpose without charge as long as sources are properly noted. (Links to this site are welcome, and educational or artistic uses are encouraged. Wholesale lifting of our text or images, however, is not permitted — nor is the unacknowledged use of this material for student papers or commercial endeavors.) Schools may print and distribute any number of copies of these materials for use in class without special permission.

Isn't that sufficient permission? I figured since it was a link and not a copy it was attributed enough (although I could also mention the source). If you think the image is inappropriate, that's of course a different story. --MartyD 10:19, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

I interpret the above as permission to use information from their site, not to deep-link to an image, thus drawing bandwidth from their server. Even the proviso that sources be acknowledged can't be met. The ISFDB software must be changed to show sources (such as the magazine covers that we get from Visco which is programmed to show the acknowledgment.) If it were simply a non-copyrighted photo of Edgar Allan Poe, it would be very easy to copy it, then upload it to our server. If you look at the image (click on the link above), you'll see that it's more than a photo. MHHutchins 17:15, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Ok, point taken. Guess I can put those long delays between page loads to good use looking for something that will pass muster.... ;-) --MartyD 19:46, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

I had the same thoughts and have already found a photo. MHHutchins 19:49, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Why, thank you! --MartyD 23:47, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Poe variants

I'm holding two submissions creating variants for two Poe titles. The first creates "Hans Phaall" for "Hans Pfaall". I couldn't find a record for the "Ph" version in the database. Do you plan on entering one later? The second held submission creates "Berenice" as a variant of "Berenice — A Tale". In your Poe research, have you found a canonical reason for the creation of such a variant? (Perhaps this was Poe's preferred title, and some reprints simply chose not to add the subtitle.) Normally such a nonsubstantial subtitle wouldn't be sufficient cause for creating a variant. Thanks. MHHutchins 17:57, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Once I have all of the titles and variants in place, I am planning to enter the collections I've found the records of that we don't yet have, using the scans that are available as reference material. Since so many of the titles already exist, it's easier to work through the titles and relationships first and clean them up. But if you'd rather I worked through publications first and titles later, I can do it that way.

"Hans Phaall — A Tale" is the original title as first published (in Southern Literary Messenger -- I think of this one as incentive to learn what to do about non-genre magazines...). It was then re-published as "Hans Phaall" (Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840)). It was then republished as "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall" (The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe (1850)) with the "Pf" spelling. Later publications then seem to pick up the "Pf" spelling. So the one I submitted is to be the parent of "Hans Pfaall", and I will (or was going to, depending on what you have to say about "Berenice", below) add "Hans Phaall" and make the existing The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall also be a variant of that new parent. Neither of the existing entries should be a variant of the other, as they're both variants of something else....

As for "Berenice", it's a little bit of a picky point, but several of his titles were published as Title (over) Subtitle in some cases and Title emdash Subtitle on a single line in other cases. Often, the works are subtly revised as well. So it seemed somewhat worthwhile to capture each of the three forms as variants (see some of the poem entries) rather than treating them as mere punctuational differences. On the site I've been using for the reference material, they actually map the publications back to the specific manuscripts, and the titles tend to follow those (i.e., Title 1 is from Manuscript A, Title 2 is from Manuscript B, and later printings using Title 1 tend to be the Manuscript A revision, while later printings using Title 2 tend to be the B revision). Nothing's ever 100%, of course, but I have a simple mind and like consistency; since some cases very clearly merit separate titles (whether variants or split due to the extent of the revision), doing the same for all titles seems better than leaving it to someone to figure out why some are one way and some the other.

That's my thinking, anyway. Opposing viewpoints welcome. --MartyD 19:35, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

You make some good points, and I'm willing to accept your interpretation of the canonical titles. I also commend you for the research you've taken on with the Poe titles. (Are you up to tackling Lovecraft? His page has some serious title issues.) I'm going to accept the submissions, even though I think the creation of variants often doesn't benefit the casual database user. We editors are perhaps too close to the material, making it difficult to see the "trees". MHHutchins 19:49, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for thinking about it. I don't have much insight into the implications of variant titles for the user experience. --MartyD 23:59, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

The Psyche Zenobia

Any ideas about the origins of this title "The Psyche Zenobia"[1]?Kraang 01:05, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

OK, I see the next edit and know what happening. Would you want to change any of the dates in the title records? At the moment they appear as 1838 on the authors page and only reading the notes would give me any idea about there first appearance. Thanks!Kraang 01:16, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, I probably should have posted a summary of the previous item (scroll up a little) on the moderator notice board. I started fixing some titles, and that evolved into fixing the others before entering the collections. As for dates, it sounds like you missed out on this exciting title date discussion. I'm with you, but bowed to precedent. That said, I am willing to participate in a popular uprising. :-) --MartyD 01:38, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Reread the discussion again and I still believe the benefits of the dates out weight any negatives. Changes in novels are easy to spot but a change in a short story means either checking all the titles(coll/anth) or doing a title search since there is no direct link to the variants. :-)Kraang 02:40, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

I am compiling a list of display changes that we need to implement as long as development starts again (once the first change has been tried) and this one is high on the list. Ahasuerus 02:48, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

My work on the Poe titles has convinced me it is not a display problem, or at least not just a display problem. The database may not have the "first" publication for a title (for a work of any length) at a given moment, in which case the title record is the only place to capture the date that title was first used. I can see the argument that if "The Tell-Tale Heart" is included in a collection in 2009 and given a new title, "Be Still My Heart", in the collection's contents you'd want to see 1843 -- the work's first publication date -- for that story, not 2009. But in the bibliographic display, you could see both (the 1843 on the parent and the 2009 on the variant). --MartyD 10:01, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

The General_Interest_Magazines were started so we could record first or other interesting publications even when it wasn't in a genre publication. It's still a lot more effort than just adding a title note, though, and hasn't caught on. Still, we can always search title notes later and create stuff. BLongley 19:52, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

I discovered that recently and am planning to use it for the Poe titles. One of these days.... --MartyD 20:29, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

BTW, I'm one of the "variants sometimes SHOULD get their own date" crowd. BLongley 19:52, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Rebel Fay

Just a note that I approved the changes to Rebel Fay and then changed the date from 2008-01-02 to 2008-01-00 based on your Note. Specific publication dates, i.e. "granularity finer than one month", typically come from Amazon.com and are based on Amazon's internal database of projected book availability, which is quite unreliable and which we don't use once the book has been physically verified. There were a few exceptions in the relatively distant past when copyright pages would say "Published September 23, 1940", but they are rare. Sometimes a bibliographer is able to determine the exact publication date based on archive research, e.g. see the first edition of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, and then we document the source of our information in Notes. Ahasuerus 00:12, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Ok, thanks. I've taken to not changing dates if I don't know where they came from, but that's one I can remember. --MartyD 00:25, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

The Ghost Book of Charles Lindley, Viscount Halifax

A couple of things re: The Ghost Book of Charles Lindley, Viscount Halifax. Hyperlinks that point to Locus1 are, unfortunately, unstable since Locus' Web pages are periodically regenerated from the underlying database. As more books are added to the database, their pagination changes and old URLs become obsolete. Also, although the Locus Index entry (and OCLC 31475517) say that the book has 171 pages, if you check their table of contents, you'll see that the actual page count is at least 211+171 and probably more since "Colonel P.’s Ghost Story" is 34 pages in Lord Halifax's Complete Ghost Book. Finally, wouldn't be better to clone Lord Halifax's Complete Ghost Book since it already has Contents level data? Ahasuerus 15:36, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

I didn't know that about the links, thanks. Unfortunately, I have stuck a lot of them in notes over time. Oh well. I knew about the 171 pages, forgot when I typed it in (pre-coffee), and now was patiently waiting an approval so I could fix it (To be completely honest, I didn't think anyone would be paying that close attention, or I would have put a note on the moderator noticeboard). I found an entry on Amazon claiming 448 pages, which is probably in the right ballpark. It didn't occur to me to use Clone, but I was planning to use Import Contents, which I couldn't do from the Add Pub screen, unfortunately. I'm the one who entered all of that other stuff, and I certainly have NO intention of retyping all of those entries!! If only there were a way to stick a comment for the moderators on the edit.... Maybe those lazy developers should get cracking on some of these usability issues instead of sitting around on their thumbs. --MartyD 16:41, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

Sounds good, approved. And if I ever run into these developer types, I will make sure to give them a piece of my mind! Ahasuerus 17:56, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

Well, you could do what Fixer does and leave loads of notes to Moderators in the actual notes, which they then have to remove in another edit. :-/ Another temporary field for "note to mods" that gets automatically discarded would save a little work for each submission though - is there an existing FR for that? I'm sure it's been discussed before. BLongley 19:20, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

See FR #2800730 Capture reason or summary of an edit which i think covers this idea. -DES ^Talk 19:50, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

