What I'm Doing Right Now
Busy - Tweaking the LyricWiki Android app and LyricWiki iPhone app

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Contents 1 Bug List 1.1 Open 1.2 Pending 2 API 2.1 REST fmt=text vs. songs with colons 2.2 Case-sensitive searching for Foreign Chars 2.3 Problems with Chinese characters 3 Uberbot Stuff 4 SpecialPages 4.1 Wikify 4.2 Orphaned pages 5 Extensions 5.1 Category Intersection 6 Not Categorized Yet 6.1 Implied redirects 6.2 REST JSON API request 6.3 About increasing frustration 6.4 Mainpage meta-tags (keywords) 6.5 Minor problem for when you need a break with the big stuff :-] 6.6 The Incredible Shrinking Cat 6.7 Song Of The Day 6.8 Limitaion of lyrics length in XML 6.9 The iPhone App 6.10 Complete discographies 6.11 Talk Page deleted 6.12 Too much entertainments... 6.13 Spam filter reporting 6.14 Just reminder... 6.15 Meeting in Chat 6.16 YouTube extension 6.17 The new Search option 6.18 Strange bug on Wikiamobile 6.19 Unresponsive script 6.20 Admin 6.21 Blue again

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Bug ListEdit

Keeping track of these all in one place so I can fix 'em. -Sean Colombo (talk|contribs)

Open Edit

1. User Merge Mayhem
2. RT #33093
   What links here is still broken. It was thought to be fixed, and it wasn't. More info on Senv's talk.
3. RT #33094
   Facebook Application doesn't render at all. -Sean Colombo 22:46, October 25, 2009 (UTC)
4. RT #25939
   Special:SendToAFriend doesn't work, and the button to use it isn't in the skin anymore. -Sean Colombo 20:07, October 31, 2009 (UTC)
5. RT #25863
   Both Special:LonelyPages and Special:DeadendPages look like they show ALL pages. (Though with bots currently out of action that's not a pressing matter… Might go away by itself anyway.) — 6×9 (Talk) 08:03, September 5, 2009 (UTC)

   Running a maintenance script that will fix this. Might take some time. --TOR 16:28, September 10, 2009 (UTC)

   Can you define "some time" please TOR, only this would still not appear to be resolved.  ♫_♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 07:53, September 15, 2009 (UTC)

   Again, can we have an update on this please TOR, only a month has almost passed and I would've thought the maintenance script had finished running by now...  ♫_♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 12:33, October 2, 2009 (UTC) Can you also amend the "Lyric Wiki" on the Special pages to be LyricWikiplease. Thanks.

   Checking on this again ... --KyleH (talk) 22:16, October 5, 2009 (UTC)

   We're running a maintenance script now to fix this issue. The script has to iterate through all of LyricWiki's 1.2 million pages (almost 10x more than any other single wiki we host), so it's going to take a while. I don't really have a specific time-frame for a while though. I'll keep you updated on the status. --KyleH (talk) 18:08, October 9, 2009 (UTC)

   This maintenance script has finished running; however it missed a few pages that were created or edited since we performed the import. TOR has a list of those pages and will be fixing them soon. --KyleH (talk) 18:09, October 13, 2009 (UTC)

   Seems that LonelyPages is sorted now, but Special:DeadendPages is still showing ALL pages.  ♫_♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 17:12, October 23, 2009 (UTC)

   No, it isn't showing all pages. And it can be fixed by making nulledits, I made some to some test-pages one hour or two hours before the cache was updated and the pages do not show up anymore now. I'll take care of it, because I do not touch pages as LWT does (which likely would work as well), but my AutoFix script actually does some work and that's even better than keeping the unwanted parts of a page ;) But maybe I'll ask Senv if he wants to write a bit for LWT that does the same work like my "AutoFix" script, including the opening and saving of pages. - Chris 11:17, December 31, 2009 (UTC)

   Status update: I made it to write a bunch of scripts that all together take care of Special:DeadendPages. Will need a certain amount of time, though, because I can only edit 1000 pages per day at the top. Or is there any way to either make the list longer than 1000 pages (which would be preferred) or change the cache refreshing-rate to higher than 1 times per day? - Chris 00:34, February 17, 2010 (UTC)

   Half a year later: Touchfix has done its work - S:DEP is empty except for the pages that really belong in there. - Chris 16:54, August 1, 2010 (UTC)

Pending Edit

For all non-urgent code changes, we branch on Mondays and deploy on Wednesdays (meaning that any code that was done by Monday will go live on Wednesday... any code that misses the cutoff will go live the next Wednesday). This section is to track changes that've been made but aren't live yet. So don't expect these to work until the Wednesday after they were put here :)

• Nothing in the queue at the moment.

