Sandbox upgrade and downtime: Tuesday, 24 November, 2015 @ 17:00 UTC

Tomorrow, Tuesday, 24 November, 2015 at 17:00 UTC, we will be bringing down rika, our sandbox server, to update the operating system. We expect this to take approximately two and a half hours, during which time rika will be updated to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. If you are running any services (such as a MusicBrainz sandbox) on rika, remember to back up your data (like the MOTD says!), and be aware that you will need to restart these services once the server is available. Thank you for understanding the brief inconvenience as we put shiny new things in place.

UPDATE: Unfortunately, something has gone wrong during the update process. rika is responding to pings, but no services have come up. We will do our best to resolve this quickly, but there is currently no ETA.

Server update, 2015-11-16

Today we’ve released several changes decided at the recent MusicBrainz Summit:

  • German, French, and Dutch translations are now usable on the main server, via the language menu at the top right of any page. Previously these were only accessible on the beta server. Don’t forget to help contribute on Transifex if you find any issues in the translations. You can also help translate some of the less-complete languages over there.
  • “Add relationship” edits have been made auto-edits for everyone. By a recent calculation, only 0.78% of these have been canceled or voted down, yet they make up a large percentage of our open edits and are easy to remove.
  • “Add release” edits have been made auto-edits for everyone. Since releases added to MusicBrainz are available immediately through the website and web services, there’s no telling where the MBIDs are being used. Permanent and reliable IDs are a core tenet of MusicBrainz, so duplicate releases should always be merged to avoid MBID loss, not voted down or deleted. I’ll be looking at ways to better detect duplicates during the add-release process, though.
  • “Add release label” and “Remove release label” edits have been made auto-edits for everyone. Like the previous two edit types, release label additions are among the most common types of open edits, and are rarely canceled or voted down. Release label removals are also easy to revert because all of the removed data is contained in the edit.
  • UPDATE 2015-12-03: It was neglected to mention here that “Edit release label” edits were also made auto-edits, since they are equivalent to a removal plus an addition. For statistics, see the comments at MBS-8666.

In addition to the above changes, Roman Tsukanov has added some new reports, and we’ve fixed a few editing bugs.

The git tag today is v-2015-11-16 and the complete changelog is below.

Bug

      • [MBS-8607] – JSON-LD has bugs
      • [MBS-8612] – 404 page has incorrect/outdated menus
      • [MBS-8614] – Release merges can fail if a recording is both a merge source and merge target
      • [MBS-8615] – Non-conflicting mediums appended after a release merge is entered block the merge
      • [MBS-8620] – Can’t add an example to an Artist-Series relationship
      • [MBS-8623] – Duplicate checker entity list lacks a space between name and disambiguation

Improvement

      • [MBS-2255] – Create a report to show stuff that’s linked to Various Artists, but may be an incorrect link
      • [MBS-6759] – Release German translation on the main server
      • [MBS-8616] – Add links back to transifex so people can help improve the translations

New Feature

      • [MBS-8489] – Report for all entity.disambiguation = entity.name

Task

    • [MBS-8387] – Make add release edits auto-edits for everyone
    • [MBS-8389] – Make add relationship edits auto-edits for everyone
    • [MBS-8596] – Make add release and add/remove release label edits autoedits

Server update, 2015-11-02

Today’s release fixes some editing bugs and adds a useful option to the edit search for finding edits by newbie editors (those who have a low accepted-edit count). The git tag is v-2015-11-02 and the changelog is below.

(This release is a day late because I’d been traveling back from the MB summit all day yesterday.)

Bug

  • [MBS-8580] – “Reorder mediums” edit is stuck after being left open and trying to move a medium into a position that already has one
  • [MBS-8590] – Can’t clear relationship credits

Improvement

  • [MBS-2677] – Filter by edit count of the editor (newbie search)
  • [MBS-8588] – Improve ContactUs page
  • [MBS-8611] – Refactor query_to_list into a role

Sub-task

  • [MBS-8610] – Convert 404 page to React

Server update, 2015-10-19

Today’s release fixes some bugs causing certain open edits to get stuck, and improves on our URL auto-selection code. Notably, URL shorteners are now detected and blocked from being entered.

The git tag is v-2015-10-19.

Bug

  • [MBS-8571] – Stuck edit: medium_positions does not account for all mediums in all releases
  • [MBS-8572] – Stuck edit: update or delete on table “recording” violates foreign key constraint “recording_alias_fk_recording” on table “recording_alias”
  • [MBS-8573] – “Edit artist” edit can be entered with a disambiguation comment containing only whitespace

Improvement

  • [MBS-6534] – URL autoselect LinkedIn → has a social networking page at
  • [MBS-7904] – Block URL shorterners

Task

  • [MBS-8244] – Add “social network” autoselect for foursquare

Server update, 2015-10-05

Besides the changes listed below, this release should mark the completion of the incremental sitemaps work required by Google. Practically, this means I’ll have more time to work on user-facing features from now on.