Looks about right, till "and would be retained in the edit log, to whatever extent the other edit details are retained." Visibility of past submissions is pretty bad - if you know the submission, a mod can use dumpxml, but finding what submissions affected a particular title/author/pub/series/etc is lacking. (There's probably an FR for that as well.) I don't think we can do much with dumpxml improvements - we normally only view those when "Bad things happened" and trying to present them better might hide the actual problem - but linking submissions to the things(s) they affected might be possible. An automatically-discarded mod note should be fairly easy though, if such would help without making later reviews of such easier. It should be available in the "edit log" (plain XML) still by default. (I think - without looking at the actual code.) BLongley 21:41, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

When i wrote the inital draft of the FR in the on-wiki features page, i knew much less about submissions and what was retained, so I was intentionally vague. There is indeed an FR calling for a full edit history and an interface to view it, but I'm not holding my breath on that one. -DES ^Talk 21:53, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

Cycle of Nemesis - small change/add

Morning! This. [2] . I changed the notes slightly and added a title page sketch for Jack Gaughan. Hope this is acceptable. Thanks, Harry. --Dragoondelight 13:11, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

Better is always acceptable. --MartyD 22:10, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

LCCN links

I see you have been adding LCCNs to at least some pubs. Thank you. In case you didn't know, there is a standard way to link tio the Loc online cvatalog record for a given LCCN. See Help:How to create a link to a US Library of Congress (Loc) record. -DES ^Talk 15:24, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

I'll reformat the labels to conform. Thanks for the pointer. --MartyD 17:37, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

The Green Mile

Added OCLC number to your verified pub. FYI, I have been informed that links to specific pages in the Locus online catalog are not stable -- at intervals they regenerate the pages from an internal database, and when they do so, links break. I can't verify this as accurate, personally. -DES ^Talk 20:01, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, Ahasuerus just mentioned it to me. I hadn't known that. I've now stopped including the links, but I haven't quite gotten myself worked up enough to go hunt down the zillion places I've included the links in the past. One day.... --MartyD 00:23, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

Well the one in the pub above is still working at the moment. -DES ^Talk 01:26, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

Depending on how many records are added to that area of the Locus database, it can take many months for a link to degrade, so there is still value to it, at least for a while. Ahasuerus 01:35, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

1972 Annual World's Best

Scanned in a cover image for [this]--Bluesman 21:40, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

That's the one. Thanks! --MartyD 22:08, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

Satan's World

Scanned in an image and altered the notes a little for [this]. The gutter codes just tell when the book run was done, but the date in the field is when the book was offered by the SFBC which can be the same month or several months later. ~Bill, --Bluesman 00:14, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

Yes, that was from my early days (a whole five months, and I consider myself a seasoned veteran). The Keeper of the SFBC has since instructed me in The Way, but a few things linger from the naive and unschooled time of ignorance before he took me under his wing. I haven't figured out a good way to hunt them down and fix them. --MartyD 10:27, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

AH!! The Newbie days..... my first discussion page is archived under lock and encryption!! Oh, the sad mistakes..... and they all surface sooner or later so some other neophyte can see and laugh and learn. ~Bill, --Bluesman 14:39, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

Watchers of the Dark [2]

Scanned in a new image and added some notes to [this] ~BIll, --Bluesman 03:34, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

Looks good. --MartyD 10:28, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

Bug 2804769 - Searching by ISBN may not find all appropriate results

I am testing Bug 2804769 - Searching by ISBN may not find all appropriate results and the first two test cases listed in the Details field appear to have been fixed. However, when I try the third test case and search for ISBN = 9780786908109, I get no results. Does this match the behavior of your local server and, if does, is it something that we meant to address as part of this bug fix? Ahasuerus 05:03, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

P.S. One more thing. When I log out, I get the expected "You are now logged out" message in the main area of the screen, but the navbar still gives me the option to "Log Out". If I click on it again, it changes to "Log In". I believe this is pre-existing behavior and may not happen in all cases, but we should probably document it if we can't fix it in this patch. Ahasuerus 05:29, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

The third case did not get implemented. It is the bad-checksum case, and the conclusion of the Community Portal discussion was that the behavior should be done only for VALID ISBNs. BTW, I documented that in the comments in tracker:

- #3 (pub stored with punctuated number that is not a valid ISBN-13) only
  searching by 978-0-7869-0810-9 finds the pub. Unpunctuated and
  converted-to-ISBN-10 variations find nothing.

and in the final note on the Community Portal (there it is "2b"). --MartyD 10:22, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

Oops, I see it now! That's what happens when testing is done in the wee hours of the morning :-) Ahasuerus 15:19, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

Logging out has always behaved this way -- I did not touch it. Logging in has the same problem. If you log in or log out, the nav bar does not change until the NEXT navigation. It is less obvious in the Log In case because the righthand side usually gives you a link that you click on without thinking, but Log Out has no such link. --MartyD 10:22, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I noticed it a few minutes ago when I was switching between my account and Fixer locally. The good news is that the color-enabled "My Messages (new)" line work fine once the navbar is refreshed :-) Ahasuerus 15:19, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

Strangely enough, the color coding worked fine on my local system, but it doesn't seem to work on the live server even though I ran "make -B install" in both cases. Are there any files in the Apache directory tree that I should check? Ahasuerus 22:32, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

The coloring needs biblio.css. It should just end up in the root directory (the file is accessed by http://www.isfdb.org/biblio.css). The one that's currently out there is not the new one. --MartyD 01:51, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

The coloring is done by an entry "div.newtalk" -- the new biblio.css will have that in it. --MartyD 01:55, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

Additional digging revealed that the version of biblio.css in /var/www/html was last modified on 2009-07-06 at 7:30pm ISFDB time. I replaced it with the new version a few minutes ago and the orange background is now visible, so everything is fine on that front. Thanks!

However, there are still a couple of things that I don't understand. First, the old version of biblio.css is larger than the new one, so I suspect that it may have been modified manually (by Al?) on 2009-07-06 without being recorded in Sourceforge. Running "diff" is not very helpful because it reports the two files as completely different. I saved the old version off, so we can review it and see what's going on. Second, I don't think I understand why "make -B install" failed to replace biblio.css with the new version on the live server even though it worked fine for me under Windows. Strange... Ahasuerus 03:20, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

E-mail sent. Ahasuerus 03:29, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

Dunno. I will take a look. I thought biblio.css was among the files we checked originally, but maybe it was not. --MartyD 10:03, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

For anyone following this here: The biblio.css on the production site had changed the banner reference from IsfdbBanner2.jpg to IsfdbBanner.jpg (presumably so the banners 2-10 could be rotated through that name). That update has been committed to CVS now. The rest of the file was unchanged; I suspect the diffs might have been due to Windows vs. Unix line endings. --MartyD 10:48, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

Great, thanks! :) Ahasuerus 11:44, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

Slaves of Heaven

Added a couple of notes to [this] and scanned in a better image. ~Bill, --Bluesman 14:36, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

You're a lean, mean, scanning-and-noting machine! Looks good. --MartyD 18:25, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land

This was published in May 1979, according to Locus #222 (June 1979). MHHutchins 00:43, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. I added the date and a note as to the source. --MartyD 20:05, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

Lexical match testing

A few issues have been found while testing the new lexical match logic, so I put the change on hold pending your return. As you know all too well, it's a headache-inducing part of the application, so it's probably best to wait for you to come back, refreshed and ready for more pain and suffering :-) Ahasuerus 18:28, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

Serpents Among the Ruins

Scanned in a new image (broken link) for [this], and expanded the notes slightly. Also added the year to the title as on the title page it appears after the worded title, not as part of "The Lost Era" series section. ~Bill, --Bluesman 14:56, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

This image does not match my copy's cover. Looks like the image is actually for The Sundered. --MartyD 11:44, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

I replaced your image with this image, which matches my book in hand. --MartyD 11:49, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

I scanned in all the images for this sub-series in 'date' order, but the DB didn't list them that way. Anyway, didn't catch the wrong image quickly enough. Points out that there is no current way to delete an image unless you're a MOD. Perhaps the page that shows for deleting a pub can be adapted for this? I know it's not likely to be used much as most editors aren't uploading images in the thousands. Seems I am. By Des' recent estimate I've been responsible for half of the images on the DB (hell, that impresses even ME!!) By the laws of chance I'm bound to blow it once in a while and it would be nice to be able to fix those little gremlinesque instances. Thanks! ~Bill, --Bluesman 23:41, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

You have uploaded just over 4,500 images (this counts as separate images any cases where you uploaded new versions of images), and have made somewhere between 4,500 and 5,000 edits that were not uploads to wiki image pages. We currently have 6,074 images in Category:Cover images, which includes all images tagged with any version of Cover Image Data. -DES ^Talk 00:27, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

The images are managed by the Wiki software. I'm not sure how easy or hard it would be to manage that correctly via code of our own (the pessimist/realist in me tends to believe even if we got it working it would break with the next MediaWiki upgrade). One error in thousands is a pretty good rate; I wouldn't worry too much! :-) --MartyD 23:45, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

What we could fairly easily do is create a custom "user group" that had deletion rights and make Bluesman, and any other trusted editor who wanted to be, a member. Then he would have the same ability to delete image pages as a mod does. For that matter i was given the "sysop" flag for wiki work (such as editing protected pages) several months before I was made a moderator. Either of these would IMO be both easier and safer than creating a custom delete interface that was intended to delete wiki pages. Or, if it is a rare event, just post on the Moderator noticeboard and someone will do the delete on your behalf fairly quickly. For a new user group, Al or Ahasuerus ‎would have to edit a config file. -DES ^Talk 23:53, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Space Time Crime