API Edit

REST fmt=text vs. songs with colonsEdit

If a song name contains a colon, disaster ensues: the artist is stripped:

$ GET 'http://lyricwiki.org/api.php?artist=Pink_Floyd&fmt=text' | grep -v Pink
Sysyphus: Part 1...
The Grand Vizier's Garden Party: Part 1 (Entrance)...
The Wall: Music From The Film (1982)
1967: The First 3 Singles (1997)

Jidanni 05:10, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

Good catch. Still broken (months later). Filed a ticket:

RT #33102

-Sean Colombo 00:54, December 11, 2009 (UTC)

Case-sensitive searching for Foreign CharsEdit

It seems searching for songs with russian titles is case sensitive -- e.g. [1] works, but [2] doesn't. Can this be fixed? Elenril 08:14, December 12, 2009 (UTC)

Another thing I noticed: [3] (the same like your working but not xml) doesn't set up the correct urls in the headline, it does for the link below the lyrics. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by LWChris (talk • contribs), 17:16, 12 December 2009.

Problems with Chinese charactersEdit

It seems the API does not work when taking song/artist with Chinese characters. Any hints? --116.49.94.149 15:45, December 27, 2009 (UTC)

Uberbot Stuff Edit

SpecialPages Edit

Wikify Edit

Here's my ideas for improving Special:Wikify:

• Fixing the bug that turns Word's into Word'S. (looks like a regex search [^a-zA-Z][a-z] could be [^a-zA-Z'][a-z] to me :P)
• Adding the second parameter to the {{Album Art}} template (caption) so every caption for album art isn't the default {{PAGENAME}} on artist pages.

Cheers, ♫ LYRIC-Humbug ^words♪_deeds ☘ 14:46, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

In addition to the problems 6x9 and myself reported to you earlier about this, there is also another bug that has since become apparent to me whereby Wikify sometimes decides to capitalise letters.  ♫_♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 15:23, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

Just to check, are there more bugs that I've lost track of? All that I'm currently aware of are the bugs in this thread and the ones that were recently fixed.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 15:29, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

What I've noticed is that often (but not always) letters after apostrophes are capitalised. (Maybe that's what Red meant?) AFAIK it's only started doing so recently (probably introduced along with the capping-accented-letters fix). I haven't done any tests to see when they are capped and when not, though… — 6x9 (Talk) 15:49, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

Yes it's after an apostrophe. It is also inappropriately uncapping letters in the middle of words, e.g. McIver it makes Mciver in the link (but not in the second parameter).  ♫_♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 12:05, 8 February 2009 (UTC)

@Sean: Yes seems it's after all apostrophes. Any way you can fix this?

@6: I like Humbug's thinking on album art..  ♫_♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 04:37, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

Inappropriate capping of letters (like your example: "McIver" vs "Mciver") may look ugly, but that's the capping policy.--KaputteMenschen 15:52, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

Filing a ticket :( Does this mean I have to fix this now? *shivver* This one is one of those things that's way trickier than it looks (because of unicode characters).

Here goes:

RT #33106

-Sean Colombo 01:35, December 11, 2009 (UTC)

You may want to use the "PreCoder" of my "LyricWiki Suite" (LWS):

• News here at LyricWiki
• Homepage with download, screenshots, documentation and more

Chris 15:40, March 18, 2010 (UTC)

I've got two small suggestions for the very helpful Special:Wikify page. The tool makes a link to The Rainy Daze:Medley: Shake/knock On Wood/respect, but it should be at The Rainy Daze:Medley: Shake/Knock On Wood/Respect (which currently doesn't exist, so no worries about that). Also, the tool makes a link to Peter Tork:Mgb-Gt, but it should be at Peter Tork:MGB-GT (which also currently doesn't exist). twomeanings talk contribs 00:15, July 5, 2011 (UTC)

Orphaned pages Edit

I think I followed the thread up about Orphaned pages or Lonely pages not including pages which are ONLY redirected to, but I can't remember where that thread is :( Until I run into it again, I'll re-start it here. The solution I was thinking of is two Special pages:

• A list of all of the pages which are only linked to by redirects. That special page would have the weakness that some ACTUAL legitimate pages may link to those redirects which then link to these "hidden" lonely pages.
• A second page (done now :D) which shows all real articles which link to redirects. The idea is that we can go through this page with a bot (which I haven't written yet, hopefully someone else will? ^^ please) and fix those original pages to link to the destination. This way, the previous SpecialPage which links to hidden lonely pages will actually only include pages which aren't linked to directly. This special page is done... it caches 1,000 results at a time for 2 hours: Special:Linkstoredirects.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 00:34, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

The (most recent) discussion was on the Community Portal… until I archived it yesterday. Sorry. The first half is here and the rest a bit lower. (Was that an earthquake, or Echo and Senv jumping up and down in joy?) — 6x9 (Talk) 00:45, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, Sean; one note regarding Special:Linkstoredirects - don't you think it would be better to make items of this list unique?--Senvaikis ^(talk) 05:39, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

