Difference between revisions of "ISFDB Feature List"

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'''Next open feature number''': 90165
 
'''Next open feature number''': 90165
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*[[Feature:90164]] Support a "Based on" relationship between two titles. '''OPEN''' A title (or perhaps a publication) should be able to be "based on" 0 or more other works. A "Based on" record might consist of a link to the work (publication?) based on, and the nature of the relationship (expanded from; includes; expands; abridged from; revised version; experted from; restored) picked from a dropdown list. This would handle fixups, expanded versions, revised versions, screenplay->novel conversions and the like. This would probably replace '''Feature:90155''. -[[User:DESiegel60|DES]] <sup>[[User talk:DESiegel60|Talk]]</sup> 20:11, 20 October 2008 (UTC)
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*[[Feature:90164]] Support a "Based on" relationship between two titles. '''OPEN''' A title (or perhaps a publication) should be able to be "based on" 0 or more other works. A "Based on" record might consist of a link to the work (publication?) based on, and the nature of the relationship (expanded from; includes; expands; abridged from; revised version; experted from; restored) picked from a dropdown list. This would handle fixups, expanded versions, revised versions, screenplay->novel conversions and the like. This would probably replace '''Feature:90155'''. -[[User:DESiegel60|DES]] <sup>[[User talk:DESiegel60|Talk]]</sup> 20:11, 20 October 2008 (UTC)
 
*[[Feature:90163]] Don't return coverart records in basic searches. '''OPEN''' (See linked page for details.) -[[User:DESiegel60|DES]] <sup>[[User talk:DESiegel60|Talk]]</sup> 19:30, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
 
*[[Feature:90163]] Don't return coverart records in basic searches. '''OPEN''' (See linked page for details.) -[[User:DESiegel60|DES]] <sup>[[User talk:DESiegel60|Talk]]</sup> 19:30, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
 
*[[Feature:90162]] Better support for art notes. '''OPEN''' In some cases, a work of art has a separate title from the work it illustrates. In some it is a detail from, or a re-use of, a pre-existing work of art, in some cases a classic many years old. In some that is particular information about the work that should be recorded. Currently it is possible to open a coverart or interior art record, and add notes, but is is unlikely that anyone will ever see there, because there is no link from a publication record directly to any art record, and no indication that any notes are present. There should be a direct link from the publication record to the cover art record (or records for a Dos-a-Dos work) and to any interior art records, and there should be a visible indicator if the notes field of any such record is non-empty. -[[User:DESiegel60|DES]] <sup>[[User talk:DESiegel60|Talk]]</sup> 17:09, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
 
*[[Feature:90162]] Better support for art notes. '''OPEN''' In some cases, a work of art has a separate title from the work it illustrates. In some it is a detail from, or a re-use of, a pre-existing work of art, in some cases a classic many years old. In some that is particular information about the work that should be recorded. Currently it is possible to open a coverart or interior art record, and add notes, but is is unlikely that anyone will ever see there, because there is no link from a publication record directly to any art record, and no indication that any notes are present. There should be a direct link from the publication record to the cover art record (or records for a Dos-a-Dos work) and to any interior art records, and there should be a visible indicator if the notes field of any such record is non-empty. -[[User:DESiegel60|DES]] <sup>[[User talk:DESiegel60|Talk]]</sup> 17:09, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

Revision as of 16:11, 20 October 2008

Major Feature Roadmap (completion estimates accurate as of 02/05/2007)

Editing

  • 02/28/2007 - Awards editing. (Have add; need edit and remove)
  • 03/15/2006 - Support for translator annotations.
  • 03/31/2007 - Review Serial support. Linkage to titles is still performed lexically.

Bibliographic Support Features

  • 03/31/2007 - History support (ongoing background task)
  • 04/30/2007 - Watchlisting authors.
  • 05/31/2007 - Title verification checkmarks (see requested feature by Ahaseurus below).

Open Features

Add new features at the top. Give the requested feature a number by incrementing the "next open feature number"; give it a status of OPEN, and then describe the problem.

Valid statuses are:

  • OPEN -- requested, not implemented or denied
  • DONE -- feature has been implemented
  • DENIED -- the feature will not be implemented in the form requested.

