BookBrainz – MetaBrainz Blog

X-odus: Find our projects on Bluesky and Mastodon

We have now completely moved off X (the platform formerly known as Twitter). It has been a long time coming, with rampant enshittification, uncertainty around platform changes, and content that has been increasingly unpleasant to interact with. Politics aside, we’re sick of going to check notifications and getting blasted with a feed largely consisting of violence, porn, advertising, the owner, and AI grifters*.

Instead, come join MetaBrainz, MusicBrainz, ListenBrainz and BookBrainz on Bluesky and/or Mastodon!

ChatBrainz: IRC, Matrix & Discord

Have you ever joined the MetaBrainz chat? Team and community members have been getting up to mischief (and, occasionally, work) using IRC since 2003 and earlier – with the logs to prove it. Today, over twenty years later, we say ‘oh hi’ to ChatBrainz.

With the launch of ChatBrainz we have officially moved to Matrix! Matrix has ease of access and some modern conveniences that make access to chat possible for more contributors and users. Not a fan of the change? Not a problem – ChatBrainz also has IRC and Discord bridges, that allow cross-platform chat with the three main Matrix rooms/channels.

Click here to get chatting!

GSoC 2023: Reviving the BookBrainz importer project

Hi, I am David Kellner (aka kellnerd), an electrical engineering student from Germany, who has finally found the time to participate in Summer of Code after four years of contributing data, bug reports and a bit of code to MetaBrainz projects (mostly to MusicBrainz and related tools such as userscripts).

Although I had mostly worked with MusicBrainz so far, I decided to apply for the BookBrainz importer project as I was already familiar with the underlying JavaScript technology and saw the huge potential of the idea to transform and import external datasets into the cleverly designed BookBrainz database schema. My proposed project was accepted by the MetaBrainz team and I have been working on it for the last six months under the mentorship of monkey.

This post gives an overview about my GSoC project and the challenges which I encountered during this summer.

Style Guideline Updates

If you’ve been lurking on our forums, you will know that our style guidelines have been receiving lots of attention lately! Both MusicBrainz docs and BookBrainz docs have been getting new additions and updates, and there’s still plenty being discussed. As I type these very words, there are greased-up editors in what’s known to us only as “the pit” – pitting their words, experience, and muscular bodies against each other in a bid for dominance over typographical punctuation.

Okay, okay, so there’s not really a pit, but here’s a rundown of some of the style discussions that are taking place, or have taken place, this year:

MetaBrainz team changes, autumn 2018

Hello!

The only constant in the world is change, right?

First off, the somewhat sad news: Sambhav, AKA samj1912, has left MetaBrainz the team as a contractor and has moved to London. The upside of this news is that he will continue to work on Picard for us and will remain a part of our team as a volunteer, but his presence will not be quite as intense as before. Thank you for your hard work these past months, especially for finishing the impossible Solr search project!

With Sambhav’s departure and our improved finances, I’m proud to announce that we’re taking on two new contractors!

Nicolas Pelletier AKA Monkey: You may remember the talented Monkey from when we designed our new logos. He was the designer who created the logos and our new bootstrap theme that adorns most of our pages now. Working with Monkey was straightforward, effective and the results were great, so when he expressed interest in working on BookBrainz, I was pleased to hear this news. Monkey will be working for us full time and spending 75% of his time on BookBrainz and 25% of his time to help with design and UX work for the rest of our projects. In the next blog post I’ll talk more about BookBrainz and what we can expect from that project in the future.

Nicolás Tamargo AKA Reosarevok: Reosarevok is no stranger to our community — he’s made 1.7M edits to MusicBrainz, is our Style BDFL and answers all of our support@ emails. He’s been learning more programming and asked to be part of the MusicBrainz team part time. We agreed to give this a go and in the short term he will be focusing on genre support and helping with the React migration among other tasks. If this trial run works out, we’ll see about expanding his scope on our team.

Welcome on board Monkey and good luck with the new position, Reo!