I think that all pairs are unique. Or did you mean make it so that everything in the left is unique or everything in the right is unique? If it's primarily going to be used by bots, as long as the pairs are unique it should be good. One interesting possible bug I noticed is that some of the links in the left column are red which makes me think that the pagelinks table has bad (old) data of links from pages that don't exist anymore.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 21:29, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Considering there's a "Backgammon" as well as several JPGs and PNGs in there… not to mention EchoSierra/Sandbox/1-3000 (while User:EchoSierra/Sandbox/1-3000 clearly exists)… I'd guess the left column strips the namespace off. — 6x9 (Talk) 21:55, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Awesome! Good catch :) -Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 22:31, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

I'd figured that was you :-) I GOT TO PATROL ONE OF SEAN'S EDITS! *hops up and down in glee* — 6x9 (Talk) 02:50, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

Finally got around to fixing those links. Still need to make that other special page. If anyone is feeling botty... this first page is a good candidate! Special:Linkstoredirects ^^ lol

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 01:31, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

Yay! teknomunk wrote the bot tonight to take care of the Special:Linkstoredirects.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 04:52, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

(OUTDENT) Summary of where this stands: we still need a SpecialPage which is a list of all of the pages which are only linked to by redirects. That special page would have the weakness that some ACTUAL legitimate pages may link to those redirects which then link to these "hidden" lonely pages. The fact that we have Special:Linkstoredirects (which can hopefully continue to be cleaned out by the community as well as bots) should make that weakness not matter much though.

-Sean Colombo 00:29, November 6, 2009 (UTC)

Ticket:

RT #33902

-Sean Colombo 19:09, December 16, 2009 (UTC)

Extensions Edit

Category IntersectionEdit

Hey there, I'm quite curious about the Special:CategoryIntersection. It seems not to be an extension enabled on request by wikia staff but a custom one by you. So could you tell me how I can use/enable this extension on another wiki? If it's a custom code, I'd love to get my hands on it and adapt it more for my use (of course with credits and such). Thanks in advantage! BFH-Wiki 11:08, March 24, 2012 (UTC)

Ah, should add that to the system if it's not in there. What wiki do you want to turn it on for?

Thanks,

-Sean Colombo 19:53, March 24, 2012 (UTC)

On this wiki, eventually with a third category textfield. Altering the url with &category_3/4/5=... works fine, too, so it's good enough for now ;)

Thanks again, BFH-Wiki 13:07, March 25, 2012 (UTC)

Added it so that it can be changed by Community Support and then set it so it will go live automatically for battlefieldheroes. The change should go live at the next release in 2 days (Wed, March 28th, 2012).

Glad you like the extension! :)

-Sean Colombo 21:10, March 26, 2012 (UTC)

Wow, that was faster and more expansive than expected. Wikia can count itself lucky to have staff members like you! Great work! BFH-Wiki 20:49, March 27, 2012 (UTC)

Not Categorized Yet Edit

Implied redirectsEdit

Looks like they don't like non-ascii characters – works as advertised with Prodigy, but not with Кино. See the lower half of this discussion. — 6×9 (Talk) 19:40, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Filed a ticket:

RT #33107

-Sean Colombo 01:42, December 11, 2009 (UTC)

Example: Кино:Дети проходных дворов / Кино:Дети Проходных Дворов should go to Кино (Kino):Дети Проходных Дворов -Sean Colombo 07:13, December 22, 2009 (UTC)

Wow, this one is rough. It seems PHP has a tough time decoding strings with %0 in them. None of the workarounds I found online seem to be working... but it can definitely be done because Кино (Kino):Дети Проходных Дворов works just fine. -Sean Colombo 06:40, December 23, 2009 (UTC)

More test-data: ギルガメッシュ redirects to Girugamesh so ギルガメッシュ:Break Down should redirect to Girugamesh:Break Down

-Sean Colombo 22:45, September 10, 2010 (UTC)

REST JSON API request Edit

Hi, could you provide an API in REST with JSON response that could list the albums per artist and the songs per album, for example:

• pseudo javascript*

getAlbumsbyArtist(artist) - the response would include the artist URL here on lyricwiki, his/her name and then the list of albums with respective URL and name

getSongsbyAlbum(album,artist) - the response would include the both artist and album URL here on lyricwiki, his/her name and then the list of songs with respective URL, name.

Thanks.

Best regards. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by 89.180.89.25 (talk), 11.50 29th May 2009 (UTC).