Next open feature number: 90165

  • Feature:90164 Support a "Based on" relationship between two titles. OPEN A title (or perhaps a publication) should be able to be "based on" 0 or more other works. A "Based on" record might consist of a link to the work (publication?) based on, and the nature of the relationship (expanded from; includes; expands; abridged from; revised version; experted from; restored) picked from a dropdown list. This would handle fixups, expanded versions, revised versions, screenplay->novel conversions and the like. This would probably replace Feature:90155. -DES Talk 20:11, 20 October 2008 (UTC)
  • Feature:90163 Don't return coverart records in basic searches. OPEN (See linked page for details.) -DES Talk 19:30, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
  • Feature:90162 Better support for art notes. OPEN In some cases, a work of art has a separate title from the work it illustrates. In some it is a detail from, or a re-use of, a pre-existing work of art, in some cases a classic many years old. In some that is particular information about the work that should be recorded. Currently it is possible to open a coverart or interior art record, and add notes, but is is unlikely that anyone will ever see there, because there is no link from a publication record directly to any art record, and no indication that any notes are present. There should be a direct link from the publication record to the cover art record (or records for a Dos-a-Dos work) and to any interior art records, and there should be a visible indicator if the notes field of any such record is non-empty. -DES Talk 17:09, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
  • Feature:90161 Better support for multiple cover artists. OPEN There are two quite different situations, both of which occur with soem frequencey. the first is a Dos-a-dos book, like the classic ACE double, each of which has a different cover artist. This is, more ore less what the current software assumes. The second is a work of cover art which is truly a joint work. There are a few artist team who routinely work togetehr, and there are some works where art from two different artists are cut together, like Station in Space. We need a clear and robust way to handle these situations. -DES Talk 17:09, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
  • Feature:90160 (Note that related Feature 90080 has been implemented). There is no easy/integrated way to see all titles published by a pseudonym, which can be sometimes useful, especially when working with a house name like Victor La Salle or a heavily ghosted author like V. C. Andrews. The "Titles" link in the navbar does dispay all Titles attributed to a "house name" Author, but it's hard to find and it doesn't tell you who the actual autor was. Ahasuerus 02:17, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
  • Feature:90159 Link locally hosted images to their wiki description pages. OPEN When a user clicks on the thumbnail of an image hosted on the ISFDB wiki, the user is taken to the "raw image page". But it would be helpful if the user was insted taken to the imae description page, where any metadata, including copyright and fair use notices, and source info, are displayed. This would require that the code detect the url as being part of the isfdb site (by its domain, presumably), and convert the raw image url to the url for the description page. This is straightforward, For example when the raw image url is http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/b/b1/Time_future-Burns.jpg, the description page is at http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/index.php/Image:Time_future-Burns.jpg. In general when the raw url is at http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/X/XY/NAME.jbg, the description page will be at http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/index.php/Image:NAME.jpg. X and XY are hex digits (from the hash of NAME), and NAME is the on-wiki file name of the image, which will be unique on the wiki. OPEN -DES Talk 17:06, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
  • Feature:90158 Capture reason or summary of an edit. OPEN When an editor submits an edit, sometimes it is obvious what is going on and why, but soemtimes it is worth noting what the editor intends by the edit. I suggest that either on the various edit screens, or on the screen that displays the submisison xml, or perhaps on a new confirmation dialog, the editor be allowed to enter an optional short reason for or summary of the edit, whcih would be visible to the moderator who is considering approving the edit, and would be retained in the edit log, to whatever extent the other edit details are retained. Obviously this is a nice-to-have, not a vital issue(TM). OPEN -DES Talk 14:10, 8 Feb 2008 (CST)
This could well be combined with Feature:90160.
  • Feature:90157 Change display of shortfiction in series. When a work of short fiction is part of a series of fiction works, it displays on the author's bibliography page with the notation [SF] after it. I presume this stands for "ShortFiction". But given the name and focus of this site, it might be confused for "Science Fiction" -- a user might mistakenly assume that we visibly distinguish between science fiction and fantasy, say. Perhaps the display could use [short] or something similar, instead. OPEN -DES Talk 13:41, 30 Jan 2008 (CST)
  • Feature:90156 Add "last edited by" function for publications. I'm doing a batch of verifications and several times today have run across publications where someone has added detailed notes. If an edit log was available then we'd be able to ask the last editor "Do you want to mark the publication as verified?" as it looks like they have done all the work except for clicking "verify." OPEN Marc Kupper (talk) 20:00, 19 Jan 2008 (CST)
  • Feature:90154 Add support for additional publication fields OPEN A discussion came about about using a standardized in the notes for magazines so that the volume and issue numbers could be extracted. This fall in line with an idea I'd been mulling to support arbitrary additional fields for a publication. There would be a fields table that has a list of the supported field names and for each perhaps a data type (string, numeric, etc.). The pubfields table would have pub_id, field_id, value. Most publications would not have additional data but for those that do they would be displayed just before the notes. This would also allow for constructing SQL queries for the additional fields. Marc Kupper (talk) 02:35, 14 Sep 2007 (CDT)
  • Feature:90153 Add a title tag editor OPEN I had thought you could edit title tags but just noticed there are two tags for first contact [1][2]. I wanted to shift the one title in the latter version over but found that apparently only the person who added this tag can edit it. Marc Kupper (talk) 22:46, 9 Sep 2007 (CDT)
  • Feature:90152 Change voting scale from 1-10 to 0-10 OPEN The current voting scale goes from 1 to 10 with "5 - Slightly below average" and "6 - Slightly above average". Although this is mathematically correct, most people are accustomed to 5 being defined as average. It also seems wrong to force people to choose between "Slightly below average" and "Slightly above average" when they may feel that a work is just plain average. I suggest an improved voting scale from 0 to 10 with "4 - Slightly below average", "5 - Average", "6 - Slightly above average", and the rest of the descriptions shifted accordingly. This scale would be both mathematically correct and would fit the common interpretation of 5 being average. If the scale is fixed soon, there shouldn't be much impact because there aren't many votes in the database yet. Ltleelim 16:27, 31 Aug 2007 (CDT)
  • Feature:90150 Disambiguate titles in displays OPEN Sometimes, for example, a bibliographic display will show a long string of essays all titled "Introduction." A thought is to detect this and for each of these to look up the publication title, and display the title as "Introduction (pub-title)". Swfritter suggests "Introduction [pub-title]". The goal here would be that the publication records could stick to what's stated in the publication rather than adding "(pub title)" manually and the bibliographic displays would be more informational. Related to this would be to have a list of special case names such as "Introduction" where ISFDB always does this. I was thinking the code should check the titles rather than always rely on a special-case name list to deal with people who write columns for a magazine where there you could see dozens of essays all with the same title. Marc Kupper (talk) 02:47, 25 Jun 2007 (CDT)
  • Feature:90148 Edit Author Data OPEN People sometimes e-mail me with minor updates to the author data on ISFDB. I'm thinking the link that says "Author Data" should be renamed to "Edit Author Data" to see if that improves the odds that people will enter the updates directly. Marc Kupper (talk) 14:03, 22 May 2007 (CDT)
  • Feature:90147 Add Merge Publications OPEN One of the PITA aspects to moderatorship is publication deletes. At the moment when an editor submits a pub-delete it's a very involved process to get from the submission to the title record and to verify that in fact the publication is a duplicate and that the editor did not overlook something such as a price change. It's still a pain even if the editor gives the pub-key for the duplicate. As a result, for the regular editors I just trust him or her and approve the submission without checking up on it. Something that would help greatly is if
    • Diff-pub also shows the differences in the metadata (I thought there was already a feature request for that but don't see it off hand)
    • Diff-pub was restructured to allow editors to pick-chose fields for the merge.
    • That the moderators see the side-by-side much like with merge-title.
This would allow moderators to more reliably see what data was being removed from ISFDB and to evaluate if it should be approved. Marc Kupper (talk) 14:11, 16 May 2007 (CDT)
  • Feature:90146 Add images to fc.cgi OPEN I try to keep an eye on the home page for publications that do not have images and to add them. Sometimes I go down the fc.cgi list to look for upcoming publications that don't have images but it's a pain. It would be very helpful if fc.cgi had a mode where it showed a thumbnail for each publication so that people could quickly scan to see if there are publications that should be fixed. Marc Kupper (talk) 13:43, 16 May 2007 (CDT)
  • Feature:90145 Add Author tags OPEN This was originally posted to Al's talk page as "Adding author gender information to authors table (and web)". I'm copying it here as remembered seeing this request and just had a merry hunt trying to find which page it was on. See the 90145 details page for more info. Marc Kupper (talk) 20:05, 2 May 2007 (CDT)
As far as I know there is no gender (male/female) informations about authors in isfdb which I think is a little annoying. I would propose to change that my adding a nullable gender column to isfdb's author table.
I have noticed public lists like this one [3] and I also think I saw somewhere more general public lists of commen male and female names. With these kind of background data, I think I could make a good computerized estimater that could be used initially to fill out the blanks... I am willing to do a first stap at calculating the estimated genender codes along with a change script for the database
if someone else will do the GUI and apply it to the isfsdb install (i.e. I can do the data gathering + database stuff but not the python web stuff). Interested? mortench 12:46, 19 Apr 2007 (CDT)
  • Feature:90144 Check for and use Amazon images OPEN One of the editors left a comment on how to get from the URL for an Amazon "Look Inside" image that has a white box around it and the arrow on top into the original image. It turns out that for a given ISBN, 0886777992 in this example, or ASIN you can use the URLs
    • http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0886777992.01.SZZZZZZZ.jpg - large - limited to 400 pixels high and/or wide.
    • http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0886777992.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg - medium - seems to be 140 pixels high and/or wide.
    • http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0886777992.01.THUMBZZZZZZZ.jpg - thumbnail - 60 pixels high and/or wide.
This only works for images uploaded by the publisher or a dealer. It does not work for customer uploaded images. If you use an invalid ISBN/ASIN, or one that does not have a publisher/dealer image, then Amazon returns a 1x1 image. ISFDB could also check via AWS to see if the images exist. My thinking as a feature request would be to auto-check to see if an image is available, to display the medium by default, and when you click to link to either the large image or to the containing page. See the detailed notes page for a version that shows the images. Marc Kupper (talk) 12:35, 14 Apr 2007 (CDT)
