Category: Community

Possible date change for our summit: 9-11 November 2012

I’ve just found out that the Music Hack Day London conflicts with our summit in Barcelona. 🙁 Given that a few people from MusicBrainz wanted to attend that Hack Day, we’re considering the possibility of changing our summit date to 9-11 November.

I’ve already contacted all of the people who signed up as potential attendees, but I wanted to throw this suggestion out to all of you who might consider going.

If you have a problem with the new date, please post a comment. If we dont get any significant conflicts, we may change the date.

Thanks!

Wiki updated!

As we mentioned yesterday, the wiki was read-only for a period today as we performed some much-needed upgrades. The new wiki is now live on http://wiki.musicbrainz.org and testing is encouraged to make sure we didn’t miss anything! It isn’t available as of this writing because a DNS change is required, but the old wiki will remain available at http://oldwiki.musicbrainz.org for some period of time, in a read-only state.

The new wiki has a few changes:

  1. You’ll see that the style has changed; instead of maintaining our own complete MediaWiki skin, we’re now just doing some modifications on top of the provided monobook skin.
  2. Login is now required to edit pages, partly as a spam-mitigation measure and partly because people were often editing without logging in, which made it hard to track down who exactly changed a page.
  3. The MediaWiki API should now be accessible, from http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/api.php.
  4. Finally, A few extensions have shuffled around and been updated as well; the full details are available on http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Special:Version.

If you find mistakes in our setup, please contact me: ‘ianmcorvidae’ on the MusicBrainz site and on IRC, and @musicbrainz.org via email; or, file a ticket on http://tickets.musicbrainz.org (under MusicBrainz Hosting, assign to “Ian McEwen”).

Wiki read-only period tomorrow, September 7

Our wiki’s been needing an upgrade for some time, and we’re ready to make the switchover. However, as you may imagine, upgrading from MediaWiki 1.11.2 to 1.19.2 isn’t a trifling matter (though kudos to the MediaWiki team for it even being possible in one step!), so we’ll need a few hours to run upgrade scripts and migrate servers (though we’ve worked to make it as quick as possible). The wiki will be available during this time, but will be read-only until the switchover is complete.

The read-only window for the upgrade will start at 15:30 PDT/MST, or 22:30 UTC. The wiki will be back, shiny and new, sometime 1.5-3 hours later, presuming everything goes according to plan.

Thanks for your understanding, and hopefully you’ll agree the new wiki is much improved!

MusicBrainz Summit 12: Barcelona Spain, 16-18 November, 2012

We’ve just finalized the dates and location for the 12th MusicBrainz summit. This year we’re going to meet in Barcelona, Spain on the weekend of 16-18 November. Our friends at the Comp Music project at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra will be hosting us during the day and we will likely rent an apartment for most of us to sleep at. It is still a bit early to make travel plans (plane tickets will get cheaper in late september), but in the meantime, please add yourself to our summit page if you’re interested in attending.

UPDATE: The summit is the previous weekend, November 9 to 11.

Reminder: MusicBrainz hack weekend starts this Friday!

I wanted to remind everyone that we’re having our first online MusicBrainz hack weekend starting this Friday. If you’re interested in participating, please be in the #musicbrainz-devel channel on Freenode on Friday, 17 August, 1900 UTC. We’re going to have quick coordination meeting at that time and see who wants to work on what projects. Then we’re going to hack through the weekend and see how much fun stuff we can build for MusicBrainz.

For more information, pleasee see our wiki page and the original blog post.

Announcing the first MusicBrainz Hack Weekend

Hi everyone!

It’s with a lot of excitement that I can announce that the first MusicBrainz Worldwide/Remote Hack Weekend has been confirmed! We will spend from 2012-08-17 until 2012-08-19 getting as many people together as we can to hack on some fun new features for MusicBrainz, or use MusicBrainz data in interesting ways.

You can find all the details including proposed ideas at:

http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Hack_Weekend

When

The first official MusicBrainz hack weekend will take place between 2012-08-17 and 2012-08-19.

Where

The main event will be taking place in the #musicbrainz-devel IRC channel on irc.freenode.org. We also encourage local people to get together and work on things in person if possible. If you’re interested in that, check the wiki page for information about people who are local to you.

Who

Everyone! The hack weekend is not just for programmers, we’ll be sure to need testers, people to help brainstorm, people to help with documentation and writing, people to help with HTML, and inevitably more on the day.

Ideas

We’ve already got a few ideas on the wiki page, but the more the merrier! Even if you don’t think you can make the hack weekend, put your ideas down and maybe someone will pick them up.

I’m really looking forward to this, and I hope you’ll join us!

Please Help Us Sanity Check More Removals

ocharles has just finished work on MBS-2547 which will result in empty labels and empty release groups also being deleted as part of our daily clean up jobs, just like empty artists are currently deleted. As we’ve never cleaned up empty labels or release groups in the past, there is quite a bit of data that will be deleted in the first run. Before we run this, we would like to share it with the community in case any of this data is important.

The cleanup algorithm is mostly the same as it is for artists. Labels and release groups will only be deleted if:

  • They have existed for more than 24 hours
  • They have no open edits, or open edits that show up in their edit history
  • They have no relationships
  • They have no releases

Here are the lists of labels and release groups that would be removed, if we were to run the script right now:

If you do not want a label or release group to be deleted, please add relationships, as you would with artists or works.

Our forums are back!

Our forums were compromised a while ago and we had to undergo massive yak shaving in order to set up a new home for our forums. Hosting many different types of software on one server makes that server hard to administer — we felt that the proper solution was to create a Virtual server host and give each type of software a new Linux instance to live in. We started with the forums, but we’re going to be moving a lot more stuff over to this virtual host in the coming weeks/months. Hopefully we can update our blog and our wiki in this process.

In any case, the forums are back online and running with the old posts, but the latest version of PunBB. In the move we lost our customized MusicBrainz theme for PunBB — if someone feels strongly about having the theme, please take a look at the PunBB docs and create a new theme. I’ll be glad to install that new theme on our server.

Thanks and sorry the forums were offline for so long!