About increasing frustration Edit

The only thing I miss is a relieable source for the editcount, the parser hook #ec: doesn't exist anymore and Special:EditCount isn't the best thing... You cannot sum 2 results from it up by using #expr::

• {{#expr:{{Special:EditCount/Raygun Shaun}}+{{Special:EditCount/Dotmoo}}}} = Expression error: Unrecognised punctuation character ""
• {{Special:EditCount/Raygun Shaun}} = 125
• {{Special:EditCount/Dotmoo}} = 135
• {{#expr:33+121}} = 154

...last works as it should. - Chris 21:21, October 29, 2009 (UTC)

I was about to point out that #ec works, because {{Userboxes/EditCount}} works… until I saw that Überfuzzy had changed it… — 6×9 (Talk) 06:16, October 30, 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, this is where I've got that "Special:EditCount" thingy from. - Chris 09:04, October 30, 2009 (UTC)

Bit of a bummer really. I also found that {{SUBST:Special:EditCount/LYRIC-Humbug}} doesn't work because it can't be SUBST'd. ♫ LYRIC-Humbug ^words♪_deeds ☘ 10:52, November 1, 2009 (UTC)

Mainpage meta-tags (keywords) Edit

I think the keyowrds for the mainpage could be chosen a lot better than they are now. Current keywords:

lyrics,LyricWiki,lyricwiki,Main Page,Main Page/Header/en,Community Portal/Editor's Corner/en,Karhu,Karhu:Sinfonia For The Blunt Sword (2008),Main Page/de,Main Page/el,Main Page/es,Main Page/fi,Main Page/fr,Main Page/ja

Only the first two are sensible (afaik keywords are treated case-insensitive). Let me comment on the other ones:

1. Main Page
   • The first page displayed when visiting a general URL usually is the main page, why point that out?
   • Who would search for "Main Page"?
2. Main Page/Header/en
   • Why should the header be interesting?
   • Who would search for "Header" or "Header/en"?
3. Community Portal/Editor's Corner/en
   • The keywords are to represent your LyricWiki project, and the editor's corner is not what forms the page
4. Karhu
   • Why such an unknown artist as keyword?
   • Karhu is the exact opposite to a gold-artist (just red-links, only one album)
   • Karhu certainly is not the mainstream-search-term (Michael Jackson or the artists from the iTunes- or common charts would be)
5. Karhu:Sinfonia For The Blunt Sword (2008)
   • This album only contains redlink-songs and should NOT be the figurehead of LyricWiki
   • This album is from last year, so not the one people are currently searching for
6. Main Page/de, Main Page/el, Main Page/es, Main Page/fi, Main Page/fr & Main Page/ja
   • Who would search for that?

As keywords are used to categorize a page and therefore are important whether the site is displayed as a result for certain searches or not, sensible keywords would be:

lyric,lyrics,lyricwiki,music,song lyrics,artist,correct lyrics,actual lyrics,translation,translated lyrics,justin bieber,taylor swift,michael jackson,iyaz,rihanna,britney spears,lady gaga

The last 7 are to be updated every few weeks. What do you think, as member of LW:1? - Chris 21:14, November 7, 2009 (UTC)

I assume Karhu and their album somehow ended up in there because they're the Free Album of the Week… It might make more sense to use the iTunes Top Songs titles & artists for tags instead. — 6×9 (Talk) 21:37, November 7, 2009 (UTC)

Oh of course, I see. However you're right, either the tags are for popular searches or for general searchterms.

N. B.: The current tags brought LyricWiki to the 22^nd rank in the Google results for "karhu sinfonia for the blunt sword"; not bad, but who'd rather search for that than for "free music download" in general? - Chris 21:47, November 7, 2009 (UTC)

Fantastic points all around, guys :) Those are pretty horrible keywords. They're currently generated automatically by MediaWiki based on the links on the Main Page. There are really two issues here:

1. The Main Page could use some work in what it's linking to at all. I have some ideas and will be throwing up a proposed new design within (I hope) the next couple of days to get some feedback. I spent a lot of Friday talking to someone who has made successful Main Pages which brought other wikis a lot more traffic, a lot more user-friendliness and even some better search-engine-respect (don't worry, there' no shady link-exchange stuff required or anything like that).
2. If the meta-tags are still lame after the re-design, then I'll have to dig my hands into the code and fix that.

-Sean Colombo 00:11, November 8, 2009 (UTC)

Related is the ticket to redesign the Main Page:

RT #33907

-Sean Colombo 19:43, December 16, 2009 (UTC)

Minor problem for when you need a break with the big stuff :-]Edit

User-blog:LYRIC-Kiefer needs to be moved to User-blog:Kiefer. (Hrmmm. How does one link to their blog? I had to us the one-bracket method. Two-brackets were a red link.) I'd like to blog about a few music things, but I'd like to keep everything together. TOR said he was going to do it about a month ago, but I'm guessing it got lost in all the other projects.    Kiefer    talk    contribs    admin   21:40, November 12, 2009 (UTC)

Wow, my talk page is so ridiculous. Fortunately, LWChris is whipping me into shape ;) anyway... filed a FogBugz ticket for it