  • Feature:90143 Add COLUMN title type OPEN It seems a COLUMN title type would be useful that would
    • Not be included in Dup-Candidates
    • Would be displayed with the publication title - For example, if the column is Brass Tacks then ISFDB would display it as "Brass Tacks (Analog Science Fiction -> Science Fact, March 1966)."
    • Possibly this behaviour could get generalized and be used for Introduction, Afterword, and other common things that we are currently classifying as essays. Marc Kupper (talk) 07:56, 29 Mar 2007
  • Feature:90141 Data source for submissions OPEN It would be useful if submissions for moderation could be marked by the editor as to what kind of source the edits are coming from, i.e. do they have a physical copy or are they entering from another source? This would not be verifying the publication. --Unapersson 05:35, 24 Mar 2007 (CDT)
  • Feature:90140 Trim spaces after page # OPEN I had long wondered if trailing spaces would get trimmed off when entering contents and ran a quick test. It looks like spaces are trimmed from the title but not the page number field. Marc Kupper (talk) 19:57, 22 Mar 2007 (CDT)
  • Feature:90139 Cover image URLs – link to external sites OPEN One solution that comes to mine for those cover images where we can’t, or it’s not practical, to secure permission to display them is to either add a separate flag or to code something in the URL so that ISFDB would not display the image but instead would link to it along with the statement that a cover image is available at a site that’s not affiliated with ISFDB. This would also allow for the links to be to web pages that contain images plus explanatory text. Marc Kupper (talk) 13:27, 27 Feb 2007 (CST)
  • Feature:90138 Title Merge Review – show differences OPEN Something that would help me when reviewing merge requests would be if there was a column to the right that indicated if all of the field values in that row were the same. I don’t think we need to show the differences unless you have an idea you want to try out in how to display differences/changes in a 3-way or more diff. Marc Kupper (talk) 13:27, 27 Feb 2007 (CST)
  • Feature:90137 Multiple verifications OPEN How about allowing multiple people to verify a publication? That would increase confidence in the verifications, allow multiple checking, and enable people with small collections that have already been verified to still contribute if they want to. Mike Christie (talk) 12:34, 24 Feb 2007 (CST)
  • Feature:90135 Recognize endash and emdash in ISBNs and dates OPEN An editor entered what looked like a valid ISBN but ISFDB did not strip the hyphens. Inspection revealed they had entered the thing using endash (ASCII character 0150, Unicode #8211 x2013) which looks identical to a hyphen in most fonts. I'd recomend that both endash (character 150) and emdash (character 0151 / #8212 x2014) be mapped to hyphen (character 0045 / #45 x002d) before processing ISBNs and dates. I believe in this case the endash was because the editor was entering publication records for hc and pb editions from an eBook (ARC/PDF) edition and must have used copy/paste from the eBook. Marc Kupper (talk) 11:14, 23 Feb 2007 (CST)
  • Feature:90132 Add a method to farm out bug and feature request coding OPEN The list of requested features and bug fixes seems to pile up faster than the snow in your yard. One thought to help deal with this is you could change the status for selected items from “OPEN” to “APPROVED” indicating that you agree with the request and don’t think people would break too much in implementing the code fix. Anyone that’s interested could then dig up the code and submit any updates to you for diff and integration into the master copy of the ISFDB code. Marc Kupper (talk) 16:41, 11 Feb 2007 (CST)
  • Feature:90131 Remove-Titles does not show what publication is being updated OPEN Most of the update moderator screens show at least the record # being affected but tv_remove.cgi does not seem to show which publication is being updated at all other than showing its title. Ideally, besides showing the record # the page would have a link to the publication being updated as presently one of the more time consuming moderator tasks is manually converting a record number into an author, title, or publication display so that I can see of the requested update “makes sense.” Marc Kupper (talk) 16:41, 11 Feb 2007 (CST)
  • Feature:90128 Non-primary verification marker OPEN It would be handy to have an indicator in the title biblios against a pub if it has been verified against any non-primary source. Currently it says [VERIFIED] iff the primary was verified. Could it say e.g. [Sources checked]? Mike Christie (talk) 20:40, 7 Feb 2007 (CST)
  • Feature:90127 Link to editor-talk from moderator-submission pages OPEN This one is more work as it’s multiple CGI (unless you have a common subroutine) but "Submitted by: Editor Name" links to the editor’s user page while 99% of the time we then click on the “Discussion” tab to get to the talk page. It seems that it would make sense to go directly to the talk page and we’d look at the user page if we want to know more about the editor. Marc Kupper (talk) 16:18, 6 Feb 2007 (CST)
  • Feature:90126 Link to editor-talk from list.cgi OPEN At the moment mod/list.cgi shows the submitter name as just a name. Can this link to the submitter’s talk page? The reason for this is that when I have items on hold at the moment it’s a 3-step procedure to see if the editor has replied in that I click on the submission, click on the editor’s name, and then click on the editor’s talk-tab. Marc Kupper (talk) 16:18, 6 Feb 2007 (CST)
  • Feature:90125 Add dos-a-dos as a title/publication type OPEN At the moment there is ambiguity on how to file dos-a-dos doubles. It can be a novel but then it’s not apparent in bibliographies and publication content lists that it contains sub-stories. It can be an omnibus but usually “omnibus” is used for publications that contain stories by the same author. It’s not an anthology as then the author’s are displayed as “editors.” “Collection” suffers the same fault as “omnibus” as the implication is that it’s a series of stories by one author (or a series by a pair of authors) plus a dos-a-dos is not really a “collection of short stories.” Thus it seems to make sense to have dos-a-dos (or “double”) as its own title and publication type. I’m undecided on of these should be sorted into their own section of the bibliographies or included with novels. I personally have my doubles on their own shelf ordered by the Ace # but don’t know how most people file their doubles. Marc Kupper (talk) 15:45, 6 Feb 2007 (CST)
In setting up The Paradox Men / Dome Around America in Charles L. Harness's bibliography it seems to make sense if the doubles are in their own section rather than under novels. Marc Kupper (talk) 19:07, 6 Feb 2007 (CST)
    • I am opposed to this. IMO "dos" should be a binding type, not a publicatiuon type. i have encountered plenty of omnibuses (more in mystery than in SF, admittedly) that include novels by multiple authors (the detective book club used to do 3-in-ones all the time). However, enhancing the omnibus type to well suppoort a volume that includes a novel and a collection or antholkogy, or even multipel collections/anthologies, would be a very good thing IMO. -DES Talk 22:27, 26 Feb 2008 (CST)
  • Feature:90124 OPEN Increase length of page number field on publication by at least 11 characters. This pub should be paginated "xi + 361 + 398 + 281 + xxvi" but the field is too short. Even without the spaces embedded the field is still three characters too short. Mike Christie (talk) 07:12, 6 Feb 2007 (CST)
  • Feature:90123 OPEN (Extracted from the mostly implemented Feature 90006). If a series is started by one author, who writes volumes 1-N in the series, but is later continued by another author (e.g. Charles Platt continuing Piers Anthony's "Aton"), then there is no way of telling that there is more to the series than the items currently displayed in the original author's biblio. Would it be desirable to add additional logic that would display a note to that effect? Ahasuerus 18:01, 4 May 2006 (CDT) Updated 4 February 2007
  • Feature:90122 Green highlights for unchanged data on a merge OPEN Change the highlighting scheme on a title merge in the moderator screen so that the only cells highlit in red are the ones which differ from the merge selection. Currently red can mean "different" or "same, but not the record selected". It would be easier to visually verify merges with this change. Mike Christie (talk) 12:15, 4 Feb 2007 (CST)
  • Feature:90120 Make My Recent Edits links OPEN Make the recent edits subject entries links to the entries so that ones that require two steps you can easily go to it for the second step after its approved for the first one. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Dcarson (talk • contribs)}.
Seconded, this would have been REALLY useful for a lot of my edits. BLongley 15:10, 1 Apr 2007 (CDT)
Still useful -- Holmesd 22:04, 26 Feb 2008 (CST)
  • Feature:90119 Make variant titles display series data for their parents OPEN If a variant title child record is not itself a member of a series, but the parent title is a member of a series, then the title display for the variant child does not show any indication of the series membership. It would be useful if it did. See also 90007. Generally a vt should act in most circumstances like its parent for purposes of series display. (Suggested by Dcarson.) Mike Christie (talk) 07:48, 30 Jan 2007 (CST)
  • Feature:90118 Check for loops in mkvariant.gsi OPEN This is technically a bug report but as I just filed two VT related feature requests for mkvariant.cgi I’ll file this here with them. The integration code has logic where if B is a VT of A (B. title_parent = A) and you try to make A a VT of C the code has logic where it will do
  • A.title_parent = C
  • B.title_parent = C
This works fine but you take A and instead of trying to make it a VT of C you try to make it a VT of B you end up with
  • A.title_parent = B
  • B.title_parent = B
I believe mkvariant.cgi should disallow this and editors would first need to remove the “B is a VT of A” relationship before you can add “A is a VT of B.” --Marc Kupper 22:31, 27 Jan 2007 (CST)
  • Feature:90115 Enhance vt display to show both canonical name and pseudonym OPEN In author biblios, variant titles are currently displayed in such a way that it can appear a book was never written by the author under their usual name, if they also wrote it under a pseudonym. It would be better to improve the display to clarify that the book was published under both names. Reported as a bug; changed to a feature request. Mike Christie (talk) 06:37, 25 Jan 2007 (CST)
  • Feature:90112 Up front ISBN checksum validation OPEN Displaying invalid ISBNs in red along with the "(bad ISBN checksum)" note has been a great help. What's happening now is I'm catching a lot of editors entering invalid ISBNs and that's slowing things down as I then need to construct a message on their talk page and later when they fix the ISBN an editor will be dealing with a pub-edit where an editor is changing the ISBN resulting in more research to understand why someone changing an ISBN out of the blue. Some form of up-front validation would save a great deal of time for both the editors and moderators. Marc Kupper 16:32, 21 Jan 2007 (CST)
  • Feature:90111 Delete pseudonym OPEN An editor was confused by the author pseudonym stuff and did one backwards at first. The correct relationship is now in place but neither of us know how to delete the old/back one. As it is, I ended up creating a second relationship in the wrong direction trying to delete the first. A thought is at the top of the mkpseudo.cgi display where it shows the current relationships that it put a checkbox next to each name and under the list to have a [Delete Checked Pseudonym(s)] button. FWIW – the author with the bad pseudonyms is Avram Davidson where you can see two links to Ellery Queen. Marc Kupper 00:37, 21 Jan 2007 (CST)
  • Feature:90110 Have hold.cgi link to new-submissions OPEN An the end of approval cycles there’s a link at the bottom of the page for [Submission List]. Can this get added to hold.cgi? I know the same link is available from the navbar but figured [Submission List] should be there for consistency. Marc Kupper (talk) 19:02, 20 Jan 2007 (CST)
  • Feature:90109 Link to child VTs OPEN When you are on the parent title child variant titles are shown but without links. I frequently want to drill down to a VT title record so that I can see the list of publications under that VT and at present it takes extra steps of clicking on a publication that may belong to the VT and then clicking on the title-reference. Can the VT lines link directly to the titles? Marc Kupper 22:49, 18 Jan 2007 (CST)
  • Michael Whelan (Cover art)
  • Don Puckey (Cover design)