Added a cover image to [[3]] No artist credit?? Neat cover! ~Bill, --Bluesman 22:32, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

No. I will add that to the notes. --MartyD 11:40, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

The Dragon Masters / The Five Gold Bands - Ace Double #F-185

I found a date for The Dragon Masters / The Five Gold Bands - Ace Double #F-185 in my later Ace reprinting of The Dragon Masters. I added the month to the publication record. Thanks Kevin 03:09, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. --MartyD 11:13, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

The Green Hills of Earth

Found an Artist credit for The Green Hills of Earth and also corrected the contents (Removed Single quote versions of contents and replaced with double quotes versions to match the 5th printing in hand). Thanks Kevin 23:26, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

I can't find my copy (through no fault on its part -- I have it around here somewhere) to confirm, but I'm sure that's one of the things I didn't know better about at the time. --MartyD 11:39, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

Beyond This Horizon

Updated your verified pub Beyond This Horizon - Thanks Kevin 04:47, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

Ok, thanks for the detective work. I don't have an opinion one way or the other. --MartyD 11:14, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

Welcome back

Glad to see you here again. -DES ^Talk 19:51, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. Now I'm ready for whatever Ahasuerus decides to throw at me. --MartyD 11:17, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

Excellent! Talk:Development has been updated with test results :) Ahasuerus 14:55, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

Have you had a chance to review my comments? What do you think? Ahasuerus 23:41, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Oh yes! They make me wish I were on vacation! ;-) I think I can make it do what you want, when I have a chance. Massive amounts of platform upgrades on my plate for this weekend, but maybe Saturday morning I'll be able to do it. --MartyD 23:47, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Great! No hurry, the code is not going anywhere (at least if I can help it! :-) Ahasuerus 01:44, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Saturday Evening Post issues

I approved the submissions placing the SEP issues into the series, but wonder if you were the editor who originally created those issues. If so, why were they titled with the "day month year" format? It may be somewhere in the help (don't ask where), but I'm pretty sure we follow the US standard (yes, call it Americentric) of "month day, year" when titling magazine issues. I'm going to edit the titles of the SEP issues to conform with that of other issues in the series (and other magazines throughout the database.) Thanks. MHHutchins 03:22, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

No, I didn't create them. I just happened to notice they weren't in the series and figured I'd fix them while noticing it. Looks like I wasn't paying quite close enough attention, or I would have fixed the titles while I was at it. --MartyD 10:24, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Help doesn't cover "day", and even if it did I think it should be "use the date format as stated", or "appropriate for the country of publication" if you can't see the physical edition. See here for the last discussion. At least help doesn't quote nonsense British examples any more. BLongley 19:03, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Snow Queen

Scanned in a new image for [this] and added notes. ~Bill, --Bluesman 23:31, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

That's the one. Thanks. --MartyD 09:56, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

A couple of outstanding issues

When you have a free moment, could you please take a look at Bug 2806702, "8888/9999 appears in more places"? It's minor, but I figure you would be uniquely qualify to drive a stake through this bug's heart :)

Bibliographic warnings was deliberate, per discussion with you. We can certainly get rid of them everywhere. --MartyD 02:30, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Oh, I think I remember it now! Sorry about that, too many balls in the air. I think we might as well get rid of 8888-00-00 everywhere since it's meaningless to non-editors. Ahasuerus 03:11, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Also, have you had a chance to review the Wiki backup file? The nightly backups are over 5Gb now and getting unwieldy, so I was wondering if we could find some kind of workaround for the orphan problem and drop the old versions of the main offenders. Thanks! Ahasuerus 18:09, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, I have not had a chance to do anything with it. And right now I have a major database problem at my day job, so I'm not sure when I'll have time for anything much. --MartyD 02:31, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Not a problem, we are nowhere near running out of disk space, so it's more of a convenience thing than anything else. Ahasuerus 03:11, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

P.S. DES has just reported a new problems with VTs, but it appears to be limited to complex pseudonymous collaborative series like Gallegher. I have created bug report 2834675, but there is no rush since it apparently affects very few series. Ahasuerus 00:55, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

So I saw. I'll have to take a look at it. One of the problems with Kuttner and Moore is that sometimes they're co-authors and sometimes Moore is the pseudonym. It's hard to tell what exactly should be displayed. But I didn't do series VTs exactly the same way as biblio VTs, so I may have to change that. It's easy enough to try. --MartyD 02:30, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

The fact that a VT like "The Proud Robot" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore appears on the Series page as a standalone title in addition to appearing as a VT of "The Proud Robot" by Henry Kuttner alone seems to be clearly in error, but I don't know how hard it would be to fix. Ahasuerus 03:11, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Turns out what I changed had to do only with Serials and doesn't apply here. The behavior seen here is because the variant (46738) is directly in the series, plus it is a variant of something else that is in the series. So I'd say functioning as designed.... --MartyD 10:57, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Unwise Child

Currey mentions, regarding [this] pub that both the trade editions and the SFBC editions/printings were from the same run and both say "First Edition", just put in different dust jackets. Saw no mention of this in the notes and wonder if maybe Currey just saw a First that someone had put in an SFBC jacket? ~Bill, --Bluesman 22:32, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

Yes, it does say First Edition. I will update the notes. --MartyD 15:55, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Mathemagics - added notation/essay

Morning! This. [4]. I added notation and essay after matching my copy to your ver. Also, a profound, but belated, thanks for all the work you have done. Thanks, Harry. --Dragoondelight 13:45, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. Another of my "ancient" entries. It's funny, I just recently read it, including the Proofs. Didn't occur to me to re-verify. --MartyD 10:27, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

I created a special book list for this place from the first, but I learned new things from the first so I have about four different notations for how current my ver is. Hopefully someday I will glance down the column and they will all shout out re-re-re-re checked! LOL. Thanks, Harry. --Dragoondelight 12:07, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

ST New Voyages

Just did some work on the first printing. Scanned in a very clean image and added the artist as there is a signature on the bottom left, about an inch in: S. Fantoni [Eddie Jones]. Really hard to see as it is black on the darkest blue of the cover. FYI, didn't adjust your notes or pub, [[5]]. ~Bill, --Bluesman 00:03, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Interesting. I will claim that artist based on your cover. The signature is not on my copy's cover. If you look closely at your scan of your 1st edition and at Amazon's image for my 3rd edition, you'll see the bottom edge of yours is cropped off (looks like 1/4 - 1/2 and inch), losing the signature. --MartyD 16:05, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Actually it's yours that is cropped! lol! It always amazes me how far images can be shifted not just from printing to printing but within a single printing. Have a 50s PB, three copies, and the signature only shows up on one of them. Got to wonder how many times that happens. ~Bill, --Bluesman 15:27, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

Right. Poor choice of words. Mine has a cropped version of yours, losing the signature. Mine does look identical to that Amazon image, so they must have done the whole printing that way.... --MartyD 15:39, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

I dated your 3rd printing from the 13th, let me know if you mistrust that. BLongley 18:38, 19 October 2009 (UTC)

I mistrust many things, but your activities are not among them. Thanks for finding it. --MartyD 10:18, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

Star Gate

Expanded the notes slightly , new image for [this] OCLC confirms the date, too. ~BIll, --Bluesman 15:23, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

X Factor

New image, expanded notes and artwork to contents for [this] ~Bill, --Bluesman 15:55, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

Verifications page

Hey, Marty! This is probably not the right place to ask you this, as I have seen reference to a "Feature Request" page a few times, but since I have no idea where that might be, thought I would post this here. By the way, the new additions seem to be all pretty positive, though the automatic appearance of "Your submission must be approved by a Moderator" following any edit seems to have disappeared? --Bluesman 03:50, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

We have disabled this message for editors who have Wiki-posted more than 100 times. We figured that editors who don't know that submissions must be approved after posting 100+ times are probably a lost cause anyway :) Ahasuerus 03:58, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

It's my "fault". I complained about the message shouting at me at 6:00 in the morning and asked if we could tone it down. The better idea was to eliminate it after it had presumably served its usefulness. If you have an opinion about which way you think it should be, now that you've seen both, chime in there -- having feedback is important. --MartyD 10:29, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Makes sense, as long as the newbies still have to see it. ~Bill, --Bluesman 01:45, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

What I want to ask is, is it possible, on the page that lists all the current verifiers and the numbers for each, to have it as a table that lists the verifications by source? Since each verification is already assigned to a particular source, could all those sources appear on the page with the total number broken into the appropriate column/source? I know it would serve no real purpose, but I would like to know the "distribution" of my verifications, and others as well, more to see the Primary numbers without the secondary ones. My numbers are quite skewed by the Currey verifications. I get no real sense of the number of books as opposed to the number of sources. It's just a point of interest to me, probably findable by some kind of search that I don't know how to do. NOT a priority by any means. Way too many things take precedence over this. Thanks! ~Bill, --Bluesman 03:50, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