RT #28217

. Community or TOR will fix it if that's easy for them... if not, I asked them to bounce it back to me so I can do it manually in the database. Sorry for the 2.5 year delay :P (geeze)

-Sean Colombo 23:26, April 12, 2012 (UTC)

The Incredible Shrinking CatEdit

Category:Language/English is currently at 149,312 pages… I doubt the others are faring any better. And there's > 100 language cats in Special:UnusedCategories that shouldn't be. — 6×9 (Talk) 14:53, November 22, 2009 (UTC)

You do really wonder why there's no pages in "Albums released in ALBUMYEAR"? Well, some categories are obsolete since the new parser functions take care of them. By the way, is there any possibility to get rid of the fLetter thingy? Is there anything like a substring-function, that, combined with some if/else queries for "0-9" or "Symbol" could do the work for us, or is it too complex? - Chris 21:45, November 22, 2009 (UTC)

(149,498 now… growing back, but veeeeerrrrrryyyyyy slooooowwwwlllly.) I meant the language subcategories that show up in Unused even though most of them (if not all) aren't.

The fLetter thing could be automated, and it wouldn't be too complex either – but it would take a huuuuuge sorry for all the multiple vowels, Sean #switch, with cases for each Chinese, each Japanese and each Korean character, each symbol and each number. Sean mentioned the possibility of a dedicated fLetter parser function once, though (hint hint). — 6×9 (Talk) 05:05, November 23, 2009 (UTC)

May I give the hint, that if there's the possibility to cut out a single character there likely is another function to check whether a character is present in a certain string (usually anything like if String.IndexOf(Character)>0) which would result in 1 string and 1 [el]if-query for every language... ;)

In JavaScript it'd look a little bit like this:

var fLetter=pagename.substr(0,1);
var fLettersChinese="...", fLettersKorean="...", ..., fLettersNumber="0123456789";
if (fLettersChinese.indexOf(fLetter)>0) then fLetter="Chinese" else
if (fLettersKorean.indexOf(fLetter)>0) then fLetter="Korean" else
...
if (fLettersNumber.indexOf(fLetter)>0) then fLetter="0-9";

Chris 22:10, November 23, 2009 (UTC)

That's possible, but still rather expensive (not something you'd want to use on x*10^5 pages), and you'll need a complete list of "symbols" as well. In regex this could be done easily with ranges (or so I've been told), but installing the regex extension would be rather dangerous (or so I've been told). Dunno how the FLETTER magic words work, but if they could be translated into a parser function (with added CJK/acc.char. detection) that might be the cleanest (and least expensive) solution. — 6×9 (Talk) 18:11, November 24, 2009 (UTC)

Related to the ticket that all of the categories are messed up:

RT #25863

-Sean Colombo 19:52, December 16, 2009 (UTC)

Song Of The DayEdit

Glad to see Uber is up and running again :-)

Just wanted to ask whether it would be possible to reformat the {{Song Of The Day}} template back to the way I had it, by which I primarily mean remove the subject headings, i.e. "Reason:", "Video:", etc. from the main page. The reason I ask is because I think it looked much better being in same format as AOTW.  ♫_♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 06:08, December 26, 2009 (UTC)

Yup, that's do-able. Right now it doesn't look as good.. it's just this way for now since it involves just basically pasting the nomination in from the queue rather than trying to cut it up into parts and reshape it (which will have to be done... I just have to poke at it for a bit to get that to work).

Gooooood call,

-Sean Colombo 20:46, December 30, 2009 (UTC)

Limitaion of lyrics length in XML Edit

Hi!

The service is really nice - thank you.

One question that I have : why the the lyrics are limited if you request them through XML. For example if you go to

http://lyrics.wikia.com/api.php?artist=Slipknot&song=Before_I_Forget&fmt=xml

I get only this:

<LyricsResult>
<artist>Slipknot</artist>
<song>Before I Forget</song>
−
<lyrics>
Go!

Stapled shut - Inside an outside world and I'm
Sealed in tight - Bizarre but right at home
Claustrophobic - Closing in and I'm
Catastrophic - Not again
I'm smeared across the page - And doused in gasoline
I'll wear you like a stain - Yet I'm the one who[...]
</lyrics>
<url>http://lyrics.wikia.com/Slipknot:Before_I_Forget</url>
</LyricsResult>

Why is that [...]? Thank you in advance

Cheers, Alexey. --Larkyphoto 14:40, January 8, 2010 (UTC)

Hey Alexey,

I hope you don't mind if it isn't Sean who answers your question; I guess you're still used to the old API or didn't expect the API to show different results than the pages?

Well, there's been a time when API-requests threw out the whole lyrics. But as the biggest music publishers recently increased their effords to tighten copyright-enforcement, their new contracts with LyricWiki contained an agreement to disable the programmatic access to the lyric-database of LW. I think it was Sean who at least saved the ability to get these first few words through API.