While this explained clearly what the roles are ISFDB does not support this. The feature request would be to allow for contributor roles in parenthese like this. Marc Kupper 00:31, 17 Jan 2007 (CST)

  • Feature:90107 Verification follow-up OPEN After verifying a publication can you navigate back to the publication's page rather than just showing the SQL insert? One editor wrote asking if "* insert into verification(pub_id, reference_id, user_id, ver_time, ver_status) values('38440', '1', '2021', NOW(), '1')" is what he should get. Marc Kupper 00:30, 16 Jan 2007 (CST)
  • Feature:90106 Storylen audit OPEN Editors tend to fiddle with the storylen and I'm thinking of a way for ISFDB to audit storylen. For each title you take a title look for all publications where that title is listed with a page number (or page count if it's the only title for a publication) and to verify that roughly the same # of pages is used (taking into account pb, tp, hc). If the page count for a particular publication is out of norm it's probably a pagination error or expanded/excerpted title. Once an average page count is determined (ignoring out of bounds values) the audit can then compute the storylen code and see if the title’s storylen matches. Marc Kupper 19:59, 15 Jan 2007 (CST)
This may be the same as the Feature:90035 request. Marc Kupper (talk) 18:33, 1 Feb 2007 (CST)
  • Feature:90102 ISBN formatting... OPEN Someone entered an ISBN that was missing one of the middle digits. I happened to noticed it seemed short, did a view-pub and saw that it was not hyphenated, looked the publication up on Amazon, and fixed the ISBN. A solution that comes to mind is when formatting the ISBN for display is
  • If it’s a valid ISBN with a valid checksum display the hyphenated ISBN.
  • else if it appears to be a valid ISBN but the checksum is wrong display it without hyphens and append “ (ISBN with invalid checksum)” to it for display (don’t insert hyphens).
  • else if it appears to be an ISBN (lets say 8 to 15 digits long with a trailing X) then append “(invalid ISBN)” to the display
  • else if the ISBN starts with “#” then display it as-is
  • else display “#” and then the ISBN.
The goal is to make it a little more obvious that an ISBN is invalid meaning that even if someone entered a hyphenated string that was not an ISBN that it would get prefixed with # making it clearer that it’s a catalogue number and not something that looks like an ISBN. Hopefully someone will notice and look up the correct number.
  • Feature:90101 Only display parent title if a page # is assigned OPEN When a NOVEL, NONFICTION, CHAPTERBOOK publication with no additional contents is displayed there is nothing in the “Contents” section. If something gets added to the contents, a Foreword for example, then ISFDB will display a contents list that includes the parent title. This feature request is to only display the parent title if there is a page number assigned to it. What triggered the request was this publication which is an existing short story that got bound into a single publication with the same name as the short story. What I'm not sure about is if not listing the parent title will make "intuitive sense" to people as they will see the publication listing and under "Contents" just the Foreward but not the story itself. Marc Kupper 13:36, 10 Jan 2007 (CST)
  • Feature:90099 Link to publication record for delete approval OPEN Earlier this morning was a pub-delete request without a note/explanation. I wanted to take a look to see if it was a duplicate before approving and realized it would he helpful for the title in the delete-request to be linked back to the original publication and from there I’d look at the title record, etc. Marc Kupper 16:47, 9 Jan 2007 (CST)
  • Feature:90094 Talk alert on ISFDB OPEN I'd like the "New messages" alert to be somehow visible on the ISFDB pages as well as the Wiki. I know this is likely to be difficult, but I just left a message for Rudam regarding a held submission. Rudam has zero contributions over here on the Wiki; not a problem in itself, but if they never come over here, they'll never see the message I've left for them. An alert on the ISFDB would take care of that. Mike Christie (talk) 13:38, 4 Jan 2007 (CST)
  • Feature:90093 HTML in mod-reject text OPEN I can enter HTML tags into title/publication notes and they are displayed as ISFDB is not escaping or otherwise mangling the tags. Apparently ISFDB does escape tags when I enter a reject note. I’d like to be able to direct people to a page, maybe help, or most recently a cover image. There are a couple of feature requests related to this. 1) Don’t escape/mangle HTML and/or if there is an (see leading/trailing space) “ http://* ” or “ www.xxx.x* ” (leading www dot, something dot, and more) then display them as HTML links. Marc Kupper 00:58, 4 Jan 2007 (CST)
  • Feature:90091 Edition label for publications OPEN It would be useful to be able to label publications as being printings of a particular edition. For example, there are plenty of Puffin printings of Le Guin's "A Wizard of Earthsea". They have different prices, and may have varying cover art, and we certainly should capture them. Displaying every printing, interspersed with all the other printings (US etc.) is going to be quite confusing. What would be better would be some way to group printings as being all printings of a given edition, and then show the edition level data (or maybe just the first printing, and a note saying "and 14 reprints)". Following on from the "Series" approach Al suggested for magazine organization, this is like a "publication series", though the display rules would be different. Mike Christie (talk) 06:58, 31 Dec 2006 (CST)
I have copied this text to its own page and added some background data to the Talk page. Ahasuerus 12:14, 31 Dec 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90090 Caching of images OPEN Something that bothers me is that ISFDB’s image support is via links to third party web sites meaning the images can be removed or modified outside of ISFDB control. As part of verifying a book I’ve been locating an image of my exact edition (scanning and uploading it to Amazon if needed) and pointing ISFDB at the image. The problem comes up then if the 3rd party image is then removed/modified meaning what ISFDB shows will not match what I verified. A solution that comes to mind is a process that would cache images shortly after they are linked (it does not need to be in real time) and then periodically would verify that the images have not been deleted or modified. I do not believe this caching/verification needs to be part of ISFDB itself but could be a external app. An ISFDB enhancement that would help this process would be a way to query for publication records that have been modified since a particular date/time (or all publications if this is the first query). Of course, RSS and/or Atom feeds would do the trick too. Marc Kupper 19:14, 29 Dec 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90088 Validate or Auto-correct binding code OPEN An editor submitted a publication with binding type “paperback.” I thought about rejecting it and asking for either pb or tp but decided to go ahead with accept/edit to mark it as pb. What I’m thinking is either ISBDF could check up front for recognized binding codes and query the editor about unusual codes or it could silently map common long names (paperpack, hardcover) into their codes. Marc Kupper 14:04, 29 Dec 2006 (CST)
I think at one point we briefly discussed changing this field to a dropdown box ("pb", "tp", "hc", "pulp", "digest", "bedsheet", "audio", "CD"), but there were too many unusual-yet-valid choices, from "leather" and "slipcase" to "Adobe e-book" and "<insert obscure e-format> e-book". Perhaps we could have a dropdown list of the 10-15 most common formats plus "Other (paper)" and "Other (electronic)", the latter two to be documented in the Note section? Ahasuerus 16:26, 29 Dec 2006 (CST)
A drop-down list would help as recent editors have submitted a "hb" (hardback), and "pbk." One option is a drop-down box with one of the options being "Other" and just to the right of it is "Other: [Edit box]." Marc Kupper 23:27, 12 Jan 2007 (CST)
  • Feature:90087 Author name kerning OPEN An editor submitted new publications with the author name kerned as “K.V. Johansen” rather than “K. V. Johansen.” This looks like something the code could check for and correct. If a period is followed by an alpha then make it period space alpha. Marc Kupper 14:04, 29 Dec 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90086 Delete submissions from the mod-queue OPEN An editor submitted a new-publication, and apparently must have hit the back button, made a small correction to the date, and resubmitted. I thought about rejecting the first submission with a note but also knew that item would be in the editor’s reject queue forever and so dealt with it by accepting the item first and then deleting it plus the new title record. I suspect if “deleted” got added as a state code that it could be used to allow people to delete items from their own reject queues. On other words new -> rejected -> deleted is the same effect as new -> deleted in that neither was integrated. Marc Kupper 13:59, 29 Dec 2006 (CST)
Deleting submissions from the Editor queue where we KNOW we're submitting a correction to something might also help, if that's easier? Although if so, more details on exactly what we submitted would help - there's not a lot of content on the Pending Edits screen for us. BLongley 14:21, 2 Feb 2007 (CST)
  • Feature:90084 Pre-fill fields OPEN There was a suggestion on rasfw to fill in context when bringing up submission screens. The example given was to prefill fields if you were on an author's screen. I don't think this should be automatic, but I think a version could be useful -- e.g. "New Novel for this author" could prefill the right spelling of the author's name. How about "New Novel in this Series"? These suggestions might have to wait for a redesign of the navbar, however. Mike Christie (talk) 07:20, 29 Dec 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90083 Need better submission feedback OPEN When the user submits an editing change, instead of displaying the XML (which seemed okay once upon a time) the user should instead see a screen like the moderator sees when viewing the submission.
This should be expanded to incorporate a few of the about features. What's needed is:
  • User fills in text fields, and hits submit.
  • On the next screen, three sections appear: a data warning section, the input data layed out in table form (as the moderator would see it), and an editable form. The user then has the opportunity to correct the form, and resubmit.
  • Once no errors exist, a confirm button would appear, and the user could submit.
The same apps could be used to modify rejected submissions.

