User talk:Ahasuerus
See User talk:Ahasuerus/Archive for discussions prior to 2023.
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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! |
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Cornish
Hi, and Happy New Year! Sorry to add to your plate, but it looks like we need Cornish for Myghal Palmer and Rebellyans. In the obituary, his brother-in-law says this was published in Cornish and that at the time (2005) Palmer was responsible for 4 of the 6 (sic) books published in revived Cornish.... --MartyD (talk) 14:02, 3 January 2023 (EST)
- No worries! Cornish is an ISO 639-2-recognized language, so it doesn't cause any issues. I added it a couple of minutes ago. Happy New Year! Ahasuerus (talk) 14:23, 3 January 2023 (EST)
AddPub Approval page issue
When the title of the new publication does not match the title of the record you are adding into, there is no warning anymore. See here. It cannot happen outside of an API call (as the field is greyed out) but that makes processing Fixer's AddPub submissions extremely finicky (and is potentially going to lead to more missed mismatches if anyone else uses the API to submit these and the handling moderator relies on the screens to tell them of a mismatch). Annie (talk) 14:28, 27 January 2023 (EST)
- PS: I think that the problem is that you never show the Publication title now on the screen - so there is no place for the warning to be shown. Annie (talk) 14:30, 27 January 2023 (EST)
- I figured that having a complete Title record in the Title table and a complete Publication record in the Publication table made more sense. The reviewer no longer needs to guess which Title field values are re-used by the Publication table.
- I also realized that, for manually created AddPubs, it's possible for the pub's title/authors to get out of sync with the associated title's title/authors. All it takes is for an Edit Title submission to be approved before the AddPub submission is processed. Ahasuerus (talk) 18:07, 30 January 2023 (EST)
Mismatched Quotes Weirdness
There is a mismatched quotes warning for the synopsis field in this submitted edit. The warning appears in the proposed value column with the warning cell completely missing. I realize that this is because the missing closing quote makes the browser think that the anchor tag is not finished. I don't know if we want to consider escaping values here, or if this is a rare enough occurrence that we shouldn't worry about a cosmetic issue. In any case, I'll leave it un-approved so you can take a look. Thanks. --Ron ~ RtraceTalk 11:05, 16 February 2023 (EST)
- I see. I think this issue is limited to Notes and Synopsis fields because they are the only ones where we allow embedded HTML (although I see that Help:Using Templates and HTML in Note Fields doesn't mention Synopsis.) I suppose the ideal solution would be to tell the browser that it should stop parsing HTML at the end of the current table cell, but I am afraid I don't know of a way to do it. Ahasuerus (talk) 12:04, 16 February 2023 (EST)
Yellow warning request
I think we need one more yellow warning on the approval screen: when AddPub had been already submitted and someone changes the type of the original we are adding to, you don't get any indication of it. Example here. I swapped the type from novel to chapbook pre-approval so I can make it in one step so I knew to check but if the approver does not open the resulting new publication, there is nothing to tell them that the work just approved needs work (And with the type missing from the top, they cannot even spot it on the screen). Annie (talk) 11:48, 23 February 2023 (EST)
- PS: I think we may end up in the same situation with a ClonePub as well - I just don't have one handy as an example. Thanks! Annie (talk) 11:56, 23 February 2023 (EST)
- All done. Ahasuerus (talk) 23:41, 7 March 2023 (EST)
- Awesome! Can you look at this one. See the top of the screen that says The Scourge Between Stars • (2023). Historically, and everywhere on the server, the year is shown that way anywhere ONLY if the title date is different from the one of the publication you are working on - so different from 2023-04-04. So seeing a year in bracket, always sent me doing sanity check on dates to see if one may need adjusting. But they match here. Is that intentional? Annie (talk) 11:20, 9 March 2023 (EST)
- All done. Ahasuerus (talk) 23:41, 7 March 2023 (EST)
