Month: December 2015

Server update, 2015-12-28

A new feature in today’s release is a list of recent notes left on your edits (accessible from the menu in the upper-right corner of the page: “My Data” -> “Notes Left on My Edits”).

Users will be notified in a banner message whenever they receive a new edit note, and be linked to that page. Hopefully this will improve communication with people who aren’t seeing their emails.

We also have a number of bug fixes/improvements from Ulrich Klauer and several Google Code-In students: Caroline Gschwend, Ohm Patel, and Stanisław Szcześniak. Thanks for all your work!

The git tag is v-2015-12-28 and the changelog is below.

Bug

  • [MBS-7572] – Edit work alias is not showing the sort name loss
  • [MBS-7873] – Edit search for editor causes editor name to be listed twice in recent items
  • [MBS-7882] – Strange empty parens after alias name on edits
  • [MBS-7907] – Warning about pending edits on a relationship is missing
  • [MBS-8051] – Editor field in the edit search does not behave correctly
  • [MBS-8167] – Display error for instruments in member rels on edits
  • [MBS-8241] – Mediums with pending edits not highlighted in release display
  • [MBS-8381] – Some symbols are double-encoded in inline search
  • [MBS-8414] – Ended flag is not correctly handled in edits
  • [MBS-8635] – Untranslatable strings
  • [MBS-8690] – “Add artist” edit can’t be rejected if the artist has subscriptions
  • [MBS-8691] – “Edits for subscribed editors” page timing out
  • [MBS-8702] – Page title shows “"”
  • [MBS-8705] – HTML code shown in edit summary

Improvement

  • [MBS-4565] – Search for Edits by editor notes.
  • [MBS-7070] – Missing icon (small version) for area, place and work
  • [MBS-8482] – “Add Disc” button in editor should be renamed to “Add Medium” or “Add Tracklist”
  • [MBS-8504] – Edits mandated by editing interface should be auto-edits
  • [MBS-8565] – Update the Discogs logo used in the sidebar
  • [MBS-8658] – Include tag name on user/tag/tagname pages
  • [MBS-8663] – Link to user’s profile in report emails
  • [MBS-8665] – Automatically add a space after ; in join phrases

New Feature

  • [MBS-8676] – Add a page to see all notes left on your own edits

Task

  • [MBS-8574] – Update the Google+ logo used in the sidebar
  • [MBS-8657] – Update the flag of Libya
  • [MBS-8672] – Update the flag of Lesotho
  • [MBS-8673] – Update the flag of Myanmar

Server update, 2015-12-14

  • The edit listings for your subscribed entities (and subscribed editors) now shows all edits entered within the past 7 days, by default (so, auto-edits are now visible, plus edits that may have passed by vote before you saw them). There’s a new toggle-able option on the page to only display open edits, to restore the previous behavior while voting. We’ll hopefully introduce some way to mark closed edits as reviewed/dismissed soon, to make the listings easier to digest.
  • Edit histories for large collections should hopefully load a bit faster now. Please comment on MBS-8368 if you have a collection that still consistently times out when viewing its edit history.

We’ve also made a slight change to our release process. Previously, our master branch was our “stable” branch which pointed to the most recent release (i.e., the code we run on musicbrainz.org itself). If this is what you expect, you should now be using the production branch instead. The master branch has become our main development branch, which means it may be slightly less stable from now on (of course, we’ll do our best to avoid that).

Thanks to Ulrich Klauer (chirlu) for his contributions to today’s release.

The git tag is v-2015-12-14 and the complete changelog is below.

Bug

  • [MBS-7012] – Join phrase cleanup not running
  • [MBS-8145] – Internal server error loading collection edits
  • [MBS-8368] – Edit queries for large collections time out
  • [MBS-8647] – “Edits for subscribed entites” doesn’t show auto-edits
  • [MBS-8660] – Editors can’t delete their location
  • [MBS-8661] – Adding and editing non-ended areas is broken

New Feature

  • [MBS-8664] – Show “last login/active date” somewhere on /user/ for account administrators

New business relations guru: Christina Smith

I am pleased to announce that I’ve just hired our first person responsible for looking after the day-to-day business operations of MetaBrainz! Christina Smith, a Canadian who also lives in Barcelona, has signed on as our part-time Business Development Guru (/Manager/Troublemaker/What have you).

This marks a significant step forward for us in a number of ways. First, it acknowledges that we have grown enough to warrant such a position. Second, Christina will improve how we communicate with customers and how much revenue we bring into the foundation. In the last two years we’ve added several new projects, but haven’t been able to hire new engineers to work on these projects, so hopefully having Christina will allow us to grow to support our new projects as well.

Christina’s responsibilities can be summarized as:

  • manage relationships with our supporters
  • provide timely, friendly and helpful answers and solutions for our supporters
  • increase revenues by connecting and building relationships with current and potential supporters
  • general accounting tasks including invoicing and payment tracking
  • periodic research, recommendations and help to address evolving business needs. (e.g. research the implementation of a company presence in Europe, including help in setting up a new headquarter in Barcelona)
  • research and suggestions on law and policy issues related to the business

I am super excited that Christina will be working with us — this removes a pile of tasks off my plate, which should allow me to focus more on running the foundation and managing our teams.

For the remainder of December, Christina will work on research tasks on how we can establish a better base in the EU. Then in January she will properly join the team and be present in our IRC meetings.

Welcome on board, Christina!

New search server build deployed

Today we’ve deployed a new build of the search server code. As you may know, we’ve been having loads of issues with our search servers recently.

In an effort to figure out what causes the bizarre behaviour we’ve observed, we compiled a new version of the codebase with a more recent version of Lucene. In theory this makes no feature changes to the codebase, but you never know if that is actually the case.

We hope that this build will be more stable, but we’ll need to observe over the next few days to see if that will be the case. If you spot any problems, please report them in our SEARCH bug tracker.

Thanks!