It's certainly possible to do, although there's no search available that does it. Since I also think it's a good idea, I logged it as Feature Request 2841828. :-) --MartyD 10:29, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Checkout FR 2813437 My verifications. Great minds think alike. :) -DES ^Talk 13:25, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

I saw that one. Sounded like it was talking about searching by verification type (which I'd also like to have, BTW). --MartyD 15:57, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

It was suggesting a page on which a user could see all of his or her verifications, plus a pulldown by which they could be filtered by type. That, it seems to me, is a superset of the idea in FR #2841828 or at least a closely related idea. -DES ^Talk 19:59, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

So what's the hold-up?¿?¿?¿ LOL!! ~Bill, --Bluesman 01:45, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Marty is busy at work at the moment, but he "showed us the way" earlier this year, so the rest of our developers are slowly chipping away at the accumulated pile of bugs and feature requests. I did a dozen of them today and I am about ready to pass out (I am not nearly as good as Marty or Al at this Python coding stuff), but with luck I will be able to re-test and install the changes tomorrow. Not this feature, though, it will have to wait until another day. Ahasuerus 01:56, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Gotta leave some of the fun stuff for other people, right? I may give both of these ideas (topvers + my verifications) a try one of these days.... --MartyD 10:10, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Spread the wealth?? A secondary but current concern for me, and some other editors who've mentioned their same intent, is to get the "Transient" verifications moved over to the more permanent ones now available, thus leaving the 'transient" field open for what it was originally intended. Already some pubs have four primary verifications! Still no rush, though. I just wanted to avoid having to go through all my books again just to find maybe 100-200 "Transients". ~Bill, --Bluesman 19:33, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

The 1,000 Year Plan - minor notation change

Morning! This. [6]. I changed the statement "Source of publication date unknown" to read "Source of publication date Tuck". After checking my copy of the Book and Tuck. Also added start page. It is interesting though it is described as a novel, that the headers show the five stories titles not the novel title. Thanks, Harry. --Dragoondelight 14:35, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Great, thanks. I don't have access to Tuck, but looks like I should have asked Mr. Hutchins about it; don't know why I didn't. --MartyD 10:14, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Quest Crosstime

Added notes and interior art to [this] ~Bill, --Bluesman 18:08, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Time is the Simplest Thing

New image and expanded notes for [this] ~Bill, --Bluesman 19:26, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

SQL question

When you get a chance, could you please review this post? We have what appears to be a nasty SQL bug which causes server hangs and possible database degradation and I hope that my proposed fix will work and can be deployed quickly. TIA! Ahasuerus 21:38, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

Answered there. --MartyD 22:23, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

Red Mars

Your verified 11th printing of Red Mars was linked to a defunct Amazon image, so Harry has re-linked it a live one. Ahasuerus 17:39, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, I missded leaving a note. Thanks, Harry. --Dragoondelight 11:31, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

Agent of Chaos - added introduction

Afternoon! This. [7]. I added the introduction after matching my copy to your ver. Thanks, Harry. --Dragoondelight 19:42, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. Don't know how I missed that. Must have been the big "Introduction by Rex Weiner" facing the copyright page that threw me.... --MartyD 17:22, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Added cover artist

I added cover credit for verified [8] from the book THE ART OF RICHARD POWERS by Jane Frank and made a note of it.Don Erikson 20:37, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Steel Brother

Scanned in a new image and expanded the notes for [this] ~Bill, --Bluesman 23:45, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

More than 15 authors

Just a heads up that I have posted a related error on Talk:Development‎. Ahasuerus 21:42, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, false alarm! Ahasuerus 22:59, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

But we do have the same problem in pubClass.py, which we probably want to fix as part of the same bug fix. Ahasuerus 23:07, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

awardClass.py, too. Will fix them. --MartyD 01:04, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

Done. Made the same change in those two files. Updated the Outstanding Changes list. --MartyD 01:20, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks! :) Ahasuerus 01:32, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

The Green Ghost and Other Stories

An error occurred in the submission adding page numbers to this pub. It stops in the middle with a red warning that "Error: record 1032284 is not valid" which may have been one of the records that you merged with another one in a previous submission (probably "Teeny-Tiny" because it listed all titles up through the "S"s then stopped). It's always good to make changes to a pub record before changing the content records, or waiting until the submissions for content changes have been accepted, then opening up the pub record to edit it. The error won't let me accept or reject the submission the normal way (it didn't get to the point of the submission where that option was available.) I'll have to do a hard reject and ask you to re-submit. Sorry for having you do the same submission twice. MHHutchins 16:42, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

Rats. Sorry about that -- I know better but didn't think of it. --MartyD 17:17, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

Skylark Three merge

It would appear that you want to merge this title with this title but use the date 1930. Since there was no actual book publication in 1930 wouldn't the 1948 date be more appropriate? Of course, that opens up the whole discussion of the date to give serials published as Project Gutenberg titles. To my mind the Project Gutenberg title should have the date it was published as a Project Gutenberg title otherwise we are giving the impression that there was actually a book publication in 1930. Perhaps will I have been busy there has been a discussion? If not there probably will be. I think I will volunteer for more jury duty.--swfritter 14:14, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

:-) No need to go to such extremes on my account! But it looked to me like it had been published as a three-part serial in Amazing Stories in 1930 (AMAZAUG1930, AMAZSEP1930, and AMAZOCT1930), so I thought that was the appropriate date. But I'm certainly no serial expert, so reject away (or accept it and I'll change the date) if it should be different. --MartyD 14:31, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

Will do so. There is also another similar submission. For a number of reasons the book publication is given precedence. The Project Gutenberg editions, while not part of your submissions, definitely need some consideration. Thanks.--swfritter 15:07, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

Triplanetary was also published in serial form in Amazing Stories AMAZJAN1934, AMAZFEB1934, AMAZMAR1934, and AMAZAPR1934 in 1934. There doesn't seem to be a clean way to handle the published-in-parts-then-as-a-whole or published-as-a-whole-then-in-parts situations. Anyway, thanks for looking at and thinking about them. --MartyD 15:34, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

The plague links to 0 variant

You have a submission that is attempting to "The Plague" by James Darke a variant of non-existing title. Possibly a result of the processing of other submissions at about the same time? Actual intent?--swfritter 15:11, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

I was trying to un-variant it for the moment. James Darke is a pseudonym for Laurence James, but he has two works titled The Plague. One is the 8th book in the series The Witches, the other is the 4th book in the series Dark Future. I'm not 100% sure yet, but I think they are two different things. The one as by Darke is the 8th in The Witches, the one as by James is the 4th in Dark Future. The existing variant relationship has the title as by Darke from The Witches as a variant of the title as by James from Dark Future. So I wanted first to break that, before trying to straighten the rest of it out. --MartyD 15:18, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

Guess I'm a little rusty. Will approve.--swfritter 15:26, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

Added cover artist

I added cover credit for verified [9] from the book THE ART OF RICHARD POWERS by Jane Frank and made a note of it.Don Erikson 17:16, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

"tuple index out of range"

What the heck does that mean? Was trying to import contents from one pub to another using the pub record number and this error message came up. Tried the same import with the tag and it worked. ~Bill, --Bluesman 04:17, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

You used the title record's number, not the publication record's number. It doesn't pay to anger a tuple. MHHutchins 04:21, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

I agree. Those tuples are not to be taken lightly! (Sounds like you tried to use the import-a-single-title idea I brought up elsewhere, but it has yet to be implemented...). --MartyD 09:57, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

The Chrysanthemum Spirit

I approved this merge but the date that was selected was 1993-00-00. The title that was dropped had a date of 1941-01-00 which seems more in line with the author's death date.--swfritter 14:59, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Yes, thanks. Locus1's contents for The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventh Annual Collection cites its first publication date as 1993 in Blue Bamboo: Tales of Fantasy and Romance, and its content list for that agrees. But then after I submitted the merge, I found his death date and got suspicious. I've found a scan of Blue Bambo on Google Books, and it cites the first publication date as January 1941 (does not say where, though) in the text. So I am going to edit it back and make some notes in the two pubs about Locus' dates. --MartyD 16:14, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

According to Encyclopedia of literary translation into English, Volume 1 by Olive Classe, the original Japanese title was "Seihintan". Ahasuerus 16:26, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Yes. The information in the Blue Bamboo introduction includes the Japanese names for the stories. Don't know if they're worth the variant (esp. with no pub), but I could at least include the names in the notes. --MartyD 16:36, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Oh yes, original foreign language titles should always be recorded. As Help:How to enter foreign editions points out, "For works that were originally written in a foreign language, the canonical title is the title of the work as it appeared in that language. If one or more English language translations of the title have been published, then they should be entered as Variant Titles. If no English translations exist at this time, do not create a Variant Title in English. If the literal translation of the title is known, document it in the Notes field." Ahasuerus 17:33, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Blue Bamboo by Dazai

I looked at the Google Books entry for this title but was unable to find if there had been any English translations of these stories published before 1993. If these are the first translations into English, I think the stories should be dated 1993. In previous cases where a foreign-language work appeared in English later, we would create variants, giving the first (foreign-language) version as the parent, and create a new record for the English version as the variant, each with the date of their first publication. e.g. Pierre Barbet. Can you find anything that states that there were English language versions of these stories published before 1993? Thanks. MHHutchins 17:55, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

