User talk:Sdtullis

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Welcome!

Hello, Sdtullis, and welcome to the ISFDB Wiki! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

Note: Image uploading isn't entirely automated. You're uploading the files to the wiki which will then have to be linked to the database by editing the publication record.

Please be careful in editing publications that have been primary verified by other editors. See Help:How to verify data#Making changes to verified pubs. But if you have a copy of an unverified publication, verifying it can be quite helpful. See Help:How to verify data for detailed information.

I hope you enjoy editing here! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will insert your name and the date. If you need help, check out the community portal, or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome! --Marc Kupper|talk 02:40, 13 September 2009 (UTC)

All Hallows 43

Thanks for entering All Hallows 43! I have accepted the submission and then changed the constituent articles from NONFICTION to ESSAY. We use NONFICTION for book length works and ESSAY for shorter articles. I also changed the title type of "Editor's Note" from EDITOR to ESSAY since EDITOR is a special title type used to designate magazine editor while editorials are entered as ESSAYs. Finally, I reformatted the Interview entries to put the person who was interviewed in the "Interviewee" field and the person who did the interview in the "Interviewer" field. Everything else looks good, thanks again! Ahasuerus 23:34, 13 September 2009 (UTC)

I am afraid there were no fiction items in the submission, so they will need to be re-entered following the guidelines in Help:Screen:EditPub. Would you happen to remember if anything went wrong during the data entry process? I wonder if you may have run into an obscure bug in the data entry form... Ahasuerus 14:38, 15 September 2009 (UTC)
I see that you tried submitting the data again, but I am afraid there was no new data in the submission :-( Did you hit "Enter" too early, by chance? The Enter key tells your Web browser to finish the submission (and we have no control over its behavior), so perhaps that's what's happening? Ahasuerus 15:36, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
I have no idea why it's happening. I'm not hitting Enter, just clicking the Submit Data button when I'm done. I'm having to click Add Title a lot to create more fields for the shortfiction entries, but I don't see how that could be messing anything up. I also submitted an issue of Crab Creek Review that I'm not sure made it there. Sdtullis 20:33, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
Since the Crab Creek Review issue apparently came through (see below), perhaps we can try All Hallows 43 again, but let's try to add just one fiction item this time around and see what happens. That way you won't have to re-enter all that data again and we will have a nice controlled experiment with only one new variable. And just to be on the save side, after you display the publication record and click on "Edit This Pub" in the navigation bar on the left, what do you do next? Do you scroll down to the end of the Content section and click on "Add Title" or do you do something else? Ahasuerus 00:19, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
Nope, that's exactly what I'm doing. I'm sending try number 3 now, with just one fiction item added (The Gallows Grave by Richard Tyndall). Sdtullis 00:42, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
That seemed to go through just fine. I've approved. -DES Talk 01:47, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
Great! I don't know how many more I dare add at one time in case this fluke is quantity-related. Unless there's an objection I'll try the next five or so and if that works send the remainder. Sdtullis 13:06, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Crab Creek Review

I have approved your submisison of Crab Creek Review, but there are some problems that will need correction.

  • First of all, since this is a magazine, there will need to be some identification of the specific issue. The usual way to do this is to change the title to "Crab Creek Review, Month Year". For example if it cam out this March, to "Crab Creek Review, March 2009". If no publication date is available, use the issue number, something like "Crab Creek Review, Issue 25". See Help:Screen:EditPub#Title for more details.
    • Also, if a publication date can be determined, the "Year" field should be filled in.
  • Secondly, is all or most of this content actually speculative fiction? Or is this a general fiction magazine, with only one or a few works of speculative fiction? In the latter case, see Help: Entering non-genre magazines -- we will want to delete the non-SF content.
  • Thirdly, if this is a speculative fiction magazine, a wiki page should be created. See Magazines#Creating a new magazine wiki page for more details on how to do this.
  • Fourthly, you list the catalog number as "07308-7008". This looks like an ISSN. Since ISSNs identify magazines, but not specific issue, we do not list them in the Catalog ID field. Instead they are included on wiki magazine pages. (The help is out of date on this point.)
  • Fifthly, you list the binding as "tpb". If this publication is actual bound as a trade paperback book, the code is "tp". Most magazines use "digest" or one of the other magazine-specific tems, see Help:Screen:EditPub#PubFormat for a list.

