Help for orphaned covers and maybe tags
Crash update. Thank you again for all the support you've given LibraryThing. I do appreciate it. I am still working through the hundreds of blog posts, profile comments and personal emails I received. Thank you for your patience.
Cover orphanage. Users who lost books also lost cover images. But the cover images were not lost, they were just "orphaned"—stranded without a "parent" book or user. Between Feb. 2 and 7 some 1,100 covers were added, many of which are now orphaned.
I have created a page showing these orphans. The page is at http://www.librarything.com/coverorphanage.php . The page shows the covers in reverse chronological order. If you added covers one after another, your books are probably clumped together on the page. If you lost 2 covers, I wouldn't bother. If you lost 50, you might find this useful.
To use one of the covers, right-click (or option-click, depending on your OS and browser) to get the image's URL. You can copy the URL into the "change cover image" page.
Help for orphaned tags? As some users have pointed out, tag edits made on the crash days are there but "invisible." Basically, this means that the tags are not printed in the catalog, but if you click on a tag, like "cooking," it will still list all the books once tagged cooking. Some users have used this feature to power edit their tags back in.
Yes, I could redo the visible tags based on these "invisible" tags. The trick is this: The "invisible tags" have no guaranteed order and they have no date. So, if I did this everyone's tags would lose their prefered order, even if they were tagged long ago.
I need to remove this inconsistency, either deleting all the invisible tags or making them visible, order be damned.
Some possible solutions:
Cover orphanage. Users who lost books also lost cover images. But the cover images were not lost, they were just "orphaned"—stranded without a "parent" book or user. Between Feb. 2 and 7 some 1,100 covers were added, many of which are now orphaned.
I have created a page showing these orphans. The page is at http://www.librarything.com/coverorphanage.php . The page shows the covers in reverse chronological order. If you added covers one after another, your books are probably clumped together on the page. If you lost 2 covers, I wouldn't bother. If you lost 50, you might find this useful.
To use one of the covers, right-click (or option-click, depending on your OS and browser) to get the image's URL. You can copy the URL into the "change cover image" page.
Help for orphaned tags? As some users have pointed out, tag edits made on the crash days are there but "invisible." Basically, this means that the tags are not printed in the catalog, but if you click on a tag, like "cooking," it will still list all the books once tagged cooking. Some users have used this feature to power edit their tags back in.
Yes, I could redo the visible tags based on these "invisible" tags. The trick is this: The "invisible tags" have no guaranteed order and they have no date. So, if I did this everyone's tags would lose their prefered order, even if they were tagged long ago.
I need to remove this inconsistency, either deleting all the invisible tags or making them visible, order be damned.
Some possible solutions:
- Delete all invisible tags after a week. Before then, enterprising users can play with power editing the tags back.
- Add a special field that shows the invisible tags, allowing users to edit them back into the visible tags.
- Allow users to choose to replace all their official tags with the invisible ones en masse. Users who did this would understand that their tag order might not be preserved. Perhaps I could force an alphabetic order, something some users prefer anyway. (Other users are vehement against that.)
posted by Tim at 1:30 AM
13 Comments:
Not Found
The requested URL /coverorphanage.php was not found on this server.
:-)
They were on a field-trip.
Add a special field that shows the invisible tags, allowing users to edit them back into the visible tags.
I like this option best, but can live with any of them.
By the way, I love the gallery... found two of my cover scans there, too (Tetsubin and Japanese Teapots). But best of all was the last "cover"... brought a big smile to my face :-)
Cool beans. Got all 67, sorted the list, loaded it into a browser and printed out a "contact" sheet so I know which number is associated with which cover.
Yay!
(It was really really hard not to get engrossed in other people's covers, though -- Maybe I should do a screen capture and make Windows wallpaper. :-D )
Another vote for "Add a special field"
I hadn't lost any covers (so far as I knew), but decided to check out that page just to see the art. And, lo and behold! the very first cover was one of mine. It must have wandered off without my noticing, and then wandered home again, because it's back without my having done anything.
Great page, I must say. I enjoyed browsing all that art.
The Cover page is cool. I found several of mine, but they were saved on my machine anyway. I also found at least one that I needed. Very cool!
I agree with those who've suggested "add a special field" so we can see the orphaned tags. If it isn't too much trouble, of course.
That cover page is fantastic. I mean, for the people who didn't lose any ;)
Could we maybe have a permanent "Last 50 covers" or "50 random covers" page, with links back to the books? The weird and delightful randomness of that catalogue could be a wonderful way to browse.
I agree with felius. The covers page was lots of fun. You really should make some sort of wall-to-wall covers page - random, top, newest, whatever!
Trying to recover a cover and this is what I get:
Warning: fopen(http://www.librarything.com/covers/655335-m.jpg) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: Operation timed out in /storage/www/librarything.com/data/addcover_upload.php on line 80
Warning: getimagesize() [function.getimagesize]: Read error! in /storage/www/librarything.com/data/addcover_upload.php on line 130
Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /storage/www/librarything.com/data/addcover_upload.php:80) in /storage/www/librarything.com/data/addcover_upload.php on line 147
I've found that for items where a cover had been dropped from my entry, if I clicked on the "social data" to look at all of the book information, the cover would still be there and I could easily retrieve it. So instead of trying to troll through that orphan cover page(very groovy covers, btw, I agree that we would enjoy some kind of cover stat montage thingy!)I'm just as quickly picking through the "social data" or "about the book" link of each of my titles that don't have covers, and I'm even finding ones that I didn't have in the first place.
Am I remembering correctly that there was going to be the feature of potential multiple user's book covers for each title? If that feature is currenly in place, then I'm to thumbsy to find it -- any leads?
Interesting . . . I tried patruska's method of finding covers. If you are on the social data page and try to edit the book data, sometimes you can (your own boook data), sometimes you can't (you can't edit other people's data). I suppose it has to do with the order of the listing of LT users who have the book in their collection. What determines that order? Incidently, I have not been able to find any missing covers that way, but I haven't tried on very many titles yet.
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