I wrote this without first seeing Ahasuerus's note in the comment above that supports the method I cite in entering foreign-language editions. MHHutchins 17:58, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

According to Ralph McCarthy's notes in Blue bamboo: Japanese tales of fantasy, the Japanese title is "Chikusei" and it was first published in April 1945. Interestingly enough, he writes that "Blue bamboo was, in fact, first published in Chinese (in the Japanese Imperial Government-sponsored journal "Greater East Asian Literature") even before it was published in Japanese". Ahasuerus 18:17, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

This is spread across two sections. Anyway, yes, I can set up the originals and make the existing ones variants. But I thought current "standard" practice for non-serial variants is to use the original date. I personally have absolutely no objections to using different dates on the variants (in fact, I'd use the date-of-first-appearance on all variants if I had my druthers), but I want to do what I'm supposed to be doing.... --MartyD 20:50, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

This goes back to the definition of variants, i.e. variants based on title and author credits vs. variants based on textual changes. If the 1993 book of English translations was in fact the first, then I see no problem with dating them 1993, because they are the first appearance of this text. If the variant is based solely on title and author credits (our current definition and usage of the word), then I believe the dates should all be the same date, otherwise the pub would display only the date of the variant. For example if a Ray Bradbury story is published as "X" in 1955, and as "Z" in 1958, and "Z" becomes his preferred title and he reprints it that way in his collections, then the collections would display the story as published in 1958, which we can all agree would not be right. I believe this was a basis for the original argument that the dates should be the same. Seeing the date of first appearance of a variant title is easy if the records are complete. All you have to do is click on the variant title, and the first pub would be the first use of that variant title. Again, this is only if all publications have been entered into the database, a highly unlikely scenario but one that we're all trying to achieve. Thanks. MHHutchins 21:46, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Ok, I will change the English dates to match the Blue Bamboo printing, which does seem to be the first English translation. --MartyD 23:48, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

FWIW, I like the end result. The Japanese title and original date end up parenthetical. See BLBMBTLSFF1993, for example. Thanks for the feedback (and the zillions of approvals). --MartyD 00:46, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Yes, it displays well, both in the pub record and on the author's summary page. Thanks for the efforts in pulling this pub into shape. MHHutchins 00:55, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Translation are (sort of) derived Titles, which raises all kinds of questions, e.g. are two different translations by two different translators really the same Title or should we have two different Title records? I am sure we will revisit these areas at the software level in the not too distant future (by adding support for translators etc), but for now we sweep much of this complexity under the rug. Ahasuerus 02:07, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Date of first serial appearance vs date of first book publication

One of the underlying issues with the way we handle serialized texts is that they have two important dates associated with them:

• "date of first serialization", and
• "date of first book appearance"

The fist date is important for obvious reasons and the second one is important to book collectors and bibliographers. You can't adequately handle both dates with a single data element the way we currently do it with "Title date" and any attempt to do so is liable to be a band-aid. Ideally, a Serial record should say something like:

Golden Blood (1933, first book publication 1964), also appeared as:
   Magazine appearances:
     Golden Blood (Part 1 of 6) (1933)
     Golden Blood (Part 2 of 6) (1933)
     etc

which is similar to how Clute/Nicholls et al record these cases.

I believe we could implement this in one of two ways. First, we could add another field to the Title table and call it something like title_serialized_date. We would then have two date fields to work with, which will address the underlying issue. We could also write a conversion script which will auto-populate this field based on the earlier of the current Title date and the date of the first known serialization. The downside to this approach is that this field will only be meaningful for Serials, so we will have another rarely used field in the Edit Title screen plus changing title types may result in awkward leftovers. Additionally, another date field makes it more likely that our Title and Publication data will get out of sync. Not a show stopper, but it's a consideration.

Alternatively, we could determine the date of the first book appearance dynamically (i.e. at display time) based on the pubs linked to the Serial Title. The downside here is that:

• we will not have a place to record the date of the first book publication if we don't have a pub record on file (not a big deal), and
• this approach may affect performance since we will need to check all pubs associated with all Serial titles at display time

Since you have done so much work on the Summary page logic, could you place check the code and see whether the second approach would be viable? Given the limited number of Serials that most of our authors are responsible for, I hope that it won't be a big deal, but I'd like to be sure before I post a proposal on the Community Portal. TIA! Ahasuerus 18:44, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Sure, I'll give it a try. The one further problem I can think of is what to do about titles with no pubs? I guess for pub-less parents, we could try to figure out the dates from the variants. But for the pub-less child (e.g., the series placeholders I've seen from time-to-time)...? --MartyD 01:05, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Good questions. I'll have to think about them and hopefully come up with something by tomorrow. Ahasuerus 02:04, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

You mention above as a downside of dynamically determining first book publication "we will not have a place to record the date of the first book publication if we don't have a pub record on file (not a big deal)". I think it may be a moderately big deal. In a fair number of cases where the first publication was in a nongenre source, or where we know the date of first book publication but have so little data on the first edition that a stub publication seems unwarranted, an accurate title date many years prior to the first recorded pub has been assigned. This is a particular problem with 19th century horror works. -DES ^Talk 15:09, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Yes, one example I had in mind is all of those lovely Poe titles I spent so much time trying to organize before ever getting to the still-incomplete entry of the non-genre magazine issues in which they appeared. --MartyD 16:18, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Good point; something to keep in mind once we dump all the arguments pro and contra on the Community Portal page and see which way we want to go. Unfortunately, the more I think about it, the more permutations I can see :( Ahasuerus 18:49, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Great Short Novels of Adult Fantasy II

I'm comparing my copy of your verified pub Great Short Novels of Adult Fantasy II and I think the title should be "Great Short Novels of Adult Fantasy: Volume II". It is listed that way on both the cover and the title page. Let me know if you agree. Thanks. ~Ron --Rtrace 03:14, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

I'll check on it tonight. --MartyD 14:39, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Right you are. I submitted a change and also asked Swfritter to check the review in Galaxy and see what title was used there. --MartyD 00:25, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

He agreed, and I changed the title record as well. --MartyD 10:46, 19 September 2009 (UTC)

The Lost Continent

Could you take a look at your verified pub The Lost Continent. I've got this printing and I noticed that the author's name is misspelled on both the cover and the title page as "C. J. Cutliffe Hyne". Oddly, Carter's introduction gets it right: "Cutcliffe Hyne". Before I start unmerging titles, I thought I'd check to see if the variation on the author's name carries through to all the Ballantine printings. Though, we'll still have to unmerge them to make a proper variant for the missing hyphen. Thanks. ~Ron --Rtrace 11:26, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

I'll check on it tonight, too. --MartyD 14:39, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Right you are again. I never noticed. It's wrong on the cover and title page. It is right in Carter's intro and above the intro's title. BTW, it's also wrong in the Ballantine book list in one of the after-page ads. Want me to do anything or leave it to you? --MartyD 00:37, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

I'm happy to handle it. It will definitely be easier to get them all at once. I'm also inclined to include the Del Rey reprint in the changes, though I've been unable to verify one way or the other by searching for that ISBN online. Unfortunately, I'm away from my library until Sunday night and won't be able to submit the edits until then. If you want to handle them before then, feel free. Otherwise, I'll change them all when I get home on Sunday. ~Ron --Rtrace 03:16, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

I'm not so sure about the Del Rey one. I'll submit the edits. It's only fair, since I missed it in the first place. --MartyD 10:15, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

The Ballantine ones are all fixed up. Notes on the 1st edition could use some help, and I did not add the intro or try to adjust the page count. Whatever yours shows should probably also be propagated to the Canadian printing.... --MartyD 10:45, 19 September 2009 (UTC)

Carter anthology

In case you missed my response to this one during my flurry of mea culpas.--swfritter 18:57, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, I was watching. --MartyD 21:59, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

Serial/Novel VTs with multiple authors

When you get a chance, could you please review this discussion, which may be related to some Serial/Novel VT changes that have been recently made? TIA! Ahasuerus 22:15, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for fixing it! BTW, while testing the fix, I came across this series with 2 omnibuses, Lord Tedric and Alien Realms (1980) by E. E. 'Doc' Smith" and Lord Tedric and Alien Realms (1980) by Edward E. Smith. One is a VT of the other, but they are not linked on this Series page. I wonder if it may be another bug? Ahasuerus 00:36, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

It's there. The "only as by...". The problem is the variant is directly in the series. Remove it, and it should be as you'd expect -- the one that's a variant should not appear directly, only its parent should. --MartyD 01:00, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, missed it! There is a FR to prevent VTs from getting assigned to Series and I hope to get to it over the next couple of months. Ahasuerus 01:10, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

3 Rms, Good View

Sorry, merged the dup titles before looking at the new submissions. Right after hitting "Approved" I realized you probably had submitted a merge of these titles. :-)Kraang 02:03, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

No problem. Better both of us than neither of us. --MartyD 02:08, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