- No rush and if it ends up being too complicated, I can get used to it behaving this way going forward. It looked like a quick way to see that the ebook date is not the same as the paper we are adding it to when I do the ebooks for Forthcoming books - that made me recheck the date on the paper one as well a few times today. I can just start comparing the dates on my own instead and ignore the year up there - both dates are on the screen now after all. :) Annie (talk) 18:23, 9 March 2023 (EST)
Author birthplace question
The editor originally entered the birthplace for M. L. Weems as 'Anne Arundel County, Province of Maryland, Thirteen Colonies, British America'; triggering an exception for noncompliance with this template. I tried substituting 'England, Kingdom of Great Britain' for 'Thirteen Colonies, British America', but the software still see it as an exception. Is 'Province of Maryland' causing the software to look for USA? What is the correct fix? I'm stumped. John Scifibones 16:55, 25 February 2023 (EST)
- Checking the code, I see that it expects the names of US states to be followed by ", USA" with a few exceptions: California allows "Baja California", Hawaii allows "Kingdom of Hawaii" and "Republic of Hawaii", Montana allows "Bulgaria", etc. Some of the original 13 colonies allow ", British Empire", but Maryland is not one of them. I'll need to update the code to support ", British Empire" for Maryland and the rest of the colonies. Thanks for identifying the problem! Ahasuerus (talk) 17:12, 25 February 2023 (EST)
- Should I go ahead and update the author in anticipation of the change? John Scifibones 17:42, 25 February 2023 (EST)
Self-Approver
Hello, can you please comment on https://isfdb.org/wiki/index.php/ISFDB:Community_Portal#Self-Moderation_Request? --Stoecker (talk) 06:44, 11 March 2023 (EST)
Offutt EILSB
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/view_submission.cgi?5606444; Do you think the day of publication or the ISBN should be entered? --Username (talk) 08:49, 13 March 2023 (EDT)
- Help:Screen:NewPub#Date says that:
- The base date optionally may be made more precise (e.g., supplying the month or day of publication) using information from a secondary source, if that source's date is otherwise consistent with publication's stated date. The source, and which details of the date were obtained from that source, must be recorded in the publication notes.
- so we could make the date more precise and state the source in Notes.
- Re: ISBN, Help:Screen:NewPub#ISBN allows padding a 9-digit SBN with a zero to make it a valid 10-digit ISBN, but creating a 10-digit ISBN based on a much shorter catalog ID ("64-490") seems like a stretch. We could always raise the question on the Rules and Standards page. For now I have approved the submission. Ahasuerus (talk) 13:49, 13 March 2023 (EDT)
Problem with an approved edit
When you have a few minutes, would you mind taking a look at the thread Neal Stephenson / Snow Crash? Thanks John Scifibones 19:31, 18 March 2023 (EDT)
- That's odd. I will restore the full backups (which include submission history) on the development server tomorrow morning and see what I can find. Thanks for reporting the issue. Ahasuerus (talk) 23:55, 18 March 2023 (EDT)
- It turns out that this and 4 other publication records were corrupted in 2007-2008. At the time we had major issues with server stability and our software was still going through a "growing pains" phase. I am going to create a database patch and apply it to the live server in a day or two. Until then these 5 publication records' Notes fields will remain uneditable. Ahasuerus (talk) 17:06, 19 March 2023 (EDT)
- Thank you for taking care of this, I know you're busy. John Scifibones 17:11, 19 March 2023 (EDT)
Possible minor bug on title-pub date check when adding collections
Hi, I just added the UK ebook of Kelly Link's White Cat, Black Dog collection, which seems to have preceded the US pubs by ~3 weeks. I was expecting it to warn me about the pub date being before the title date, but didn't get any yellow warning, which can be seen here. It did spot that 2 of the stories which inherited the US title/pub date are after that pub date though.
My guess is this might be down to one of two things:
1. It's a collection, whereas normally when I get the warning it's on a novel - do those title types perhaps use different code? 2. The check/warning wasn't done here because I cloned the pub, rather than doing an AddPub as I usually do. Again, maybe different checks are being done?
