Month: November 2011

Have Your Say In Scheduling

In an effort to bring the community into our development process more, I (ocharles) have built a new little application to help the MusicBrainz community decide exactly what we should focus on. I present to you, the Scheduling Game!

The Scheduling Game
The Scheduling Game

The idea behind this little application is to let the community quickly scan through open issues and decide when they believe they should be fixed. Each editor is presented with 3 options:

  1. Within 3 months. This ticket must absolutely be fixed within 3 months from now.
  2. Within 12 months. This ticket should be fixed within a year from now. This means the ticket should be fixed within the year, but is not critical for the next 3 months
  3. Unscheduled. This issue is not pressing and can be fixed much later.

Later, when issues have been voted on by enough people, the developers will try and decide how to schedule work to best fit the needs of the community.

A few disclaimers… Firstly, this is just an experiment! We don’t know how well it will work, though initial testing has shown it to already be quite useful. Secondly, it’s not really much of a game, but I wanted to give it a cute name (I know how picky everyone can be!). Currently only a subset of open tickets are available for voting on – specifically tickets in the “NGS + 1” and “Post NGS” milestones on JIRA, as these milestones are in need of a sorting.

The scheduling game is currently live on my server at http://scheduling.ocharles.org.uk/. You can have a look at the current (anonymous) votes at http://scheduling.ocharles.org.uk/results. If you have any questions or comments, you can reach me in IRC as ocharles or email oliver@musicbrainz.org. Happy voting!

Server update 2011-11-21

A few days behind on this one, but we’ve got this release out. This release has one controversial change, which I want to discuss in this blog post.

Displaying Relationships on Release Pages

A lot of people want this, and we’ve shipped something that adds this functionality. However, a lot of people think this is too verbose, and to a point I agree – there’s a lot of information there that can be displayed better. However, work on this issue has been on and off for almost the past 2 years. We’ve got a solution here that while far from ideal will get this ball rolling.

This is an unpopular move on my half, but I’m asking users to please try and bear with us until the next release (scheduled in for 5th December), which is just over a week away. Hopefully having this fairly messy display so open will raise enough discussion on how exactly to move forward. If you really must see it gone, you can use AdBlock or user styles in your browser to hide the dl.ars element.

Changes in this Release

  • [MBS-2067] – CDStub not displayed in the "Matching CDs" section on CDTOC lookup page
  • [MBS-3668] – all edits including "Auto-edits" are being tallied as "Accepted" edits in editor profile
  • [MBS-3688] – Wrong coverart on all-zeros barcodes
  • [MBS-3718] – Inline search has problems with search terms with " (double quotes) and colons in them (and maybe others)
  • [MBS-3734] – Google indexes MusicBrainz search result (and some other) pages it shouldn’t
  • [MBS-3754] – Splitting an artist shouldn’t be an auto-edit
  • [MBS-3755] – Importing from FreeDB puts the artist name in the wrong field
  • [MBS-3759] – Auto-editor election isn’t showing own vote (instead: private)
  • [MBS-3764] – Typo on artist merge page
  • [MBS-3768] – Error when editing URL into one that already exists
  • [MBS-3777] – Musicbrainz breaks https://secure.wikimedia.org link in edit notes
  • [MBS-3786] – Entities with tag count on top of tag view page is incorrect

Improvement

  • [MBS-2979] – Enable CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing)
  • [MBS-3105] – Country/Language/Script statistics should include a statistic for those with none set.
  • [MBS-3752] – Making edit note for "Add release" mandatory
  • [MBS-3767] – Distinguish between Discogs master and release URLs on release pages
  • [MBS-3778] – Separate release group links from release links on release pages

New Feature

  • [MBS-496] – Display recording relationships on a release page
  • [MBS-3761] – Add songfacts to the sideboard

Server update 2011-11-14

It’s been a while, but we’ve finally got a new server release out! This one didn’t go perfectly smoothly, and we had (more, i’m afraid) troubles with the release editor. We’ve got a fix for this out, so editing should be at least as stable as it was before. As always, please do continue to report any bugs you find. Here’s what’s changed:

Bug

  • [MBS-761] – Release has ASIN but no cover art ("No cover image available.")
  • [MBS-1169] – Musicbrainz website is missing HTML escaping on user entered data
  • [MBS-2529] – Orphaned release group and recordings after rejecting or cancelling a release/medium
  • [MBS-2590] – Unused URLs not being removed
  • [MBS-2847] – Merging artists moves the comment from the old artist to the new one
  • [MBS-3102] – Changing release artists automatically changes all track artists
  • [MBS-3305] – Artist missing in edit medium edit
  • [MBS-3451] – Unterminated link on CD Stub page causes "Overview" and "Edit" tabs to display incorrectly
  • [MBS-3466] – otherlookup for non-existent MBID throws ISE
  • [MBS-3522] – Bad gateway errors in Add Missing Entities trying to add large VA releases without locking down artists
  • [MBS-3656] – Clicking text (Yes/No/Abstain/None) on the most recent open edit changes votes on all edits in that page.
  • [MBS-3657] – Medium order not allowed when merging releases
  • [MBS-3675] – Modbot failing edit relationship edits with "This relationship has already been deleted"
  • [MBS-3677] – Recording page doesn’t highlight releases with pending edits or show disambiguation comments
  • [MBS-3689] – Tagger button on tag lookup for recordings confusingly leads to "non-album tracks"
  • [MBS-3715] – Fix the wording for YouTube videos on the sidebar
  • [MBS-3719] – Format/display of recording search results is broken for standalone recordings
  • [MBS-3741] – Incorrect artist_credit.name

Improvement

  • [MBS-1766] – Display lyrics and score links in work sidebar (in the External link section)
  • [MBS-2478] – Pages for releases should also show ARs from the release group they are contained within.
  • [MBS-2942] – Warn users that FreeDB indexes are only updated monthly
  • [MBS-3192] – Display release group URLs also on release pages
  • [MBS-3495] – Make IMSLP links look like the Wikipedia ones
  • [MBS-3508] – Indicate if a release group contains only one release in release group
  • [MBS-3713] – Add JS autoselect for the SoundCloud relationships
  • [MBS-3714] – Add cleanup for YouTube video URLs
  • [MBS-3747] – Create script to split arranger relationships

New Feature

  • [MBS-71] – Add auto-editor elections

Task

  • [MBS-3697] – MusicBrainz needs to comply with new changes of Amazon Product Advertising API taking effect on October 25, 2011
  • [MBS-3710] – Tranclude "People" instead of "MusicBrainz_Bio"

Dear python-musicbrainz/0.7.3 application, we need to talk!

An application that uses our python-musicbrainz/0.7.3 client library has been putting undue load on our servers all at once. This application looks up something at MusicBrainz at 03:00UTC causing our servers to be overloaded at that time each day.

To protect our servers from being overloaded we’re going to block this application from 3:00 UTC – 4:00 UTC. We’re hoping that this will alllow us to identify the application and start a dialog with the application authors. Once we have established communication with the authors and worked up a plan to fix this, we’re going to release the block.

We really dislike blocking applications, but if applications are being inconsiderate of our resources, we’re left with few options. We hope to hear from the application authors soon so we can resolve this issue. Also, we’re moving forward with our plans to require User-Agent strings that properly identify applications using our service to fix this problem going forward.

If you are the author of said application, please leave a comment with information on how we can get in touch with you.