The Time Traders

The notes for [this] need an adjustment? The ACE Image Library seems to have altered it's note and now (correctly) refers to D-461 as the original ACE edition (there never was a double). FYI ~Bill, --Bluesman 02:20, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Indeed. The ACE Image Library notes are significantly improved since February. I will update the entry to match. Thanks! --MartyD 10:20, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

I also added a note to D-461 and a link to ACE's cover image for that one. --MartyD 10:28, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Starbridge - added Author's Afterword/notation

Morning! This. [10]. I added the Author's Afterword (I hope, brain fxxt!) and notation. Thanks, Harry. --Dragoondelight 13:30, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Do we suppose Ann Crispin and A. C. Crispin are one and the same, pseudononymous in the ISFDB sense? --MartyD 14:56, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

I would, but would use the "pseudonymous whatever" instead of making the whole name a pseudonym at this point. I have doubts do to the age of the author that there will be much more usuage as Ann. Thanks, Harry. --Dragoondelight 11:32, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

Ok, I'll bite. What's the "pseudonymous whatever"? --MartyD 21:03, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

Do you mean creating a variant title without creating a pseudonym relationship? -DES ^Talk 21:31, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

Sorry for late reply. What I meant is what DES stated with clarity. Possibly "Pseudonymous to Whomever". LOL Thanks, Harry. --Dragoondelight 12:27, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

One More For the Road

In your update to One More For the Road would change the titles of two content items:

• "Diane de Foret" to "Diane de Forêt"
• "Tete-a-Tete" to "Tête-à-Tête"

It would also change dates for "The Dragon Danced at Midnight" and "The Enemy in the Wheat".

All four of these stories all appear in the Morrow edition, which was verified by User:Bluesman. Please check with him whether these changes match his pub, or whether we need variants here. I have your submission on hold, pending his response. -DES ^Talk 00:47, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, I thought I had checked, but obviously not. Will do. --MartyD 10:37, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

Upon further review, please reject. Looks like the date the pub has for "The Enemy in the Wheat" is wrong, so I'll at least want to rescind that and supply different notes. I'll wait until I hear back from Bill and submit more appropriate changes. If you can, would you dump the edit and send it to me? If not, no big deal. Thanks. --MartyD 11:34, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

a copy of the edit data sent by email via the wiki. Please confirm reception, and i will reject only after getting confirmation. -DES ^Talk 18:34, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

Got it (replied to it, too). Thanks much! --MartyD 21:00, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

The Accidental Time Machine

I added the author's note and some notes to this verified pub. Thanks, Willem H. 15:09, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

Added gutter code

I added a reprint gutter code to your verified [11].Don Erikson 01:55, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

Tomorrow's Children Date

After merging this title I changed the month form 7 to 3 to match the date for the first publication which appears under the master title. I also changed some variant dates yesterday - mostly cases where the month was 0.--swfritter 13:37, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. I had meant to go change it but got interrupted and forgot. --MartyD 15:56, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

Gehenna by Malzburg

I have a copy of this pub with the same gutter code. "Gehanna" is credited to Barry Malzberg and not to his pseudonym K. M. O'Donnell. If you don't want to dig out your copy let me know and I will make the change.--swfritter 14:37, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

I'll check it tonight (+5 hours). That would have been one of my earlier entries and verifications, and I could have botched the verify. I'm also quite positive I wouldn't have known then about variant titles, so I doubt I set that up. --MartyD 19:23, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

It's going to get fun now that we should notify as many as five verifiers. This one already slipped by two primary verifiers. And I thought I was just going to breeze through my anthologies and collections.--swfritter 19:57, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

Yes, indeed. I mentioned to Ahasuerus just the other day that we need to find a way to auto-notify without requiring Wiki edits.... --MartyD 20:21, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

We need something like that for the mods too - half the approvals I look at really only need a check to make sure that other verifiers have been notified. A quick win might be links to the verifier's talk pages to see if a note has been left, but knowing that auto-notification had taken place would be even better. But that would require user-preferences for all sorts of options - e.g. I don't care if somebody has added an OCLC reference to my pubs, but that will only show up in notes. BLongley 20:54, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

Auto-notifications are a good idea, but it may not be easy to do. Ideally, we would have an audit trail of all changes with the "before" and "after" states of the record available on demand. As Al discovered when he tried to do it a couple of years ago, it's not as simple as it sounds, so he stopped after implementing Author History. Ahasuerus 22:00, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

Meanwhile, back on the original topic. It's "Barry Malzberg" and only "Barry Malzberg" everywhere. I will add a new title and remove the other one. Does anyone have an opinion about whether I should make the same replacement in WBSF1972 (the unverified, paperback edition)? --MartyD 23:29, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

The problem is that we can't be sure if those were credited to Barry N. or Barry. My suspicion is that every appearance after the mag and Ace Double appearances were one or the other with earlier ones likelier to be Barry Malzberg. But only a guess. Considering the errors I and others have missed and made I think we really needed all five primary verifications.--swfritter 00:47, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

Deryni Checkmate

I uploaded a new cover image for your verified pub, Deryni Checkmate. I also expanded the title of the Carter introduction. Thanks. ~Ron --Rtrace 11:35, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. I debated about which way to enter it. --MartyD 00:52, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

Against the Fall of Night - added cover image/start page number

Morning! This. [12]. I added a cover image [13], after matching my copy to your ver. Thanks, Harry. --Dragoondelight 12:24, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

That's the one. Nice find! I spent a lot of time looking for it without any luck. --MartyD 00:51, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

Players of Null-A

Found an artist for [this] from Ian Summers' sci-fi art book Tomorrow and Beyond. Added to the field and a note. ~Bill, --Bluesman 22:31, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

Pearson's Magazine - there are UK and US editions

As I realized yesterday - Fictionmags lists a UK edition and US edition with disparate contents. Secondary sources don't usually indicate which edition but I would assume US sources are more likely to list US editions. Just another complication. I think there was also a UK Pearson's Weekly which predated these two magazines.--swfritter 15:13, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

Ah, how special. I did not know that. I did see a reference somewhere to Pearson's Weekly. I didn't have a chance yet, but I was going to format the title for the one I created and those other ones that were sitting there (which I put into the series) to be the year-based groupings such as those you had set up. At least, I assumed it was you. Seems like a nice way to organize anything more frequent than annual. --MartyD 23:10, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

I did not put the Pearson's Weekly in because a serial that ran in it ran for nearly a year. I would have put in the last installment only but I there was no documentation as to how many installments there were and it's possible that they had double issues or issues during the run that did not have installments. Yes, I put most of the mags in the series; I don't bother until it reaches the point where it is easier for me to determine if a particular mag has been added.--swfritter 23:25, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

Prentice Alvin

I added this cover scan to this verified pub. Thanks, Willem H. 09:12, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

Looks good. --MartyD 10:01, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

Changes to Heinlein's 6XH

Your verified pub. Changed '"—And He Built a Crooked House"' to '"—And He Built a Crooked House—"'. Changed "All You Zombies—" to '"—All You Zombies—"'.--swfritter 14:35, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

Demon Breed

Added a cover image to [this] ~Bill, --Bluesman 01:30, 17 October 2009 (UTC)

Added interior art to transient verified pub Somewhere a Voice

this pub.--swfritter 15:13, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

Two translated poems by Clark Ashton Smith

I'm holding the two submissions which want to merge poems, giving the French author co-authorship. I see he's given credit in the 1971 collection Selected Poems (verified by Rtrace), but the 2001 collection (The Last Oblivion) is verified without given authorship. The verifier is inactive so we can't ask for it to be checked. Until we can get another verifier or a reliable secondary source, it would probably be best just to create variants for these two poems. MHHutchins 21:28, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

I left a note on Unapersson's page about the submitted merge, since asking didn't look likely to be fruitful. I based the merge on Locus' contents list, which actually lists those poems as by des Laurieres and translated by Smith without mention of prior publication. Given the verified Selected Poems dual credit, it seemed enough to go on for a merge. If you disagree, feel free to reject and I'll make variants and put notes about the des Laurieres credits into the Smith-only titles and into The Last Oblivion. --MartyD 09:56, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

I'm not doubting that these are translations of poems by des Laurieres, only that they may not be credited as such in The Last Oblivion. Until it can disputed otherwise, we should go with the verified pub. I will reject the submissions to merge, and will create variants. Thanks. MHHutchins 16:53, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Sounds good. Sorry, I would have done it. Didn't mean to create even more work. --MartyD 17:31, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Salome vs. Salomé

I'm holding another submission which wants to make variants of these two titles by Stableford. I'm not sure if the standards require the creation of a variant in this case, and wouldn't mind if you took the question to the rules and standards page. Personally, I feel the two title records should be merged, dropping the accented letter. Each title record only has one pub, one a Stableford collection and the other a Stableford-edited anthology. So either way is fine with me, perhaps with a note in the pub not chosen about how the word is titled. (A database search brings up both records regardless of whether you use the regular "e" or the accented "é".) This is similar to how records are handled which credit Philip Jose Farmer as opposed to Philip José Farmer. We don't distinguish the two and they are merged into one record without variants created. What is your take on it? Thanks. MHHutchins 21:42, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