I won't update the title date for the collection, or the 2 stories, until you've had chance to look into this - I think if I fixed things, it would cause the yellow warnings on the linked submission page to disappear? Regards ErsatzCulture (talk) 09:51, 14 April 2023 (EDT)
- Thanks for reporting the problem! Let me try to replicate it on the development server and see what I find... Ahasuerus (talk) 14:10, 14 April 2023 (EDT)
External IDs and Submission Conflicts
Figured I'd mention this, in case you have some good and simple idea for it. Yesterday I processed a lingering submission that had a host of changes, one of which was adding an LCCN external ID reference. There were no external IDs at the time of submission. After that was submitted, someone with self-approval rights (happened to be a moderator) edited the same pub and added OCLC/Worldcat and Reginald-3 external ID references and accepted that submission.
No surprise, when I went to process the lingering submission, that considered the external ID situation to be add LCCN and remove both OCLC/Worldcat and Reginald-3. I know the same would have been true had there been a conflicting edit to any other field. It got me to thinking, though, that if we treated external ID removal as some sort of negative addition (a la the use of 0 for removing a variant parent ID) rather than absence of the identifier, then these two additions to the External IDs would not have conflicted.
Thanks for listening. --MartyD (talk) 13:15, 20 April 2023 (EDT)
- I am afraid I am not sure what "negative addition" would mean in this case. The current logic simply deletes all old External IDs, then adds the ones that were submitted. How would the proposed logic work?
- To use the scenario described above as an example, if a publication has an OCLC ID and a Reginald-3 ID and a new submission has an LCCN ID, how would the software know whether the submitting editor meant to add the LCCN to the two IDs already on file or to replace them with the LCCN ID? Ditto for "Web pages" and other multi-fields.
- I suppose we could create new options to "Remove IDs/Web pages/etc", which would be similar to the "Remove Titles from This Pub" option. Once it was in place, we would change the behavior of EditPub to add new values without deleting old values. Is this in line with what you were thinking? Ahasuerus (talk) 14:22, 20 April 2023 (EDT)
- Yes, I was thinking that "blanking" a value would actually submit some sort of change-this-to-a-special-value that would indicate it should be removed (a la parent ID = 0), rather than simply causing it to be absent. 0 or -1 or DEL might be a good candidate. The back-end processing would have to be more complicated, as it couldn't just delete and add. But it could, for example, delete all of the IDs in the submission (rather than all of the IDs on the pub) and then add the ones in the submission back, except for the special-value ones. You could probably structure the insert's SQL cleverly to not have to filter in the code (e.g., insert into xxx values (...) where [new id value] <> 'SPECIAL-DELETE-THIS-VALUE';). --MartyD (talk) 09:56, 21 April 2023 (EDT)
- The reason we can use "0" as a special value is that our Title IDs cannot be 0. On the other hand, we have no way of telling what strange value a third party may decide to use. We wouldn't want to find ourselves in the same position as a certain government agency which used "Test" as a dummy last name (for testing purposes) until they discovered that people with that last name actually existed :-)
- Luckily, we don't need to use special values. We can use a new XML element name for a list of "External ID Type-External ID value" pairs to be removed.
- That said, I am not sure that it will cover all possible scenarios of External IDs getting added, removed and replaced. Let me draw a few diagrams and see what scenarios I can come up with... Ahasuerus (talk) 12:54, 21 April 2023 (EDT)
ISBN Search Case Sensitive
ISBN search is now case sensitive which is a bit of a pain.
- https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/se.cgi?arg=162755646x&type=ISBN returns nothing
- https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/se.cgi?arg=162755646X&type=ISBN returns the pub
Can we get it back to being case insensitive? Probably would just need to convert search term to uppercase when ISBN selected. -- JLaTondre (talk) 20:24, 24 April 2023 (EDT)
- That's odd. I'll take a look. Thanks for reporting the issue. Ahasuerus (talk) 21:02, 24 April 2023 (EDT)
Merge variant with parent problem
See this submission, but Keep ID and Drop ID are both present. The Drop ID is a variant of the Keep ID, but in the XML it's trying to set the merged record's Parent to Drop ID, which is rather odd. And I also think maybe the message means to say that the proposed parent does not exist? --MartyD (talk) 13:46, 6 May 2023 (EDT)
- Earlier this morning I recreated the problem on the development server. I then created FR 1565, "Disallow Merge Title submissions which would create circular VTs". The FR reads:
- Currently, the software lets you create a MergeTitle submission which would merge a variant with its parent and make the resulting title record a variant of itself. Since circular variants are not supported by the ISFDB software, these types of submissions are invalid.
