User talk:Ahasuerus

See User talk:Ahasuerus/Archive for discussions prior to 2022.

PLEASE NOTE: If you're writing to inform me that you've either added a COVER IMAGE or NOTES to any of my VERIFIED PUBS, please follow THIS LINK and add it to the bottom of the list. A link to the pub record would be appreciated. Once the pub has been reviewed, I'll remove your note from the list. Thanks!

Author Merges & Alternate Names

I merged "J. C. H. Rigby" (148444) and "JCH Rigby" (287823) resulting in the "new" JCH Rigby. One of them (I'm not certain which at this point, but think it was the 287823 entry) had an alternate name of Charlie Rigby. When I did the merge, the alternate name was lost. That caught me by surprise. When a merge is done, the normal expectation would all the information is merged. Title merges handle variants so I would have expected author names to handle alternate names. Ideally, it should handle the alternate name. If not, there need to be a big warning that further action is required. I wonder if we have lost alternate names because of this... -- JLaTondre (talk) 09:06, 1 January 2022 (EST)

Let me take a look... Ahasuerus 11:33, 1 January 2022 (EST)

OK, I think I can see the sequence of events. Let me run the weekly/monthly backups and then I will try to recreate the problem on the development server. Ahasuerus 12:17, 1 January 2022 (EST)

I have wrapped up and deployed the cleanup reports which were in a semi-ready state yesterday. Hopefully I can recreate and fix this problem tomorrow. Ahasuerus 20:19, 2 January 2022 (EST)

I have been able to recreate the problem on the development server. Luckily, it doesn't seem to affect VTs, so any lost "alternate name" associates will appear on the cleanup report that looks for "stray" publications. Bug 795 has been created. Thanks for identifying the problem! Ahasuerus 17:11, 3 January 2022 (EST)

OK, I believe the bug has been fixed. Ahasuerus 18:06, 3 January 2022 (EST)

Out of curiosity: aren't we standardizing names anymore to J. C. H. Rigby? Regards, MagicUnk 05:32, 4 January 2022 (EST)

Originally, we always added a period and a space after an initial. As Template:PublicationFields:Author says:

• Initials should normally be entered followed by a period and a space as "Gordon R. Dickson" or "K. D. Wentworth", even if the period or space is omitted in the publication.

However, we later realized that some authors deliberately use their initials as a "pseudo-name" like "JCH" and that the practice has been getting more common recently. That's when we updated Template:PublicationFields:Author with the following caveat:

• However, when it is clearly the author's choice to omit the period, or when the author has a single letter name that is not an initial (e.g. "Harry S Truman") the period should be omitted. In the rare case where an author prefers two (or more) initials as if they were a name (such as "TG Theodore"), without a period or space, and is so credited, we follow the author's preference.

Ideally, our search logic would ignore periods and other punctuation in names, but we aren't there, so this s the best compromise we could come up with. Ahasuerus 10:08, 4 January 2022 (EST)

Rejection Issue

I screwed up the HTML on this submission which is causing the moderator display to not show correctly. I tried editing the URL to change it to http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/mod/reject.cgi?5187168, but that seems to get the ID from the post and not the URL. Need some help on how to reject this submission. Sorry for the inconvenience. -- JLaTondre (talk) 11:51, 2 January 2022 (EST)

Done. You were close -- the correct CGI script name is "hardreject" :-) Ahasuerus 12:19, 2 January 2022 (EST)