I will bring it up on the rules and standards page. In this case, you're right -- there is no functional difference. But that's not always true of all diacriticals. I recall from working with the Poe titles "Maelstrom" vs. "Maelström": searching for one does not find the other. So there a variant is necessary. I'm definitely of simple mind, so if it's necessary in some cases, I'd be inclined to do it in all cases. Is it reasonable to expect editors to figure out which diacriticals matter and which don't? Dunno. We'll see what people think. --MartyD 10:10, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

Discussion started Rules_and_standards_discussions#Variants_based_on_diacriticals. I noticed in writing that up that existing help for authors specifically encourages variants based on accents and for titles encourages recording the accented characters (with no mention of variants). --MartyD 15:16, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

I'm going to approve the submission, and if there is stronger software support for diacritical marks later on, we can revisit the situation. Thanks. MHHutchins 18:35, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Sounds good. It should be easy enough to find diacritical variants and merge them if/when we want to. Thanks for reviewing it. --MartyD 01:48, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

Lost Worlds cleanup

I don't want to interfere with any edits you may have planned for the Lin Carter pub. It looks like none of the stories need to be variant titles if the data from the copyright notice is documented. If you hadn't planned on doing so let me know and I will make the appropriate changes. Thanks for documenting the change on the verifier's page even though they haven't been active for awhile. Saved me some time.--swfritter 14:38, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. I have it on my list to do -- ran into it via the duplicated titles. I will look at all of the others as well. --MartyD 23:37, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

The Scroll of Morloc

I have approved unlinking The Scroll of Morloc by Lin Carter alone from The Scroll of Morloc by Carter and Clark Ashton Smith. I assume you intend to merge the two Titles next? Ahasuerus 01:35, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

Merge next. Got a big warning about both titles being in the pub when I tried to do the straight merge, so I figured better to be safe and break the variant than to experiment.... Would it have done The Right Thing^TM had I just merged? --MartyD 10:36, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

I tried merging them directly on the local server and it worked fine as long as I told the Title Merge screen to use NULL as the new parent record. I think the yellow warning is generated based on an SQL call which returns all Pubs for each Title including each Title's parent Title, which is not what we want in this case. I'll check the code again and create a Bug Report. Thanks! Ahasuerus 23:41, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

I was afraid it might actually try to add the parent into the pub. I haven't looked at merge's pub-title logic. --MartyD 11:09, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

As suspected, SQLGetPubsByTitle(titlerec) retrieves:

select title_id from titles where title_id=%d or title_parent=%d" % (titlerec, titlerec)

Bug 2891059 created. Ahasuerus 04:17, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

You may assign it to me if you want. I've been more than a bit remiss about looking for things to fix lately.... --MartyD 14:00, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

Great, done! We have only 38 open bugs left, so things are not as bad they used to be :) Ahasuerus 17:29, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

P.S. This function is apparently used in a dozen different places, so we may have to clone it to make sure that the change in behavior doesn't affect anything else. Ahasuerus 17:30, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

Eek, I just noticed that I accidentally assigned Bug 2891059 to myself rather than to you :( Sorry, fixed now. I think I may need a vacation... Ahasuerus 02:42, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Here I figured you just couldn't resist working on it yourself. :-) --MartyD 02:53, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Just one more turn, er, I mean one more bug and I promise this will be it for the night! Ahasuerus 03:10, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

The Metamorphoses of the Vampire

I think you'll find this was translated by Frances Amery rather than Frances Avery (i.e., Brian Stableford). BLongley 18:03, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, yes. Realized the mistake after I submitted it. Have a note to self to go fix it. --MartyD 18:14, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

Choice of Gods

Scanned in a new image and expanded the notes for [this] ~Bill, --Bluesman 03:48, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

That's the one. Thanks! --MartyD 13:59, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

Nyarlathotep Cycle: Tales about the God of a Thousand Forms

Unfortunately, I had to reject the submission since record 108379 had been merged and the submission was no longer approvable. Could you please try again? Ahasuerus 01:41, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Didn't realize I had jumped the gun on that. Sorry. Re-submitted. Thanks. --MartyD 11:06, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Conjure Wife

Added the publication month and a note to this verified pub from my 4th printing. Thanks, Willem H. 14:23, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Deryni Rising

I expanded the title of the Lin Carter introduction in your verified pub, as I had done for Deryni Checkmate. I've been expanding the titles of all the Carter introductions to the Ballantine Adult Fantasies as I get to them. Thanks. --Ron ~ Rtrace^Talk 04:07, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

No objections here. Thanks. --MartyD 11:12, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

New Orleans Item - Mummy's Foot

You have part 2 of "The Mummy's Foot" entered as a serial but Part 1 as shortfiction/short story. I would have assumed Part 1 was meant to be entered as a serial if you had not also added the short story qualifier. Usual practice would make both parts will become variants of the short story so Part 1 should also be SERIAL?--swfritter 16:05, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I had a brain cramp when I entered Part 1. It went away by the time I entered Part 2. Rather than trying out the spiffy new Cancel functionality, I figured I'd just wait until it went through and then fix it. Maybe I should put a bug in Ahasuerus' ear about allowing correction of submissions.... :-) --MartyD 16:56, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

I will be more than happy to test this change once somebody <cough cough> codes it! :-) Ahasuerus 16:59, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Ah, I see you have them held. Anyway, yes, I intend for them to be serial installments of the full short story, to be made variants of Le Pied de Momie. --MartyD 16:58, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Approved, linked and pubs reference in General Interest Magazines.--swfritter 17:14, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. I would have done those, too. I like to wait for the approvals before doing the other bookkeeping, just in case.... I submitted an 'ss' length for Part 2 (vs. blanking the length on Part 1). Doesn't seem like it does any harm to record the story length; from what I see in the database, we're not consistent about recording or not recording lengths on the serial installments.... --MartyD 17:40, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

I sometimes enter the short-story length for serials if they are less than novel length, especially if they have not been reprinted. It's an undocumented feature.--swfritter 18:16, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

And by the way, do you finally think you are approaching moderator proficiency level? I think a lot of other people think so and you are under no obligation to do anything but self-moderate.--swfritter 22:49, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

I still think you mods operate on an entirely different plane, but if it will help, what the heck. --MartyD 02:03, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Resistance is futile. You WILL be assimilated. Drone Swfritter, will you do the honors? Ahasuerus 18:05, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

The deed has been done, congratulations! Just remember that with great power comes great responsibility :) Ahasuerus 18:14, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

HTML error

Please check the HTML code for this pub. Thanks. MHHutchins 22:59, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

As Kurt Cobain says, nevermind. You fixed it on the next submission. Thanks. MHHutchins 23:01, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, even I notice things like 12-line links. :-) --MartyD 05:13, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands

I cloned your verified pub, The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands and I'm questioning whether yours is actually a first printing. Mine states "First Plume Printing, January 1992" and has a full number line. The back cover art on mine matches the scan of the front cover of yours. I suspect that the reverse is also true given the cover artists listed. Lastly, mine does include a price on the back lower left. Given the nature of the differences, I'm wondering if yours is perhaps a book club edition or some other variation. --Ron ~ Rtrace^Talk 18:35, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

See Bill's note below, FYI. Anyway, yes, mine has the train on the back that yours has on the front. It is otherwise exactly as I described it. I found this entry in Locus:

_The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands (Penguin/Plume 0-452-26740-4, Jan ’92 [Nov ’91], $15.00, 422pp, tp, cover by Don Brautigam & Phil Heffernan) [Roland (Gunslinger)] Reprint (Donald M. Grant 1991) dark fantasy novel, third book in the “Dark Tower” series, with full-color illustrations by Ned Dameron. There are two different versions of this edition, one with a cover by Brautigam, the other with a cover by Heffernan. Other than the cover illustration, the two are identical.