- When it happens, the submission review software makes the submission unapprovable and displays the following error message:
- "The proposed parent title is the title record which will be kept after the merge."
- We want to change the software to catch this problem at submission creation time. The error message listed above should be retained in case a title record is turned into a variant between the time the submission is created and the time it's reviewed/approved. However, the text should me made more explicit:
- "This submission would result in a title that is a parent of itself, which is not allowed."
- Thanks for identifying the issue! Ahasuerus (talk) 12:46, 7 May 2023 (EDT)
Suboptimal behaviour on art award categories for "proper" titles
This isn't a bug IMHO, but it's definitely not ideal - if you're adding an award entry such as this one for the Locus Poll Art/Illustrated category, then only the author gets shown, when it's probably the case that the artist(s) is at least as responsible for the work being nominated. However, if the nominated work was never entered as a title/pub, then the artist does show up along with the author in the untitled award record (example).
(I'm guessing a similar situation would be in play for translated works, and for audiobook awards if we record any.)
I can't think of any easy solution for this - obviously the ideal would be if/whenever proper "roles" for a work are addable to the database - but I'm just mentioning it, in case there's anything you can think of as an interim workaround. Maybe something could be done with the award note field, but it'd still be a bit clunky?
Apologies in advance if this is something that is already known about and has been considered... ErsatzCulture (talk) 16:40, 13 May 2023 (EDT)
- When we create a "title-based" award record, we link it to one -- and only one -- title record. As long as this limitation remains in place, we can't link an award record to multiple title records at the same time.
- That being said, I am not sure we have this title entered correctly. If you look at this publication record and pull up its Amazon UK page, you will note that it is described as follows:
- From the Eisner and Bram Stoker-award winning team of Snow, Glass, Apples comes a delightfully humorous and charming new graphic novel adaptation.
- This suggests that this is not just a reprint of Gaiman's 1992 story "Chivalry" illustrated by Coleen Doran, but a new (derivative) graphic novel by Gaiman and Doran. Once we create a new SHORTFICTION title record for the graphic novel and enter Gaiman and Doran as its authors, we should be able to link the award record to it. Does this make sense? Ahasuerus (talk) 20:16, 13 May 2023 (EDT)
- Thanks - I've pinged the PVing editor who submitted that title & pubs. ErsatzCulture (talk) 08:16, 14 May 2023 (EDT)
- As the PV and editor that created all of these pubs, I may indeed have attributed the authorship wrong. The copy I have in-hand shows the following on the title page: "Story and Words" [over] "Neil Gaiman" plus "Adaptation, Art, and Illuminated Manuscript Lettering" [over] "Colleen Doran" plus "Lettering" [over] "Todd Klein". Relooking at this, I can see why the author's should be both Gaiman and Doran. If I just change the title record, will that flow down to the pub records as well? Phil (talk) 08:39, 14 May 2023 (EDT)
- Thanks - I've pinged the PVing editor who submitted that title & pubs. ErsatzCulture (talk) 08:16, 14 May 2023 (EDT)
- I am afraid not. I think the quickest way to address this issue would be to do the following:
- Remove the 1992 SHORTFICTION title from each of the 4 affected CHAPBOOK pubs
- Change the authorship of the CHAPBOOK title record to "Neil Gaiman" and "Colleen Doran"
- Change the authorship of the 4 CHAPBOOK publications which include this title record to "Neil Gaiman" and "Colleen Doran"
- Edit the "Chivalry" INTERIORART title by Coleen Doran to be a SHORTFICTION [sic!] title by Coleen Doran and Neil Gaiman; make sure to set the "graphic format" flag
- I think that should do it, but we can review the records after the changes are made. You may also want to add a link to this discussion to the Moderator Note field of your submissions. Thanks for chiming in! Ahasuerus (talk) 11:32, 14 May 2023 (EDT)