12 • The Lord of Tranerica (Complete Novel) • (1939) • serial by Stanton A. Coblentz (aka Lord of Tranerica) [as by Stanton A. Coblentz ]

The display logic correctly finds the "aka" data, but also adds the unnecessary "as by" data. Ahasuerus 19:43, 23 Dec 2006 (CST)

Yeah. I've spruced up the part that notes a title difference (hence the aka clause), but noticing an author difference is non-trivial. Okay, it's trivial for works by one author, but gets complicated for works with two or more authors, considering order (none guaranteed) and at least one of the authors may be a pseudonym. And since it's merely annoying... Alvonruff 20:20, 25 Dec 2006 (CST)
Well, the change is clearly a net plus, so I guess we can just call it a "low priority display issue" and move to the end of the queue. I hesitate to close it because it's something that out users may inquire about and it's probably better to have it here where it can be found than buried in the archives. Ahasuerus 21:20, 25 Dec 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90078 Order of Length field options OPEN It’s a little confusing that the length field’s options are -, Novella, Shortstory, Novelette in that order. I suspect ss is the most common and also that people think of lists as from smallest to largest meaning this order would make more sense -, Shortstory, Novelette, Novella. Marc Kupper 15:15, 26 Dec 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90076 Directory Support OPEN The old author directory are static files generated by a set of tools never ported to ISFDB2. The appropriate changes need to be made to the author table such that a directory can be constructed dynamically. This would apply to both authors and pseudonyms.
  • Feature:90075 Pseudonym and vt sourcing OPEN I would like to have somewhere to record the source or justification used when a vt is assigned or a pseudonym is assigned. For example, on a pseudonym record I'd like a comment field which might read "Listed in 'Who's Hugh'" etc. On a vt, a comment explaining why the vt is assigned would also be useful -- did I make a deduction, remember something but have no source, or do I have a citable source? Or did I read the texts and compare them to determine they're the same text? Mike Christie (talk) 06:07, 25 Dec 2006 (CST)
When I was thinking of how to structure my own book db an idea I toyed with was a pseudonym type indicator that would have things like Legal name, Misspelling, Etc. The misspelling one was a key item and would be used to help direct new sub-submissions or search requests to the right person’s record. Just last night I fixed a bunch of “Gale Greeno” records because her name is “Gayle Greeno” and Gayle is the name on her books too. Marc Kupper 14:36, 26 Dec 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90074 Interior art display OPEN When an interior art record's title perfectly matches another contents record in page number and title, I suggest that the pub display displays it as something like this:
44 • Room Without Windows • shortstory by Manly Banister • interior artwork by Vidmer
-- Mike Christie (talk) 12:22, 23 Dec 2006 (CST)
Oh! A very good idea! Ahasuerus 12:47, 23 Dec 2006 (CST)
I have come across at least one story where the text started on page N, but the big illustration was on page N+1. How would this feature request be affected by these cases? Ahasuerus 21:53, 27 Dec 2006 (CST)
After adding illustrations and departments to a few magazines, I have to concur. It can be quite hard to find Titles in a lengthy Edit form if the data is not sorted at least by page number. Ahasuerus
I was just about to add a feature request to sort contents records in editpub display but will instead add my vote to this request. Marc Kupper 15:21, 16 Jan 2007 (CST)
  • Feature:90066 Can Features get titled? OPEN It's painful to look at Recent Changes or the watchlist and see many dozens of anonymous Feature:900## listings scrolling by. I like the idea of separate discussion pages for each one though. Marc Kupper 23:23, 19 Dec 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90064 OPEN Authors getting flipped on title edits. At the moment when I edit variant title records with two authors and save them the author names (#1 and #2) are getting flipped around. The author order looks ok in the XML that’s displayed on submitting the edit. It looks ok in the verify screen. I’d have to stare at the SQL for a while to see if the order looks ok. Just in case it was related to variants - I added a new test title and with two authors and they got flipped around on approval. If it matters – the author I was working on was Donald A. Wollheim and specifically his World's Best SF. DAW Books republished part of this series and titled the books “Wollheim's World's Best SF: Series One” “Two” “Three” … “Nine.” On 2006-11-25 I added variant titles for each of the original series years that was reprinted and wondered why it was saying “[as by Arthur W. Saha and Donald A. Wollheim]” for most of them. Tonight I looked into it – saw that the author names were backwards in the title record, fixed that, save/approve, and the names were still backwards. Once I understood the names are just getting flipped I did books six to nine with the authors “backwards” and in the list is now correct. Marc Kupper 00:10, 30 Nov 2006 (CST)
We've already had this discussion elsewhere, and we've established that there is currently no support in the ISFDB for author ordering. An order that is induced is purely happenstance. This support would have to be added as a feature. Alvonruff 12:56, 16 Dec 2006 (CST)
Adding a comment by Hayford Peirce:
[I]t would be nice if eventually this could be straightened out. After all, suppose an unknown Nordhoff and Hall SF or fantasy story turned up in Tahiti in an old storage shed (hmmm, idea for a possible story of my own!), and someone mistakenly typed in their names out of order? Then you'd have "The Masked Mahi-mahi" by Hall and Nordhoff!
Apparently co-author ordering can be almost as important to writers as the billing order is to actors, which is saying something :) Ahasuerus 17:16, 26 Dec 2006 (CST)
I had no idea. After almost 12 years, a completely new requirement shows up. Well, guess we'll have to start from scratch again.... Alvonruff 18:36, 8 Jan 2007 (CST)
I fixed the python error that was described, but the work still doesn't show up on the bibliography. We need specific support for Chapter Books. Alvonruff 12:51, 16 Dec 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90062 OPEN We need to add support for Works that were written prior to 1 AD, e.g. Plato's Timaios. Currently, the ISFDB software interprets "-370-00-00" or "370BC" as an invalid date and stores it as 0000-00-00. Ahasuerus 14:27, 19 Jun 2006 (CDT)
  • Feature:90061 OPEN Multiple attempts to change the name of one of the co-authors of this book from all uppercase to mixed case have been unsuccessful. The submission goes through the motions, but re-displaying the record returns the same all uppercase name. Presumably, the software does a lookup on existing entries in the Authors table in order to determine if the submitted Author name is new or not and the match is case-insensitive. Therefore as long as there is an uppercase version of the name in the database, it will be used for all new records. Ahasuerus 15:34, 5 Jun 2006 (CDT)
  • Feature:90060 OPEN "Recent Changes" displays the first 40 characters of the changed title, e.g. "The Metal Man and Others: The Collected " which tends to truncate a significant percentage of the titles. Ahasuerus 14:17, 2 May 2006 (CDT)
This is actually intentional. The submission subject field is only 40 characters wide. We could look at making it a bit wider. Alvonruff 10:39, 16 Dec 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90059 OPEN The page title (and header) for Add Publication (addpub.cgi) says "Publication Editor" rather than "Add Publication" which causes a mild jolt of confusion. Marc Kupper 01:38, 16 Dec 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90058 OPEN If someone who is not a moderator does a Delete Title (deletetitle.cgi) do they get a confirmation? With moderators lack of confirmation is not an issue as they can just reject their own edits. Marc Kupper 01:30, 16 Dec 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90057 OPEN If someone who is not a moderator does a Delete Publication (deletepub.cgi) do they get a confirmation? With moderators lack of confirmation is not an issue as they can just reject their own edits. Marc Kupper 01:30, 16 Dec 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90055 OPEN The page title (and header) for Clone Publication (clonepub.cgi) says "Publication Editor" rather than "Clone Publication" which causes a mild jolt of confusion. Marc Kupper 23:27, 15 Dec 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90054 OPEN For submissions which involve auto-merging with an existing Title (e.g. Add Publication to Title, Clone Publication, etc) the submission approval screen that moderators use lists only the internal number of the Title that the proposed new Publication will be merged with. Once we start approving other people's submissions, we will need more information about the Title to be able to tell whether the proposed new Pub is legitimate or not without having to perform additional lookups. Ahasuerus 19:35, 15 Dec 2006 (CST)