So these lines are the rest of what formerly was a source for many lyric programs, unfortunately... Can't fight it, though. So this is the reason for the cut lyrics. - Chris 18:24, January 8, 2010 (UTC)

@Sean: Would it be possible to have the API add a short info message after the truncated lyrics? I'm sure Alexey isn't the only user who wondered about this… — 6×9 (Talk) 18:54, January 8, 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, I think we'll have to do something like that, we're still getting frequent questions about this. We originally had a message right in the response, but some users complained. Maybe I'll just add an additional field to the response which explains briefly and has a link to more info.

-Sean Colombo 18:51, March 15, 2010 (UTC)

The iPhone AppEdit

Wonder if I had the honor of being the first downloader?

I noticed that in Search mode, the autocomplete includes pages that have been redirected on the wiki -- for example, searching for Feist, the first listing is her artist page, but then the second listing is Feist:(500) Days Of Summer... (and if you click on that, you get an unformatted version of the album page for (500) Days Of Summer (2009)) and the third is Feist:1,2,3,4 (which has been redirected to Feist:1234).

Also, I'm not sure about the the gray-on-black on the lyrics pages, or the title/artist being in a serif font (you don't see a lot of serifs on the iPhone!). Trainman 00:48, July 16, 2011 (UTC)

Sorry for the huge delay in responding. I did make app updates based on this post, but didn't get time to reply.

Anywho: redirects showing up in type-ahead is by-design... that helps if you don't know the right name of a song (one of the best features of redirects). The really bad side-effect you mentioned (unformatted album pages) was fixed in an update... now albums and "list" pages (like the Grammy Awards) are formatted lists just like artist discography pages.

Chopping serifs is a good point though :-/

-Sean Colombo 23:38, April 12, 2012 (UTC)

Complete discographies Edit

Hello!

I've been doing quite a lot of editing lately, and just finished up The xx. I decided to add all the singles, because I believe they should be there as well, and was wondering if there was a policy on this? Should singles be added, or not?

Thanks -=KAG=-^{My Pride} 12:44, October 3, 2011 (UTC)

The short answer is, only if they contain songs not available on a regular album. Same goes for best-of compilations and live albums, unless they're notable (e.g. being multi-million sellers). There are sites dedicated to (and much better equipped for) providing complete discographies. We add discographies mainly so that song pages are easier to find, and that aim is best served if we keep them as short and to the point as possible. (That last bit's not policy though, just my opinion.)

This question has cropped up quite often, mostly on user talk pages. Maybe a new FAQ entry is due… — 6×9 (Talk) 14:25, October 3, 2011 (UTC)

When you say regular albums, do you mean including bonus discs released on deluxe edition in that definition?

-=KAG=-^{My Pride} 12:35, October 4, 2011 (UTC)

Yes – if the songs in question are included on a bonus disc (or as bonus tracks), and that bonus disc is listed on the artist page, then it's preferable not to list the single as well. — 6×9 (Talk) 17:49, October 4, 2011 (UTC)

All right, I'll remember that for the future. I've already added the singles for The xx, though, and the tracks on those singles can be found on the bonus disc of their only release, what should I do about them?

-=KAG=-^{My Pride} 22:03, October 4, 2011 (UTC)

Talk Page deletedEdit

Hello Sean Colombo,

my talk page has been deleted for no particular reason by someone unknown. Can you fix it please? (http://lyrics.wikia.com/index.php?title=User_talk:Zaibatsu&diff=cur) Zaibatsu 00:28, November 11, 2011 (UTC)

Weird! No history, no deletion log, it looks as if it had never been created. Eek!

If I had to guess, the system is just confused & the data is still there somewhere. Looking into it.

Sorry about this & thanks for reporting it,

-Sean Colombo 00:57, November 11, 2011 (UTC)

Too much entertainments... Edit

Hi, Sean

It's getting allmost impossible to use IE on LW, especially for anonymous users; here's one from bunch of errors:

User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; GTB7.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E; InfoPath.1; OfficeLiveConnector.1.3; OfficeLivePatch.0.0)
Timestamp: Fri, 13 Jan 2012 13:14:52 UTC

Message: Object doesn't support this action
Line: 227
Char: 71
Code: 0
URI: http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__am/46612/group/-/oasis_extensions_js

If warnings about errors are enabled in IE options, LW page scrolling becomes practically impossible... That doesn't mean LW hasn't any problems on other browsers, but IE is a leader here certainly.

(Just for balance: this one - from FF 9.0.1:)

http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js (f. stringify)
JSON.parse: unexpected character
Line 9

... and so on...

--Senvaikis ^(talk) 13:42, January 13, 2012 (UTC)

Senv, I reported this on (Thursday?) when you mentioned it but just wanted to follow up. Is it any better for you now? I checked it out in IE 9 on my computer, but IE 9 is often significantly different than IE 8.