Thanks to Gentlecat and Zas for their work on today’s release. The git tag is v-2015-10-05.

Bug

  • [MBS-7828] – Seeding secondary types doesn’t work
  • [MBS-8553] – Internal server error when an automatic series reordering involves multiple of the same entity
  • [MBS-8561] – The entity type should be preselected when following an “Add to a new collection” link on an entities page

Improvement

  • [MBS-8554] – Cache area containments
  • [MBS-8560] – Add Google Play to the sidebar

Updated libcoverart-1.0.0.tar.gz

It was brought to my attention that the tarball for the libcoverart 1.0.0 release wasn’t built correctly, and contained files within a confusingly named subdirectory.

I’ve rebuilt the tarball, and made it available via GitHub as usual. Please note that as a result of this, the MD5 checksum of the tarball has changed. The file content of the archive is, however, unchanged.

The new tarball is available here: libcoverart-1.0.0.tar.gz (MD5 checksum: 856d83a4e57a2325c168eb979b9c00d8)

The MusicBrainz documentation page for the library was also updated to reflect this.

Laurent Monin joins the team as a part-time sysadmin

For the first time in a number of years we have a person responsible for system administration! Over the past few years we’ve been trying to spread the duties to maintain our servers among our developers. This only worked so well and the duties are piling up and not being attended to.

With the introduction of our new MetaBrainz site in May, we finally have an increasing revenue stream, which allows us to finally hire a paid sysadmin. Hopefully we can work on our back log of tasks now.

Laurent Monin (aka Zas) is no stranger to our project — he has been hacking on Picard for a number of years and he attended last year’s summit in Copenhagen. I’m quite happy to have found a community member and long-standing contributor to take on this task.

Some of the first tasks that Laurent will take on are from direct feedback from our blog series about community improvements. We’re hoping to consolidate our mailing lists and forums into a Discourse instance and then provide single sign on for Discourse, our Wiki and Jira. Stuff we’ve talked about for years, but never have made any progress on.

I’m quite excited to have Zas on board! Welcome!

Server update, 2015-09-21

We just have a small release today, so I’ll let the changelog speak for itself. I’m currently focused on finishing implementing the hourly sitemaps required by Google (to indicate when our embedded JSON-LD markup last changed), and Roman Tsukanov is continuing to familiarize himself with our huge codebase. So, development in other areas will pick up in time. 🙂

The git tag for today’s release is v-2015-09-21.

Bug

  • [MBS-8370] – « Format: Medium » is shown instead of, for instance, « Format: CD »
  • [MBS-8534] – Label-only release label edits no longer display the catalog number

Improvement

  • [MBS-8523] – For Places, rename “founded” and “defunct” to “opened” and “closed”

IRC channel switcheroo

If you’re like me, you may have noticed a sudden drop in activity in #musicbrainz-devel (if you’re not like me, you may still have noticed it). This is not because we all suddenly dropped off the face of the earth (not all of us anyway), nay, we simply decided to move to #metabrainz!

#musicbrainz-devel was registered on Freenode on February 16th, 2009. That’s almost 6 years and 7 months ago! However, over the last months, it has been as much (if not more!) about AcousticBrainz, CritiqueBrainz, and two brand new members of the Brainz family (stay tuned for more news on these!) as it has been about MusicBrainz. The channel has also been home to a lot of non-MusicBrainz specific MetaBrainz talk, e.g., talk about my hire, Roman’s hire, upcoming hires (stay tuned for news on this as well!), server administration, finances, … – you get the picture. In light of this we decided to rename #musicbrainz-devel to #metabrainz, and also merge the more quiet channels of #bookbrainz and #bookbrainz-devel into this new channel.

So thank you to #musicbrainz-devel for your proud service over the years, and welcome to #metabrainz, I hope you do us just as much credit as your predecessor did! I hope to see a lot of you in #metabrainz over the next few days, to join in the celebrations with a nice virtual cup of tea or other beverage of your choice.

Sincerely,
Freso, your friendly neighbourhood community manager <3

Server update, 2015-09-07

The 2015-09-07 server update is released today (a day late). Late because I wanted to investigate a fix for cover art uploading, which many people have reported issues with lately. Notwithstanding troubles at the Internet Archive, the server should hopefully give less errors now when uploading.

The other changes deal with edit-system bugs and URL cleanup enhancements.

Thanks to Gentlecat and reosarevok for their work on today’s release. The git tag is v-2015-09-07 and the changelog is below.

Bug

  • [MBS-8531] – Delete release label edits with no label fail to display
  • [MBS-8532] – Can’t edit a release label to add a label
  • [MBS-8533] – Catalog number-only release label edits no longer show in a MB Label’s edits
  • [MBS-8543] – Error uploading image: MalformedPOSTRequest

Improvement

  • [MBS-8124] – Recognise and clean up Loudr.fm URLs
  • [MBS-8182] – Improve Deezer URL cleanup