    I was about to suggest a very similar feature, but I'd like it if the submitter were given a page showing any merge candidates generated by the new submission, and could indicate which ones should actually be merged. WimLewis 03:55, 17 Mar 2007 (CDT)
  • Feature:90053 OPEN When searching for a title that contains a single quote it turns out the type of quote matters. The feature request probably is that Unicode characters 0039 (apostrophe) and 0146 (right single quote) be treated as equivalent when searching. I had searched for “The Serpent's Shadow” which found nothing but “The Serpent’s Shadow” does work. In this case the title is in ISFDB using Unicode character 0146. Character 0146 is normally how titles get printed in books and 0039 is what most people get when they hit the ["'] key unless they entered the title in Word or something similar that converted the ' into ’. Marc Kupper 16:36, 9 Dec 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90052 OPEN When making a title into a variant title of an existing title, editors need to enter the canonical title's ID. Currently, the ID is only available in that title's URL, which may confuse less computer savvy editors. It would be better to have it displayed explicitly. Ahasuerus 10:08, 8 Dec 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90050 OPEN I'd like the ability to list all edits that relate to a given title, or to a given publication. In combination with requested feature 90044, this would allow you to see the history of changes to a title or publication. Mike Christie 06:26, 3 Dec 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90048 OPEN Sometimes there is a Title with numerous Publications associated with it, e.g. http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?13556 , where only the first Publication (edition) (http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?THWLKLNG311900 in this case) has Contents data. The only currently supported way to propagate Contents data from the first edition to the rest of them is to Clone the first edition, then update the newly created Publication with Publication-specific data from the existing Publication, and then delete the current Publication. Doable, but somewhat time consuming. One possible solution would be to add an "Existing Publication ID" field to the Cloning tool. When this field is populated, the cloning process, instead of creating a new Publication, would copy the contents of the current Publication to the one that was identified by the specified Publication ID. If the destination Publication already has Contents data, the cloning process would presumably fail since merging the Contents data of two Publications is potentially too messy (?). Ahasuerus 18:08, 2 Dec 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90046 OPEN On the Title Edit screen can the “Storylen” field label get renamed to “Length”? This will make the field label consistent with the field label “Length” on the Publication Edit page in the Contents section and will also make it consistent with this field’s help page. Marc Kupper 15:33, 2 Dec 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90045 OPEN It would be nice to have serializations of variant titles display in the long works page. See Frederik Pohl's biblio for an example; "Gravy Planet" is serialized but does not show because it is only recorded as a variant of "The Space Merchants". Mike Christie 07:02, 2 Dec 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90044 OPEN Per Ahasuerus's note on the community portal, it would be very useful to have the "Recent Edits" submission lists (both approved and rejected) include a link to the same display used for approval, in order to view the change made or proposed. Mike Christie 04:55, 29 Nov 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90043 OPEN Per Ahasuerus' note on the community portal, it would be very useful to have the "Recent Edits" submission lists (both approved and rejected) hyperlink the subject column to the appropriate publication, title, or author. Mike Christie 04:55, 29 Nov 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90042 OPEN It would be very useful for moderators to have a free text reason field for rejects. Without it they can still leave a message for the editor on the editor's talk page, so it's not a must-have, but it would be quite handy. Mike Christie 04:55, 29 Nov 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90040 OPEN Several times I’ve needed to click “Edit Title” or “Edit Publication” to determine the item’s “Type” value. Could this get included on the main displays for both titles and publications? Related to this is that the publication listing has a line that says “Type: pb” but the edit screen uses different field names - “Pub Format: pb” and then “Pub Type: (drop down list of ANTHOLOGY, CHAPTERBOOK, COLLECTION, MAGAZINE, NONFICTION, NOVEL).” Marc Kupper 19:39, 27 Nov 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90039 OPEN The author and series pages display titles with [O] if it's an ombibus. Can the same be done on the title pages when listing publications? The reason is I had a brief spate of confusion when looking at The Spell Sword or The Forbidden Tower both of which include The Forbidden Circle in their publication lists as The Forbidden Circle is an omnibus. Marc Kupper 19:31, 27 Nov 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90038 OPEN Related to "resubmit capability" (see the following bullet) I've been wishing for a preview or confirmation page. The very first time I entered a publication I was quite surprised to see that the "year" was 0000-00-00 when I went to approve the publication. My mistake was I had entered 1973-03 and assumed the system would fill in 1973-03-00 for me. There have been quite a few edits where I'll submit/approve and when looking over the finished result I'll see a detail that needs cleanup resulting in a second (or even third) edit/approve. I can think of two styles of confirmation pages 1) Format them just like the normal author/title/publication display pages except perhaps with highlighting of values that were changed (if an edit) or 2) something that looks like the existing approval page that shows a side-by-side diff, or 3) both #1 and #2 on one page with #2 being the lower section. Marc Kupper 17:36, 26 Nov 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90037 OPEN I think we're going to need a resubmit capability for rejected edits. Suppose editor A spends twenty minutes assembling a newpub screen full of fifteen stories and all the relevant information, but makes a few mistakes -- perhaps he puts in the anthology date rather than the copyright date for the titles, and uses an incorrect name format for the authors. It is pretty tough on editor A for the moderator to just say "Rejected", even if we do get the reason-text feature so the moderator can explain it, and then have the editor re-enter all that data -- perhaps several times till they get it all right. What would be far better, and less demotivating, would be if you could select a rejected record and have it repopulate the screen used to submit it, so you could re-submit it with edits. Mike Christie 07:54, 23 Nov 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90036 OPEN The more I think about how the ISFDB will actually operate as a collaborative project, the more it seems important that the project teams that form should be able to take sets of the ISFDB data under their wing, and manage it. I think a critically important part of that is that they should be able to see any changes made to the data.
For example, a Heinlein project member is going to want to know any time a record is updated that relates to Heinlein -- author record, titles attached to Heinlein, publications containing a Heinlein title, series by Heinlein, and so on. Ideally you'd be able to watchlist a publication, title, author, series or award, but any one of publication, author and title would be enough to get started with -- publication is probably the least desirable, but title would work ok. Publisher would be handy for people like Marc that want to manage a publisher-based project.
Are records kept of edits? In other words, are accepted submissions dumped into a history file? If so, it should be possible to write some query against that. The query doesn't have to run from a wiki page; it could run from the ISFDB.
Without a feature like this, projects will have to hunt for their data to corral it. I think this, or something like it, is pretty high priority, and may be necessary before a successful go-live. Mike Christie 07:49, 23 Nov 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90035 OPEN It would be nice to give the Advanced Search link more visibitity on the Main Page. Ahasuerus 12:20, 26 Jul 2006 (CDT)
  • Feature:90034 OPEN There is a fair number of non-fiction anthologies in the ISFDB, including SF symposium minutes and other SF-related items. They are currently classified as "non-fiction" instead of "anthologies", but there is no hard and fast rule that I would be aware of. Ideally we would have "Fiction Anthologies" and "Non-Fiction Anthologies" they way Reginald and some others list them. Ahasuerus 13:50, 19 Jun 2006 (CDT)
