A click plea
I know LibraryThing has been slow. I am working to get it working faster.
I have the following plea. If LibraryThing does not respond quickly, please do not click "refresh" trying to get it to speed up. This never works and has been behind the recent downtimes. Things are going smoothly, the database server gets a little behind, and people start hitting refresh until the server is so behind it crashes.
Thank you for your patience as I work to scale LibraryThing to satisfy its current popularity.
I have the following plea. If LibraryThing does not respond quickly, please do not click "refresh" trying to get it to speed up. This never works and has been behind the recent downtimes. Things are going smoothly, the database server gets a little behind, and people start hitting refresh until the server is so behind it crashes.
Thank you for your patience as I work to scale LibraryThing to satisfy its current popularity.
posted by Tim at 3:33 PM
6 Comments:
Dear Tim,
Here I am again. Last night when I was typing I was very tired. I can today think of two examples of the kinds of trouble beyond the first word in the title when you search not taking into account "A" and "The."
Accents. It seems the search engine is accent sensitive. This is bad. Often I can't remember the spelling of an author's name, much less whether it has accents. Or I manually put in a book and forgot or goofed the accents. When you fix the search function, it should not be accent or lower case/upper case sensitive.
I just typed in John LeCarre. I know I have 6 novels by him. When I just typed in LeCarre, the library thing told me I had no books by him. When I typed in John LeCarre, I got 500 books with authors whose first name is John. I do better to go over to a shelf and try to find what books I have.
I noticed one person suggested that you should try to makes the comments part of what is searchable. Yes. I often put in the comment something that triggers my memory. Like red folder; or I put in the comment an essay in said folder which is not in the title or author column but is what I am looking for.
I notice you can't put two things together. Suppose I remember I have a book in xerox form in a red folder and it's by say Walixes but I can't remember the title or Walixes' first name. It would be useful if I could type in Walixes and red folder.
Bear in mind as I wrote last night I am woefully ignorant of how hard it is to make software and what's involved.
I have now understood the problem of disambiguation -- which I would not have understood at all until I came onto library thing.
I hope I don't seem to be officious or requiring something superfluous no one else would want. You did say in your blog yesterday that you would like to get this sort of feedback.
I can't always remember what happened when I did a search and was frustrated. So I wrote this down as I was just frustrated and can remember what goes wrong.
Chava -- the name has an "h"
misskate06:
To sort your entries click the column header. To sort them in reverse click it again. You can sort by any field show. To show other fields—Deweys, for example—click "change fields."
At present, you only get Deweys if you drew the books from the library. This will change soon.
"At present, you only get Deweys if you drew the books from the library. This will change soon."
Oh man, that'll be amazing...if I wasn't living in an apartment in NYC with 1/2 my books in virginia I'd be forced to sort them.
Fixing all things relating to accents is on top of my wishlist, too. You can't search for them, and LT won't recognize the possibility that for example LeCarré and LeCarre are the same author, thus forever separating the people that use correctly accented spelling from the majority that don't.
Just to let chava know that he or she is not alone in putting a flexible search system high on their list of 'wishes' for LibraryThing. I've been holding off entering many books until I know that I can easily find and list those with a certain tag combination in my catalogue. The recently improved search is certainly a help (thanks Tim) but two problems I have had in using it are the fact that the catalogue search page seems to default to searching the title rather than tags and then when I repeat the search, this time remembering to click on the tags button, I often find I have forgotten to go back to 'all books' so once again get a no titles found result! Some way of selecting what field or fields or all fields to search on plus an option to select your complete catalogue or previous search results from within the search box would be great.
I do realise that Tim has lots of us all voicing our various 'wants' - it must sometimes feel like he's in front of a group of noisy children trying to get attention - so this is basically a vote for development of the search and tagging features to take priority over any new 'social' features (interesting and enjoyable as they are).
You might consider posting this on the main librarything page rather than just in the blog. More people would be inclined to see it there and it might head off more of the problems your having.
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