Thanks for the info!

-Sean Colombo 00:25, January 18, 2012 (UTC)

• Still getting mentioned oasis_extensions_js err. while scrolling most lw pages on IE.
• Firebug on FF still points to the same fn. stringify error also.

--Senvaikis ^(talk) 07:44, January 18, 2012 (UTC)

Spam filter reporting Edit

Any reason why the spam filter problems report page is telling me I don't have permission to edit it?

The spam filter issue I was attempting to report involves the N-word in John Lennon:Woman Is The Nigger Of The World and a new page for a cover version of that song, Ben Lee:Woman Is The Nigger Of The World. Trainman 05:25, March 24, 2012 (UTC)

Just reminder... Edit

Hi, Sean,

looking at recent Janitors editions (1, 2), seems that "= problem", mentioned in Janitors talkpage, still remains unsolved. Or, what's more likely, - unnoticed; that's why I decided to 'bump' you right here ;).

And one more wish: it would be fine to implement some procedure for artist name validation, to avoid creating such ghost-artist pages like "Kurt Nilsen Espen Lind Askil H", "Blues Brothers, The" or "Seven Nation Army Rmx(Po…". Tia, --Senvaikis ^(talk) 12:47, March 26, 2012 (UTC)

...any reaction? :( --Senvaikis ^(talk) 12:29, April 26, 2012 (UTC)

I think it's finally fixed. Sorry for the delay. -Sean Colombo 13:34, April 26, 2012 (UTC)

Sorry for rearchiving this reminder, but the "ghost-artist" part of it still needs your attention; see latest additions (Lady Antebellum - or È®šç¾Žä¹‹æ³). Tia, --Senvaikis ^(talk) 16:51, May 4, 2012 (UTC)

Meeting in Chat Edit

Hey Sean,

I'd like to talk to you about several things, so please join the chat when you've got time to. It'll take approx. 10-20 minutes. - Chris 19:18, April 18, 2012 (UTC)

Hi there,

I'm at the All Hands so we're booked all week except for a few seconds here and there... will pop on when I get a chance. Sorry for the delay! :)

-Sean Colombo 14:41, April 19, 2012 (UTC)

I'm hopping on and off & will continue to until I run into you :)

-Sean Colombo 22:07, May 1, 2012 (UTC)

YouTube extension Edit

Hello,

I would like to improve the YouTube extension. In particular, I would like to add Dailymotion to the supported sites. It would also be interesting to support the parameter to start at the middle of the video ("t=" on YouTube, "start=" on Dailymotion).

Sarah Manley told me that you could help me to get started on modifying an extension, and then to have my changes integrated into Wikia. Right now I don't even know where I can find the code of the extension: I found this one and several others; I don't know which one is used on Wikia. And is it possible to test an extension somewhere on Wikia?

You can email me if you prefer.

--Rinaku 19:56, May 8, 2012 (UTC)

Hi Rinaku :)

The version of the extension we're using is /extensions/wikia/YouTube. There is no easy way for the public to test changes on Wikia yet (TOR is working on this, I think). So the best way to test the extension would be to install normal MediaWiki and then just download that code and include the /extensions/wikia/YouTube/YouTube.php file. I assume it doesn't have many other requirements.

Thanks for helping out & please let me know if you have other questions :)

-Sean Colombo 20:09, May 8, 2012 (UTC)

Okay thanks. --Rinaku 21:12, May 8, 2012 (UTC)

The new Search option Edit

Hey Sean,

I'm pretty sure this has happened for all wikias, but searching for something on the search bar doesn't take you directly to the page you search for anymore, instead, it takes you to a list of search options, which I don't like at all. However, it also seems that the search suggestions has been removed from this wiki specifically, though, although I may be mistaken. I just felt like telling you this because it really slows down my work here on the wiki, and was wondering if you could do anything about it.

Thanks in advance :) XxTimberlakexx 21:59, May 16, 2012 (UTC)

Hiya,

Thanks for the feedback :) it helps. The search change (to turn off automatically going to a page) was intentional, but there seems to be a lot of mixed feedback so they're pondering it more deeply. At the current moment, that is the intended behavior though.

As for the search-suggest... that's a temporary bug. It was re-written (to be better, faster, stronger ;)) but when it was released today, there was an issue after getting hammered by all the traffic of the site (and even more-so on wikis like LyricWiki which have eleventy-billion pages). Literally as I type this, some guys are working on fixing it 10 feet away. Should be fixed soon :)

Hope everything is going well w/you & that this clears things up a bit... thanks again for the feedback! :D

-Sean Colombo 22:28, May 16, 2012 (UTC)

Things are going quite well, thanks for asking. Been doing a lot of Bronzing to artist pages, and I Bronzed my first artist page, The Fireman, last week! :D It irks me that some artist pages are ranked Bronze, though, when some of the songs and albums are still green. Luckily I consider Bronzing all their songs and albums before doing the artist page.