  • Feature:90033 OPEN Long Works bibliographies display Serial information for Long Works. However, Serial information is not displayed for Variant Titles, e.g. James H. Schmitz' The Tuvela. We may want to either get rid of Serial information on the Long Works page (my preference) or make Serial information display for variant Titles as well. Ahasuerus 13:39, 16 Jun 2006 (CDT)
  • Feature:90032 OPEN Per Al's note on the community portal, it would be possible for the publication submission to check for possible title merges for the titles (both short and long works) associated with the submission. If it found a merge candidate it could then submit a merge request that would be controlled by moderators as any other submission would. Mike Christie 09:17, 15 Jun 2006 (CDT)
  • Feature:90031 OPEN A collection usually contains single author short fiction pieces plus the odd intro/afterword by somebody else. Granted, there are exceptions like that recent Avram Davidson collection which contained over a dozen short essays/memoirs by his friends and sometimes things are complicated by collaborations, e.g. Partners in Wonder. Nevertheless, it would be helpful if there was a way for the Author fields in the Contents section of new Collection submissions to be pre-populated with the Collection's Author name. Barring that, submission processing could assume that blank Author fields should be interpreted as "written by the Collection's Author". Ahasuerus 19:16, 11 Jun 2006 (CDT)
  • Feature:90030 OPEN Publications which contain Review Works, e.g. this Analog issue, display the reviewed book's title, author and name of the review, e.g. "Time Tunnel • Murray Leinster • book review by P. Schuyler Miller". However, only the book's Author and reviewer (and not the title) are hyperlinked to their respective pages. Ahasuerus 12:56, 8 Jun 2006 (CDT)
  • Feature:90028 OPEN It looks like the ISFDB Directory hasn't been updated in quite some time. The copyright date is 2005. It would help if the Directory could be updated with the latest version of the Author list every night or so. Ahasuerus 14:03, 26 May 2006 (CDT)
  • Feature:90025 OPEN The Main ISFDB page has links for Publishers and Magazines, but nothing for Awards. Wouldn't we want a similar list for Awards up front and center? Ahasuerus 12:42, 25 May 2006 (CDT)
  • Feature:90024 OPEN May 18 2006 - When adding a "New Book", there is no field to enter its Wikipedia URL. Also, there is only one "Note" field, which gets associated with the newly created Publication record as opposed to the Work record. We may want to have a second Note field that would be linked to the Work record. Ahasuerus 10:27, 18 May 2006 (CDT)
  • Feature:90023 OPEN May 17 2006 - Add support to the title table for free etext links, such as Project Gutenberg. Alvonruff 05:59, 17 May 2006 (CDT)
  • Feature:90022 OPEN May 02 2006 Ahasuerus Could we change the way titles are sorted in the Title Merge screen so that leading articles ("A" and "The") would be ignored for sorting purposes? That would make it much easier to select duplicate titles to be merged since you would't have to hunt for them and they would't be found on separate pages. Currently, "Chains of the Sea" may be on Page 1 while "The Chains of the Sea" may be on page 4. The workaround for now is to run Advanced Search for "chains of the sea", but you have to know what you are looking for. Ahasuerus 09:01, 2 May 2006 (CDT)
  • Feature:90021 OPEN May 01 2006 Ahasuerus It might be more intuitive if the "Other Bibliographies" section of the navbar were up top. Perhaps we could ask a few editors to see what would be more user-friendly? Ahasuerus 22:04, 1 May 2006 (CDT)
  • Feature:90020 OPEN May 01 2006 Alvonruff The old ISFDB had a notes notation for generating external and internal links. The new ISFDB needs to have a replacement annotation, similar to that of Wikipedia, using single brackets to refer to external links, and double brackets to refer to other authors in the ISFDB.
  • Feature:90019 OPEN May 01 2006 Ahasuerus Perhaps we could spell out what the various links in the navigation bar on the left do? E.g. "Enter a New Book" as opposed to the current "New Book", "Update Author Data" instead of "Author Data", "Merge Titles" instead of "Titles", etc? The way they are currently listed, they only make sense in conjunction with the subsection header ("Editing Tools"), which is not immediately obvious to new users. Ahasuerus 12:18, 1 May 2006 (CDT)
  • Feature:90018 OPEN May 01 2006 Ahasuerus It would be nice to be able to approve multiple submissions at once, e.g. when a moderator is approving his own submissions. Checkboxes, perhaps? Ahasuerus 12:18, 1 May 2006 (CDT)
  • Feature:90017 OPEN May 01 2006 by Ahasuerus Can we add a free text field to the Merge/Delete form so that editors could explain why they want to merge/delete data? Should make it easier for Moderators to decide whether to Approve/Reject submissions. Ahasuerus 10:07, 1 May 2006 (CDT)
  • Feature:90015 OPEN May 01 2006 by Alvonruff A list of ISBN resources (www.amazon.com, www.addall.com, used.addall.com, www.sigla.ru, etc) for moderators to check submissions against to help identify spam, typos and other types of bad data.
    • Perhaps automate the checking? Ahasuerus 06:47, 1 May 2006 (CDT)
  • Feature:90014 OPEN Apr 30 2006 by User:Ahasuerus - We need a new title type called CHAPTERBOOK, which would allow a title to be treated like both shortfiction and long fiction. The title would show up on either author bibliography - on the long works page it would show up as a novel, and on the short works page (or in a magazine, collection, or anthology) it would behave like a work of shortfiction.
  • Feature:90012 OPEN Jun 21 2005 by User:Ahasuerus - It might be helpful to have a list of checkmarks for individual authors: checked against Bleiler, checked against Reginald, checked against the LoC, checked against Gaslight, Contento, Hall, The SF Hub, Bookwhere, etc.
  • Feature:90011 OPEN Jun 21 2005 by User:Ahasuerus - Secondary bibliography. Is there a way to link bibliographical works to the people that they cover? For example, if I were to take the Simak (bio-)bibiliographies that I listed in his Wikipedia entry and enter them in the ISFDB, would the users be able to see them when they pull up Simak's bibliography?
  • Feature:90010 OPEN "Series Bibliography" pages do not distinguish between single Author books/stories and anthologies. For example, of the five entries in Witch World Stories, one is an Andre Norton collection and four are anthologies edited by Norton, but you can't tell from the list. Ahasuerus 09:07, 19 Jun 2006 (CDT)
  • Feature:90009 OPEN Some series, e.g. "Forgotten Realms", have extensive Web-based bibliographies either at Wikipedia or elsewhere. The ISFDB would benefit from having a "Wikipedia" link and a "Web1" link for series records. Ahasuerus 14:50, 29 May 2006 (CDT)
  • Feature:90008 OPEN We could use a more intuitive display layout for Series that include Long Works, Short Works, Anthologies and Non-fiction entries. With the proliferation of shared worlds in the last 25+ years, breaking up Series like "Thieves' World" into three chunks (novels/collections, anthologies and non-fiction) the way Long Works page currently tries to do is probably suboptimal. Vide David_Weber, Fred_Saberhagen, etc. This may be best done simutaneously with the request below to enhance Long Works to display non-genre Series. Ahasuerus 14:50, 29 May 2006 (CDT)
  • Feature:90004 OPEN When a Long Works list includes series data (one or more novels in a series), it displays all levels of the series hierarchy, e.g. "Terminator (top level series); Terminator 2 (lower level series); T2: Infiltrator (novel title)". However, when you click on a lower level series, it gives you a list of titles that belong to it, but it doesn't show which higher level series it is a part of. Wouldn't it be better if it did? Ahasuerus 13:15, 2 May 2006 (CDT)
90041 OPEN Series pages do not show the names of their parent series and it seems the only way to discover the parent series names this are to edit the series or to click on an author’s name and then look for the title (or series name) on the author’s page. For example, if I’m on the Star Trek Bantam page I can click on Joe Haldeman and find that Star Trek Bantam is sub-series of Star Trek The Original Series which in turn is a sub-series of Star Trek Universe. Marc Kupper 02:04, 29 Nov 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90003 OPEN When an Omnibus collects books in a series, it is displayed along with the series, which is probably better than displaying it with regular omnibuses. However, the fact that it is displayed at the top of the series list can make it hard to read, e.g. see "Guardians of the Flame" at http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?Joel%20Rosenberg . Should we move series Omnibuses to the end of the series?
  • Feature:90002 OPEN There is no way to enter Series data when entering a new title. Is this a design limitation? Ahasuerus 12:18, 1 May 2006 (CDT)
  • Feature:90001 OPEN There doesn't appear to exist a way to indicate that one subseries follows another subseries within a larger series, which can lead to unexpected behavior like the fact that the two Amber series are listed incorrectly at http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?Roger%20Zelazny Could we add something like "Subseries order within the series" to the Series record? Ahasuerus 17:30, 1 May 2006 (CDT)