So sounds like there are two different covers, but it also sounds like mine could be a BCE or other variation. Unless, of course, what's inside the two different covers isn't exactly identical.... Mine does not have that "First Plume Printing" statement, number line, or prices outside the barcode. Unfortunately, it is my wife's book, and she does not remember where she got it. I am going to approve your submission, and I will change mine to do the cover artists as you have done yours (credit Brautigan solely, and add a bc interiorart entry for Heffernan), so the differences should be clearer to the next editor who happens upon them. We'll have to see if someone can shed light on the possibility of mine's being a BCE. --MartyD 02:26, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Looks (a bit) like three different editions? I scanned the backcover and copyright page of my edition, so you can compare them. My front cover is the same as shown here. Apparently I missed the statement about the publication date and price when verifying. Shall I make my own clone? Willem H. 12:36, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

I think you should. Mine looks just like yours, BUT.... where yours has prices on the back cover, mine has a white box stating "PRINTED IN U.S.A.", and where your copyright page has the printing statement and number line (between the publisher pedigree and the copyright), mine has empty space. Given Ron's description and Locus' comment, it sounds like you have the other edition of his, and I have something else (like a book club edition of some sort). So clone away and move your verification to that, and I'll adjust the notes on the existing entry to point out these differences and speculate that it is some sort of BCE. Thanks (thanks for the scans, too). --MartyD 12:50, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Sounds logical. I removed my verification from your pub, and submitted a new clone with (I hope) clear notes. I'll add a front- and backcover scan after my submission is approved. Thanks for the notice, and by the way, congratulations with your promotion. Groupies already crowding around your house? :-) Willem H. 13:55, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

It's a side of the job no one warned me about. And the whole underwear throwing thing is really quite embarassing. --MartyD 18:02, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

I updated my pub with notes similar to the ones Willem H. did for his and also including a stitched front and back cover image. I also removed the series title from the publication title. If it were to be included the series title appears under "The Waste Lands" on the title page. However, I recall a recent discussion where the consensus was not include series titles. Thanks for both your researches on this. I guess I'll hold on to my underwear. --Ron ~ Rtrace^Talk 22:50, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Waste Land

Rtrace has submitted a new pub [[14]] that seems to be a clone of yours [[15]] but with different artwork and printing/numbering data yours lacks. I placed the submission on hold so you can look at it. Maybe you and Ron can figure this out. If so feel free to unhold and do what you need to? Thanks. ~Bill, --Bluesman 18:36, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

And congrats on the 'promotion'!! ~Bill, --Bluesman 18:36, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, and will do. --MartyD 01:34, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Actually, I can't take it off of hold. Would you be so kind as to do so? Go ahead and approve it, or leave it to me if you'd rather it had my fingerprints. Thanks. --MartyD 02:38, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

I wasn't aware of that. I shall remove the hold and you can do dastardly things to the submission. :-) ~Bill, --Bluesman 04:24, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Due to a long and painful history of accidental cross-approval, it's no longer possible to approve/reject submissions held by other moderators. In extreme cases, e.g. when a moderator is MIA, as appears to be the case with DES, we can "hard reject" and then recreate the submission. Ahasuerus 02:59, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Monsters

Found a nice cover for [this] ~Bill, --Bluesman 18:25, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

It is very nice indeed! --MartyD 11:11, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Players of Null-A [2]

Newly scanned image and slightly expanded notes for [this]. Found Podwil's sig on the cover. ~Bill, --Bluesman 20:03, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

That's the right one. It's so much easier to see those signatures once someone else finds them. There it is, plain as day.... --MartyD 02:09, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

Sending an XML

Marty, you don't accept emails from here, so I can't send you an XML file. I do, so email my your addie and I'll send it to you. Or you can enable for a while so I can send it in the body of a from-the-site email. WXRock 20:38, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, it was supposed to be on. It is now, so give it another shot. I will not be around tonight, so the earliest I'll be able to look at anything will be tomorrow morning (now + 14 hours or so). --MartyD 21:38, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

Lords of Atlantis

The gutter code in [this] is the date it was printed, according to a discussion some time back. Though 60¢ and '73 don't seem to match?? FYI ~Bill, --Bluesman 04:03, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

Hmmm. You're right. If you look at the 1972, 1973, and 1976 listings for Airmont Books, you'll see several people have used that code as month and year. I guess I may as well be a conformist.... I will go give it a date. --MartyD 11:11, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

Leigh Brackett

Yes, that is a mistake. No wiki expert here.

No problem. That's what we're here for. By the way, it is ok to respond to notes/questions on your own talk page. The people who post them will watch for your responses (pages one edits in the Wiki automatically get added to your "watchlist" (see "my watchlist" at the top right of this window) and will post any follow-ups there. It helps keep discussion threads together in one place. You just indent your response by adding a colon at the front of each text block. Multiple colons get you multiple levels of indentation, so use one more colon than present on text you're responding to. --MartyD 12:42, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

The Other People is a variant title for The Queer Ones - it was called The Other People in the Dikty Year's Best Ninth Series volume.

So I was trying to link those so that The Other People is a variant title of The Queer Ones, being the uncommon usage.

Ok, so I will reject the proposed variant that's the mistake, and you can submit the one you really wanted. For future reference, if you ever discover you've made a mistaken submission, you can cancel it yourself (if you click on "My Pending Edits" at the left, when you're in the ISFDB, you'll see everything you've submitted that's not yet approved or rejected). --MartyD 12:42, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Also, Paizo's Secret Of Sinharat has the same content As the Ace Double The People of the Talisman / The Secret of Sinharat as does Eric John Stark : Outlaw of Mars - I am not sure how to separate it out so it is individual like those two?

Yes, I saw your note. The structure's a little confusing, but I approved the change of the publication's type to OMNIBUS and added a matching OMNIBUS title to it. That publication contains the original Secret of Sinharat novel title. You can add The People of the Talisman as another title to its contents. You can also make the OMNIBUS title a variant of The People of the Talisman / The Secret of Sinharat, which seems appropriate. So there will be two, Secret of Sinharat titles -- one will be for the novel itself, the other will be for the two-novel publications labeled the same way. Does that make sense? If you need help with any of this, let me know. --MartyD 12:42, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Ok, thanks - to add an existing publication as opposed to new is there a way to link those? Also most of these Planet Stories volumes have introductions by a living author, so I could add those too - which is the adding the new content bit. Bluetyson 14:20, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

To add to an existing publication, view it (e.g., find the title and click on the link for the particular publication). Then you Edit This Pub from the left menu, and in that screen, below the main data, you'll be able to add titles, just as you can when entering a new publication. Once the additions are approved, there's a "Merge" operation to combine the title(s) you just added (which creates new titles) with existing titles; that merge operation gives one the choice of which details to keep, so you don't have to get the dates, etc., correct when you do your adding, as long as you're diligent about doing the merging after the approval. If you want to do it on your own, that's fine. If you'd rather I took care of the merging, I'm happy to do that -- let me know. --MartyD 13:17, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Yes, please merge away! Bluetyson 13:35, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Now you can see how this one turned out. --MartyD 13:55, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Right, thanks. There's still one stray Brackett story, but it is from a non-genre magazine (or magazines) as such - are those doable? e.g. * The True Death of Juanito Rodriguez, (ss) Cosmopolitan Feb 1965 Argosy (UK) Jul 1965 Bluetyson 14:16, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Yes. You can add it to whichever publication, just like any other title. You can edit the title (once the addition is approved) and note the original publication in the Notes section. Or, you can add the non-genre magazine with just this story as content (or add content to an existing edition of the magazine, if it's already recorded). See Help:Entering_non-genre_magazines for details. If you look at the short fiction and poems under Edgar Allan Poe, you will find plenty of examples. --MartyD 14:27, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

The other is that the Dennis MacMillan nongenre No Good From A Corpse is actually a collection. It contains the novel, but also her eight crime short stories - that could be set up and her crime stories listed as the contents - do they appear in the list then? There's also another stray story from Cosmopolitan magazine that I presume is a crime story, but haven't read it yet.

This is similar to the omnibus above. I approved the change of the publication's type to COLLECTION and added a matching COLLECTION title to it. That publication contains the original No Good from a Corpse as a (non-genre) novel. You can add the titles for the other stories to it. Since this is the only form of this collection, there's no need to do anything further with the COLLECTION title itself; and there will once again be two No Good from a Corpse titles -- one for the novel, one for this collection. Again, let me know if you need help. Thanks! --MartyD 12:42, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Bluetyson 12:15, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

I just noticed this discussion after posting a comment on Bluetyson's talk page about non-genre magazines. It is my understanding that a record for an issue of a non-genre magazine will not be created unless it contains spec-fic. Otherwise, the story's origins would be added to the notes of its title record. A non-genre story would not be added to the database unless it is a) published in a collection by an author who has attained the threshold for the inclusion of non-genre work (which Brackett has) , or b) published in an anthology that has a majority of spec-fic. I'm not sure if this is spelled out in the help pages, but it seems to be the rule that most editors work by. The stories in No Good From a Corpse are IN because of the first criteria, but we would not create records for the non-genre magazines in which those stories appeared. We would simply record their original publication in the notes of the individual title records. Hope this helps. Thanks. MHHutchins 18:04, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Yes, sorry, I should have been more explicit. I was thinking the story was spec-fic in a non-genre magazine and didn't pay close enough attention to what the story is. --MartyD 19:43, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Added gutter code

I added a gutter code for a reprint of your verified [16].Don Erikson 18:27, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Red Planet

Scanned in a new image and expanded the notes for [this] ~Bill, --Bluesman 04:56, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

'Salem's Lot, Illustrated Edition

Thanks for fixing it up. I used the other edition as a guide to add mine. Something must of gotten messed up when I added it (I had the other stories/essay listed). I'm working on addding those right now. --Wonder_al 07:01, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

Rocket Jockey - replaced cover art link

Morning! This. [17]. I replaced a null link for the cover art with this [18]. Thanks, Harry. Also, I think you caught a cover artist in the cover art link field mistake for me today. Thanks, Harry. --Dragoondelight 14:27, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

Looks lovely, thanks. Yes, I noticed it and fixed it. I was almost going to ask you about it, then I saw you had the name right there in those beautiful notes of yours! :-) --MartyD 01:09, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, Harry. --Dragoondelight 12:00, 18 December 2009 (UTC)