Anyways, glad to hear the search suggest is a temporary bug. I mean, taking away both the search suggest and going directly to a page you search for make it much harder for me to work on here, especially since the search-suggest helped me avoid getting sent to the list of search options. And what do you mean guys are fixing it 10 feet away? :O Great to hear it'll be fixed soon though, great news to me.

No problem for the feedback! :D XxTimberlakexx 22:45, May 16, 2012 (UTC)

Just a quick note to say that you while we removed "go" search, we did add it as a personal preference so you can enable it for your own experience. Just go to Special:Preferences, click the "Under the Hood" tab, and choose "Enable Go-Search" in the advanced section. This will turn it back on for your personal experience. --Dopp (help forum | blog) 23:42, May 16, 2012 (UTC)

Hey Sean,

I opted in for Go Search like Dopp mentioned above, but starting this morning it takes me to the search options again, and the search-suggest disappeared again. And I checked, and Go Search is still on. I presume they're still working on it? XxTimberlakexx 21:23, May 21, 2012 (UTC)

Strange bug on Wikiamobile Edit

Hi Sean, not sure if you're the best guy to come to, but anyhow...

I'm having a rather weird bug when viewing an album page on the Wikiamobile skin (the one used by smartphone browsers). Where the album art should appear in the infobox instead has a copy of the actual page. You can see an example of this by navigating your (computer) browser to this url. I'm not exactly sure what's causing it. Do you mind checking it out?

 Eladkse  Talk  Casualty  Holby City  14:00, 21/05/2012 

Actually, I just found the line of code causing it. In Template:AlbumHeader, there is a section of code
<div style="display:none">{{:File:{{{Cover}}}}}</div>
The mobile skin strips styling, so is causing the page to be outputted as well. What is the use of that piece of code, and can it be worked around?  Eladkse  Talk  Casualty  Holby City  14:05, 21/05/2012 

I think you mean the template {{Album}} (the naming of the basic templates is not very coherent round here...). I quickfixed the issue by highjacking the printfooter class to that element, as this was the only class that had applied display: none to it in the WikiaMobile skin. Unfortunately our own style isn't used and I don't know if there is any page like MediaWiki:WikiaMobile.css that would be evaluated.

I hope that this won't break printouts, because as printers have a lot of time to render a page, I hope they will not strip the styles and let the display: none overrule any other setting saying else, for example with @media print. - Chris 22:53, May 21, 2012 (UTC)

As to its use, it's to display a notice on the album page if the image has no {{albumcover}} template, and add a category so we can find it. — 6×9 (Talk) 17:00, May 22, 2012 (UTC)

I wanted to say that but I forgot, it was late when I fixed it :D - Chris 17:52, May 23, 2012 (UTC)

Unresponsive script Edit

A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, or you can continue to see if the script will complete.
Script: http://slot1.images.wikia.nocookie.net/__am/53335/group/-/oasis_shared_js:3

--Senvaikis ^(talk) 16:12, May 22, 2012 (UTC)

Does this sound like the same issue you're having?

- Firefox
- Shrink the browser width just enough so that the horizontal scrollbar at the bottom appears with almost no sliver of horizontal movement.
- Be logged in

Afterwards, wiggle around the toolbar lock zones on random pages.

Current behavior:
After the precondition is met, crossing the toolbar lock zone will freeze the browser.

Expected behavior:
Nothing unusual should occur.

Steps to reproduce:
1. Meet the pre-condition as stated above.
2. Wiggle back and forth around the toolbar lock zone.

Or does that not describe your browser & what's happening?

Thanks,

-Sean Colombo 23:37, May 22, 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for response, Sean, but now, on my work-box browser, this message doesn't appear. Should recheck that later in the evening, on my laptop (both W7+FF12). (Behaviour was very similar to described above, as I can recall). --Senvaikis ^(talk) 07:16, May 23, 2012 (UTC)

PS (evening): as it was expected, - can't reproduce the situation, e.g. - ticket closed.

Admin Edit

PLEASE make me an admin? Jerome (Ian Streeter) Just my contribs! 20:06, May 23, 2012 (UTC)

Blue again Edit

An old CSS bug reappeared again in preview window.

I see red-links for non-existant pages in Chrome. Is it normal non-existent pages that are messing up for you, or was it a category or something?

-Sean Colombo 17:57, May 24, 2012 (UTC)

I see the same (with red links) now too. Feeling stupid, though can swear - that wasn't a mirage :) --Senvaikis ^(talk) 18:41, May 24, 2012 (UTC)

Haha, well I'm glad it's fixed. :) Was probably just a temporary problem. -Sean Colombo 19:22, May 24, 2012 (UTC)