Implemented Features

  • Feature:90133 Show who has verified a publication in pub-edit approval DONE pv_update.cgi has a message stating "WARNING: This publication has been verified against the primary source" which is handy but it also means I then need to manually look up the publication to see if the person editing the record is the same one that verified it particularly as editors will send in an update and also verify the publications based on the updates they just sent meaning changes to verified publications are fairly common. Marc Kupper (talk) 01:40, 15 Feb 2007 (CST)
I would really like this too: I did a lot of this today as some people were verifying a collection/anthology pub and THEN merging all the titles. (I usually do it the other way round.) BLongley 15:10, 1 Apr 2007 (CDT)
  • Feature:90117 Fill in default values for mkvariant.cgi DONE When I use the "If the parent title does not exist" part of make-variant the new publication is usually quite similar to the record. Could you fill in the fields in the lower part of the screen from the child record and then someone could just change what's needed and then hit [submit data]? Marc Kupper 20:49, 27 Jan 2007 (CST)
  • Feature:90116 Allow 0 for parent in mkvariant.cgi DONE I had been setting the parent to 0 (zero) to remove variant title relationships (it's particularly handy when one is done backwards). Validation code was added recently and now when I try to remove a VT relationship I get a yellow box that says "Error: Parent record does not exist." Could you please allow 0 again or some other method for removing VT relationships? Thank you. Marc Kupper 20:49, 27 Jan 2007 (CST)
    • FYI, the workaround for now is to create a temporary Title record and merge it with the Title that needs to have the "vt" relationship removed. This is unwieldy and time consuming since the only way to create a bew Title is by creating a Title/Publication pair and then you need to delete the extra Publication. Still, it gets the job done. Ahasuerus 14:43, 2 Feb 2007 (CST)
  • Feature:90114 Warning when merging titles in the same publication DONE There have been multiple instances of people merging titles in a publication, and then being confused when the new title shows up multiple times. Since the merge preserves ALL of the old publication links (as it must), the new title appears to show up in error, when actually it is taking the place of the old titles (the correct action is to remove the duplicate titles, not merge them). Nonetheless, people are familiar with using the merge application, and it seems logical to use it in this case. As such, when the target titles appear in the same publication, we need to warn the user that their pending action is not a prudent one. This feature combines EditBug:10073_Merging_titles_within_a_pub and DisplayBug:20094 Repeating titles
  • Feature:90103 Linking book reviews to their title records OPEN A discussion came up about the book review for “The Outline of Sanity” in a collection. At the moment the review is entered as both an essay and as a review which brought up the fact that the essay links to the title record while the review does not. Can book reviews link to their title records? Marc Kupper 00:49, 11 Jan 2007 (CST)
Unmerge is desperately needed by many people. One solution to the shortfiction unmerge that comes to mind is to add it as an option at the publication level. You would only be able to disconnect the current publication from it's parent title and the publication would get it's own dedicated title record that you could them edit or merge as needed. This would also allow a two-step clone and unmerge for those cases where a collection or anthology title changes. You clone it and once approved you unmerge it. Marc Kupper (talk) 02:56, 3 Feb 2007 (CST)
  • Feature:90077 ISBN Hyphenation DONE Support needs to be added such that isbns continue to be stored without hyphens, but are displayed with hyphens within the bibliographic, editing, and search tools.
  • Feature:90068 Add hold flag to submissions DONE If you're a moderator reviewing a submission, I think it would be handy to have a "hold" checkbox that you could check to show that you are reviewing it, and that other moderators shouldn't approve it and needn't investigate it. Ideally it would also show who held it -- so in fact you only need one field; "Held by", and a button to toggle it from blank to the currently logged in user. Right now I have asked a question about a recent submission but there's no easy way for y'all to see that. I don't think the flag needs to prevent approval; it's just informative. Mike Christie (talk) 11:41, 22 Dec 2006 (CST)
I suggested something similar back in May-June, but Al had other things to worry about at the time and, besides, we weren't sure how useful it would be. Based on recent moderatorial experiences, it does seem quite useful. Half the time I have to spend a couple of minutes checking the submitted change against Contento/OCLC/Worldcat/etc and it would be useful to be able to "put it on hold" so that other moderators wouldn't be duplicating the effort. Ahasuerus 12:47, 23 Dec 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90065 DONE Can the code that generates HTML links to the wiki check the wiki’s SQL tables to see if the target page exists and to display a visible indicator if wiki-notes exist at the target? This would match the behavior within the wiki (which displays links in red for missing pages) and greatly improves the odds of someone noticing that Bibliographic Comments exist. For example, at present only 43 of 88,125 publication records have wiki pages meaning it’s likely people will not be in the habit of just checking the wiki-notes for data as 99.95% of the time it’ll be “(There is currently no text in this page)”. Marc Kupper 19:28, 18 Dec 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90056 DONE Can a link to a wiki-help screen get added to the Title Unmerge Request (tv_unmerge.cgi) page? Right now the link and page are somewhat mysterious unless someone has done a thorough reading of the manual. If it’s not too hard – a [Cancel] button would be nice for this page too. Marc Kupper 01:30, 16 Dec 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90049 DONE Suppose you find a Publication that shouldn't be under its current Title. This happens fairly frequently with collections when you discover that a later reprint edition contained more (or fewer) fiction Titles. You would then want to create a new Title and make it a variant Title of the original Title plus "(expanded)" or "(abridged)" added, but the only way to do it would be to delete the existing Publication and re-enter/merge all of its Contents titles, which is a pain. The obvious solution would be to add a "Make this Publication into a New Title" option on the navbar, which I think Al briefly mentioned some months ago. Ahasuerus 18:08, 2 Dec 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90047 DONE At this point, the Unmerge Title option gives you no choice but to convert all Publications for a given Title into separate Titles. Can we change it to a form with checkboxes that will let you select which Publications you want to Unmerge from the Title? That would save a lot of re-merging time when there are only half a dozen erroneously merged Publications out of a few dozen. Ahasuerus 18:08, 2 Dec 2006 (CST)
  • Feature:90029 DONE When submitting a deletion request for a Publication or a Work, a free text "Reason" field would be very helpful. That way Moderators would know why a particular record was nominated for deletion, e.g. "Duplicate record, see XYZ". Ahasuerus 09:59, 30 May 2006 (CDT)
  • Feature:90027 DONE When you display a variant title, it shows e.g. "Variant title of 1694" where the 1694 is a link to the main title. It would be nice if this displayed 'Variant title of "Jack of Eagles"' instead. Mike Christie 07:58, 26 May 2006 (CDT)
  • Feature:90006 DONE Series entries are displayed based on their individual entries' length. Thus, novels appear on the Long Works list while shorter pieces appear on the Short Works list. You can see the whole list, but only if you click on the series name. Although the current behavior is logical, it may not be what most users expect. Perhaps we could add a note to the series name, e.g. "for shorter works in the series, see here" if applicable? On a related note, if a series is later continued by another author (e.g. Charles Platt continuing Piers Anthony's "Aton"), there is no way of telling that there is more to the series than the items currently displayed on the screen. Ahasuerus 18:01, 4 May 2006 (CDT)
  • Feature:90005 DONE 11/15/2006 (or thereabouts) A "series" search currently retrieves a list of Works whose "Series" field matches the search string. E.g. "Mars" returns 27 books whose "series" fields contain "Mars". There is no indication of what the series names are, though. Shouldn't the results page display a list of series instead? Or a list of titles along with their associated series fields? Ahasuerus 16:52, 4 May 2006 (CDT)
  • Voting system. Users are now able to rate titles on a scale of 1 to 10.
  • 11/12/2006 - Ability to delete specific titles from a publication. DONE. Alvonruff 06:59, 16 Nov 2006 (CST)
  • 10/31/2006 - Publication verification checkmarks. For publication data, users with access to the primary sources can verify that the data matches the physical object. DONE. Alvonruff 11:18, 12 Nov 2006 (CST)
  • Early June 2006 - Editing Tool: New Content. This tool will allow users to submit new magazines, anthologies, etc... DONE. The ability to edit existing content is next in line. Alvonruff
  • 05/20/2006 - May 01 2006 by Alvonruff - Ability to delete a title. DONE. Note that it will only allow deletes if the title is unreferenced. It will not delete the title if a publiation still refers to it. And no, we won't make deletetitle smart enough to delete the publication - what if the title is a short story in a magazine full of other stories? At any rate, deletetitle will tell you what refers to a title. Alvonruff 05:31, 20 May 2006 (CDT)
  • 05/20/2006 - Apr 30 2006 by User: Ahasuerus - Ability to unlink a serial from a Work in case it turns out that they are unrelated. DONE. (Actually I think this was a bug fixed a while back). Alvonruff 05:31, 20 May 2006 (CDT)
  • 05/20/2006 - Redesign pseudonym support, and add explicit support for variant titles. DONE. Alvonruff 05:31, 20 May 2006 (CDT)
  • 05/10/2006 - Added a "Delete Publication" link to the navbar when viewing a Publication. DONE.
  • Early May 2006 - Now that the database is begining to open up, the volume of "recent changes" is likely to go up considerably. We may want to make sure that backups are done regularly (daily?) and that the ISFDB Downloads page is stamped with the last backup date so that a user would know which version he is downloading. Ahasuerus 14:45, 1 May 2006 (CDT) DONE.
  • 05/05/2006 - Added a Bibliographic Comments link to the author bibliographies that point to pages in the Wiki. DONE.
  • 04/30/2006 - Anthology and magazine editors will be now shown as "editors" and not "authors" when displaying publication data. DONE.
  • 04/16/2006 - Login Tools. This allows users to establish an editing session with the ISFDB and submit updates. DONE.
  • 04/02/2006 - Jul 17 2005 by Peter D. Tillman: It would be nice if the main page came up with the search box highlighted, ala http://www.google.com/. Would save a step on the search. DONE.
  • 04/02/2006 - Jul 17 2005 by Peter D. Tillman: Also be nice if, on searching for a name, eg William Sanders, the 'ware took you straight to his page, rather than having to click on the name you just typed in. DONE.

Open Wiki Features

Add new features at the top. Give the requested feature a number by incrementing the "next open feature number"; give it a status of OPEN, and then describe the problem.

Valid statuses are:

  • OPEN -- requested, not implemented or denied
  • DONE -- feature has been implemented
  • DENIED -- the feature will not be implemented in the form requested.

Next open feature number: 100003.

  • Feature:100001 Implement custom namespaces OPEN Obviously, the prefixes Author:, Publication:, Series: etc. in page names aren't defined as Custom namespaces but merely parts of the name without a special significance. Now if they were, this would allow use of the PAGENAME/PAGENAMEE variables as default parameters in templates for linking both to ISFDB itself, like {{A}}, {{P}} etc., and {{Wikipedia}} in such a way (see the current state of wikipedia:Template:Isfdb name etc.) that mostly it would not be necessary to include any parameters manually (and also allow simple linking directly to Wikipedia's author article, currently not supported by the template at all). I think it would improve usability and save work quite a bit, although I don't know how extensively the wiki is planned to be used after ISFDB proper is in full operation.
There will always be a need for a place to have free text discussions of the many arcane bibliographic issues that can (and often do) arise. See, e.g., Author:C. S. Lewis. Ahasuerus 22:59, 2 Nov 2006 (CST)
Another solution would be installing StringFunctions, but using them to cut the "Author:" etc. bit from the PAGENAME would be pointlessly complicated.
Also, I don't know if any of these might not require upgrading the MediaWiki to version 1.5 or higher. --JVjr 11:20, 2 Nov 2006 (CST)
That's a good question, but I am out of the Wikimedia loop. Perhaps Al might know? Ahasuerus 22:59, 2 Nov 2006 (CST)
So, my MediaWiki consultant tells me that an upgrade is generally a good idea: for example, what I was trying to do yesterday over at {{WP}} works only from about 1.6 higher; and at the very least, he recommends a security upgrade to 1.4.15, because a. o. „Versions prior to 1.3.16 and 1.4.10 have a serious data corruption bug which is triggered by a spambot known to operate in the wild.“
Speaking of future uses for the wiki, I was reminded of an old idea of mine - well, I guess that belongs to the ISFDB:Community Portal. --JVjr 11:09, 3 Nov 2006 (CST)
I'm not opposed to upgrading the wiki, I just need to look into what that entails. Alvonruff 07:01, 16 Nov 2006 (CST)
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