Month: July 2003

Change Log for mb_server

Moderation notes: when entering moderations, you now get the chance to enter a
moderation note at the same time as entering or confirming the moderation
itself. Previously it was actually quite hard work to add notes to your own
moderations, to explain why you were entering a particular mod; now it’s easy.
This should hopefully encourage the use of moderation notes to make voting on
“difficult” or odd-looking moderations easier. This change applies to all
moderation types apart from: Add TRM, Change Track Artist, Move Disc ID,
Convert Release to Single Artist. These moderation types will be dealt with
later.

“Edit Album Attributes” moderation: when adding a moderation of this type, any
releases whose attributes already match the “new” attributes are now quietly
removed from the list (because there is nothing to change). If the list
becomes empty as a result, no moderation is entered. Thus there will be no
more moderations which say (for example) “Old: Album, Official; New: Album,
Official”.

Moderator emails: moderators’ names shown in e-mail headers (e.g. when it
shows your name in the “To:” header) are now displayed correctly much more
often. Internally, all of the e-mail code has been rewritten, to make it
easier to maintain and extend the code. Proper UTF-8 support has been added
for e-mail subject lines (the message body was already handled correctly).

Server errors: in the highly unlikely 😉 event that you should experience a
server programming error of some kind, instead of being presented with a big
ugly list of error messages, you now just get a much nicer-looking “500 Server
Error” message. (The error messages are now written to the server error log).

Login / account creation: Bug #752767 “@Q@ in URL” has been fixed. Also, when
you log in you will now never be redirected to the login page again, nor to
the logout page. (When this used to happen it was very confusing!). If you
see the “you must log in” box whilst trying to do something, and you choose to
create a new account, you are now redirected back to the correct page once
your account has been created.

Some obscure and intermittent HTML- and URL-encoding bugs have been fixed.

Dave Evans

Adding and removing tracks

Certain checks are now made to see if tracks can be added to, and
removed from, a release. This is primarily to protect releases with
Disc IDs from having the Disc ID “broken” via the addition or removal of
tracks.

Example: let’s say you’ve got a 15-track version of some album, but it’s
not in MusicBrainz; however there is a 14-track version already in the
database. If the 14-track version has a good Disc ID then you won’t be
able to add the 15th track to it – you’ll have to create a new release.

Viewing artist releases

The page where you can view a list of releases for an artist
(/showartist.html, also currently called “Show Albums”) now has two
display modes: “Full” and “Compact”. “Full” is the old behaviour.
“Compact” shows the data in a more compact, tabular, form, with one row
per release. In “compact” mode, all you get is a link to view each
individual release – there are no “Edit”, “Del”, or “edit attributes”
links, and the releases cannot be expanded to show track listings.

You can manually switch between “full” and “compact” views. The default
is “full” mode, unless there are more than /n/ releases (/n/ is set by a
new preference), in which case you get “full” mode.

The aim of this feature is to generate more lightweight pages,
especially for artists with a large number of releases, e.g. Bach,
Mozart, Elvis Presley, David Bowie.

Sorting disc sets

When sorting releases by name on the aforementioned “showartist.html”
page, the system now “understands” the “(disc /n/)” notation, and sorts
those releases numerically instead of lexically – i.e. 10 ends up coming
after 9, not between 1 and 2. It also recognises “(disc /n/ of /m/)”
and sorts those releases by /m/ first, then /n/.

Also, “ties” in the sort order are now broken by track count (least
first), TRM count (most first), and finally database row ID.

Moderation notes

URLs to the show(album|artist|track|mod).html pages are now hyperlinked
when displayed.

Internal architecture

Moderation Notes have been split out into their own class (from
Moderation.pm). So have Votes. This makes it fractionally easier to
write code to add notes to moderations. Maybe in a few releases time I
might get the ModBot to add more notes, e.g. every time any moderation
fails (apart from “failed vote”), maybe the ModBot should explicitly
state the reason for the failure.

Dave Evans