- Those changes are submitted except for setting the graphic format flag which has to be done after the type is changed to SHORTFICTION. In this process, I also discovered I had consistently misspelled Colleen (including in the other titles and cover artist) so there are also submissions to correct that. Sigh. Phil (talk) 15:06, 14 May 2023 (EDT)
- I am afraid not. I think the quickest way to address this issue would be to do the following:
- Everything has been approved and the "graphic format" flag has been set. I believe the only thing that we still need to decide on is whether the previously discussed award record, which is currently linked to the CHAPBOOK title, should be linked to the SHORTFICTION title instead. Ahasuerus (talk) 17:31, 14 May 2023 (EDT)
- The prior award record has been deleted and a new one created against the new shortfiction record. Thanks both. ErsatzCulture (talk) 17:55, 14 May 2023 (EDT)
- Everything has been approved and the "graphic format" flag has been set. I believe the only thing that we still need to decide on is whether the previously discussed award record, which is currently linked to the CHAPBOOK title, should be linked to the SHORTFICTION title instead. Ahasuerus (talk) 17:31, 14 May 2023 (EDT)
- There is no need to delete an award that is pointing to the wrong record. While on the 'Award Details' screen, select 'Link Award' from the 'Editing Tools' menu and enter the correct record #. This will preserve any useful information. This one for example. I won't need to repeat the research. John Scifibones 20:12, 14 May 2023 (EDT)
Odd & now missing approval
Hi Ahasuerus. I just approved this submission[1] and got an error message, but when I checked it went through, except it's not in the recently approved or in author history. Thought I should let you know.Kraang (talk) 10:52, 15 May 2023 (EDT)
- I see that the submission errored out -- see this list of Errored Out and "In Progress" Submissions, which can be accessed from the "Moderator Links" section of the navigation bar on the left. "Errored out" submissions are typically due to server problems that we have no control over. Some months the server that we rent experiences more of them than other months. For example, it happened 19 times in December 2022, but only 16 times in January-May 2023. Ahasuerus (talk) 11:31, 15 May 2023 (EDT)
Invalid Page Numbers
Please see this pub and the first page number (`42). Is non-standard punctuation something that should be added to the cleanup report? -- JLaTondre (talk) 12:32, 21 May 2023 (EDT)
- It's 142, I fixed it in my (pending) edit. Whoever entered contents messed up several page numbers. --Username (talk) 12:43, 21 May 2023 (EDT)
(edit conflict) From the last database dump:
mysql> select pubc_page,pub_id from pub_content where pubc_page like "%`%"; +-----------+--------+ | pubc_page | pub_id | +-----------+--------+ | `42 | 303295 | | 1` | 389098 | | |9` | 472957 | | `51|28 | 249793 | | 80` | 919331 | | 6` | 927024 | +-----------+--------+ 6 rows in set (6.89 sec)
So seems a common enough occurrence of people missing the 1 key and hitting ` instead. -- JLaTondre (talk) 12:45, 21 May 2023 (EDT)
- Thanks for identifying the issue. I will update the cleanup report once I finish the current task. Ahasuerus (talk) 16:42, 21 May 2023 (EDT)
- I have updated the cleanup report to include values with a "backtick" (`) character. The new data will become available tomorrow morning. Unfortunately, I couldn't think of any other punctuation characters that could be included because we record page numbers as they appear in publications, including oddball values like "C-1", "C!1", etc. Ahasuerus (talk) 10:46, 23 May 2023 (EDT)
Figuring out a Russian name
This story is by a Russian from the Soviet era (1954 or before). Any chance you can figure out who it is? ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 19:00, 26 May 2023 (EDT)
- [2]; right-click, translate to English, if that helps. --Username (talk) 19:22, 26 May 2023 (EDT)
- As far as I can tell, there's no one with the name Арефьев in the database. I couldn't find any connection other than that one page. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 19:35, 26 May 2023 (EDT)
- Here it is: Тайна полигона by С. Арефьев (I went brute force based on the Japanese name -- there are only that many possible spellings in Russian of that last name. I will update the record. :) Annie (talk) 19:33, 26 May 2023 (EDT)