Please correct these issues, or supply the information so that someone else can do so. The information needed is:

  • Date or issue number
  • Is the content mostly speculative? If not, which items are?
  • Is 07308-7008 an ISSN ?
  • What was the size and binding description?

Thank you for your contributions, and my apologies for the complexities of the ISFDB, and for the places where the help is unclear. -DES Talk 23:41, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the help. I've corrected the points regarding date, issn, and binding. As for the content, I confess I haven't read enough of the issue outside of my own contribution to accurately judge the speculativeness of it as a whole. All of my published work to date has been in the field of sf/f/h, though, and my story in this issue was I think in that vein, if perhaps more ambiguously so than anything else I've done. That said, I suspect most people would view this as a literary journal, and so I can delete the material I haven't read if you'd prefer (though if possible I'd love to keep my own contribution in the database together with my more easily classifiable stuff). Sdtullis 01:19, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
You are quite welcome. I didn't realize you were entering your own work. All fiction, of yours or anyone's, that is even generally in the SF/F/H field is welcome. When entering a magazine that has some things that are or probably are SF/F/H, and some that pretty clearly are not, we omit the latter and include a note that the publication's record is intentionally incomplete. But there is no rush to delete stuff already entered that might or might not be SF. It does no harm to leave it in until someone can read it. -DES Talk 02:32, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Nemonymous 8 (Cone Zero)

I've approved Nemonymous 8 (Cone Zero), the result is here. I'm curious, was "(Cone Zero)" included in the title in parens, or was it a subtitle?

A minor point, we show ten pounds as "£10.00" rather than "£10". I have corrected this. -DES Talk 01:57, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

I wasn't sure how to do the title, and ended up going with how it's done on the Nemonymous wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemonymous) which I believe the editor himself set up. But "Cone Zero" seems to outweigh "Nemonymous 8" somewhat on the cover (as shown at http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/cone_zero_under_way.htm). Sdtullis 12:58, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
Oh I see. This is a bit awkward -- it intentionally falls between the cracks. We could treat this as a magazine, or as a series of anthologies. If it is to be treated as a magazine, i would use "Nemonymous" as the main title, and "Cone Zero" as a subtitle, following a colon. If it were to be treated as a series of anthologies, I would have this one titled simply "Cone Zero" but a member of the series "Nemonymous", the 8th item in the series. Either method is defensible -- I incline to the anthology method myself. The lack of author credits in the publication itself is also annoying from our point of view, but we can live with it. I am going to draw wider attention to this publication and see what others here say. -DES Talk 14:35, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
I have asked for wider comment at ISFDB:Community Portal#Nemonymous. W'll see what other editors advise, if anything. -DES Talk 14:46, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
Several experienced editors incline to the anthology solution in this case. Do you have any objections? I will offer to convert the existing record, since there will be several steps and it might be tedious for someone who is not a moderator, but if you prefer to do this yourslef please let me know. -DES Talk 20:27, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
I'm still learning the ropes here so I think I'd better leave it in your capable hands. Thanks for taking care of that. Hopefully the remaining copies of Nemonymous that I have to submit will prove less sticky. Sdtullis 21:49, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

All Hallows 43 revisited

One thing that I have found recently is that if you leave a Title section blank when entering Content data, the software may ignore any entries after the blank section. I wonder if that's what happened with the first All Hallows 43 submission? Ahasuerus 02:19, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

You're probably right, but the only thing I did differently that last time around was cutting and pasting the info from a Notepad file instead of MS Word. That seemed to do the trick, though I can't say why. Sdtullis 18:04, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
The first thing that comes to mind is that MS Word is a very complex application and uses all kinds of invisible characters internally, especially when dealing with non-English names and titles, and these characters may be messing our application up. I'll try to play with it tonight and see if I can recreate the problem. Thanks for your patience! Ahasuerus 18:24, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies

I accepted this but suspect you reversed title and author for "174 • Christopher Morris • shortfiction by The American Club" and "193 • Mike O'Driscoll • shortfiction by The Rediscovery of Death"? BLongley 23:53, 6 July 2011 (UTC)