- Cool. Thanks (to you and Username). ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 19:37, 26 May 2023 (EDT)
- And now we have a more-or-less complete entry for the first Japanese science fiction magazine! ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 19:39, 26 May 2023 (EDT)
- And I just tracked down the original Russian publication of that story as well :) Annie (talk) 19:43, 26 May 2023 (EDT)
- Awesome! That's a pretty quick turnaround on translating a story and publishing the translation (end of August to December in the same year). ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 19:47, 26 May 2023 (EDT)
- Yep - it is possible that the translation was done based on pre-publication proofs. I am seeing a few reprints in Russian magazines and newspapers in September 1954: serialization in very early September in За тяжёлое машиностроение (based in Yekaterinburg) and a full story in Молодой сталинец (in Tbilisi) in the middle of the month so I suspect the story was making the rounds before it officially came out. I cannot find anything before that August publication (and that magazine makes sense as a first publication) but now I am curious just how many I will find (I see at least one later serialization in 1957-1958). Maybe there is an earlier one out there in the same year - Fantlab puts in in 1954 (with no details on where) so it is unlikely to find it earlier than that I'd think. :) Always fun to track down old stories :) Annie (talk) 20:17, 26 May 2023 (EDT)
- Awesome! That's a pretty quick turnaround on translating a story and publishing the translation (end of August to December in the same year). ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 19:47, 26 May 2023 (EDT)
- And I just tracked down the original Russian publication of that story as well :) Annie (talk) 19:43, 26 May 2023 (EDT)
- (after edit conflict) Quick turnaround indeed. I am not an expert in the area of Soviet-Japanese relations, but the first thing that comes to mind is that the Soviets were trying to improve their relationship with Japan around the same time. In July their First Deputy Foreign Minster Andrei Vyshinski claimed that the USSR wanted to promote trade and cultural exchanges with Japan, ultimately leading to a "normalization" of the relationship. In September Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, said that the USSR "expresses its readiness to make normal its relations with Japan". It culminated in a Sino-Soviet "Joint Communique" in October in which both countries "express[ed] their readiness to take steps to normalize their relations with Japan". Perhaps the editor(s) thought that it made late 1954 a perfect time to publish a Russian story. Ahasuerus (talk) 20:26, 26 May 2023 (EDT)
Weird Duplicate Submissions
This was probably just some weird hiccup, but I thought I would mention it: I made an edit to a publication after accepting the submission. From my side, I got a single moderator approval window. But when I went into the moderation queue after approving that, I saw about 30 duplicate submissions (see Recent Rejections from 2023-05-28 08:39:42 to 2023-05-28 08:39:44). As far as I know, I didn't do anything different than normal when submitting (ex. holding down a key while submitting). I certainly didn't inadvertently pop-up 30 different tabs or anything like that. Thanks. -- JLaTondre (talk) 08:56, 28 May 2023 (EDT)
- Thanks for letting me know. It is exceedingly odd. On rare occasion, something happens between Apache and MySQL that results in a duplicate submission, but I don't think I have ever seen 30 duplicates.
- Checking Apache's log file, I see:
- [Sun May 28 08:39:42.498256 2023] [cgid:error] [pid 1597558:tid 1597806] (104)Connection reset by peer: AH01270: Error reading request entity data, referer: https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/edit/editpub.cgi?952950
- which matches the time frame and the publication ID. So something clearly happened at the Apache level, but I am not sure what it was. There are online reports of a regression bug in this area under Apache 2.4.39, which was fixed in 2.4.40, but we are running a later version. I guess we'll have to keep an eye on it. Thanks again. Ahasuerus (talk) 12:41, 28 May 2023 (EDT)