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Contents 1 Server Stuff 1.1 Email Confirmation 1.2 Not to complain... 2 ÜberBot Stuff 2.1 SotD 3 API 3.1 My plead for a fully functiong REST method 3.2 REST API: No songs found 3.3 Please have a look 3.4 Once more about REST API getArtistResponse xml structure 3.5 SOAP API Error: Not Found 3.6 Redirect in SOAP calls? 4 Uncategorized 4.1 Public Financial Information 4.2 This was in the wrong place, and it was my fault 4.3 Thanks 4.4 {{Disam}} 4.5 The Old Search Function 4.6 Spam Report?????? 4.7 Signatures 4.8 New policy, need looking at 4.9 My Own Bot 4.10 Linking to YouTube 4.11 Function / implied redirects failures 4.12 Help? 4.13 Artist Redirects 4.14 BotUber seemed to have made some artist flipped pages 4.15 Pssst. 4.16 SOTD April 01, 2008 4.17 Auto-template for Albums 4.18 Edit count bot (or no bot) 4.19 Batch Move 4.20 User Scripts 4.21 Send to a Friend extension 4.22 Stuff 4.23 Software Updates

[edit] Server Stuff

[edit] Email Confirmation

I don't know if you knew about this already, but it seems that some of our users can't get the Email confirmation to work correctly. One that I talked with on IRC said he gets this error when trying to confirm:

Invalid confirmation code. The code may have expired.

Sorry to dump yet another thing on you, but I had better let you know before I forget it :p

- teknomunk (talk,E,歌) 12:56, 17 November 2007 (EST)

For the record: we worked on this guy's issues & got him fixed up. We think we fixed it and haven't heard complaints since, so I'm assuming this works as we expect now.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 10:26, 26 April 2008 (EDT)

[edit] Not to complain...

...But is there something that can be done about the response time from LyricWiki? I had some free time today, and decided I'd catch up on my LW contributions. Editing on this particular project was excruciatingly slow. In particular, it seems to be hanging on this image, which worked just fine during the first few edits (and seems to open just fine).

Again, I hate to complain, but waiting upwards of two minutes for a page to refresh is a bit disagreeable. When making similar edits across different pages, I found myself losing track of where I was when the pages ground to a halt here and there. Really got in the way of any productivity.

Any ideas?

—  jF 18:38, 6 April 2008 (EDT)

That's weird... I hadn't noticed any slow-downs lately. What time of the day (and what timezone) was this happening? Does this happen to you a lot?

Thanks for the info,

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 08:23, 7 April 2008 (EDT)

This is a fairly frequent problem. It had improved, I thought, over the past couple of months. But then in the last week or so it started back. LW is the only site with such issues—the rest of the 'Net is fine for me. (And for comparison, pages at Wikipedia, Memory-Alpha, and other sites using MediaWiki load just fine.)

This was on Sunday, from around 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. CST. Using Firefox 2.0.0.13 under Windows 2000 Pro SP4, if that's relevant.

The problem is lengthy delays from the servers. When you click a link or button, there is a delay before the item you requested is pushed. In the meanwhile, it just sits there with that "Waiting for lyricwiki.org..." message. I've yet to actually have a page timeout, but I have seen waits of nearly five minutes. Yesterday was getting around two.

It is noteworthy that it doesn't appear to affect all pages equally. The home page seems to stand a better chance of loading quickly than normal article pages. The Google Search results page comes up pretty fast. But anything with typical wiki content seems to have delays. I tried loading the Community Portal page just now, and it took seven seconds for LW to begin sending the data. And that's fast compared to what I sometimes see.

Be glad to do any testing or anything else you need to help resolve the problem.  :-)

—  jF 11:18, 7 April 2008 (EDT)

Wow, that's not cool at all. There def. aren't supposed to be any performance problems right now. I'll keep this in the back of my mind & when I get home I'll poke into it.

Thanks for the useful info!

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 16:20, 7 April 2008 (EDT)

Finally solved the problem (it got worse before it got better). There was a huge job-backlog probably caused by a widely-used template being changed. The jobs were getting run once per page (default for MediaWiki), I've slowed that down but started a script that comes with MediaWiki which just runs through all of the jobs. It seems to be going a lot faster using this method (there are probably a bunch of table-locks the other way when a page-load claims a certain task). The task should be caught up shortly and things should calm down significantly after that. To check up on the progress, see Special:Statistics. It's at about 352,000 right now. Eventually it should hover around 0.

Thanks for bringing this up,

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 17:33, 12 April 2008 (EDT)

[edit] ÜberBot Stuff

[edit] SotD

According to the pages' histories and the date on the main page, SotD hasn't been updated for two days (including this morning). Just thought I nudge you to see if something's wrong. --WillMak050389 10:01, 26 February 2008 (EST)

Thanks for the head's-up. Turns out he was confused by "www.lyricwiki.org" being redirected to "lyricwiki.org" now, but we had a chat & he's all up to speed now.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 18:46, 26 February 2008 (EST)

Would that explain his forgetfulness lately? Might want to take a look through the archive as well—Übes missed several badges around the turn of the year. Brought that to Kiefer's attention as well.

Glad to know I'm not the only one he hates.  ;-)

—  jF 22:30, 27 February 2008 (EST)

Looks like he didn't update it today, too. --WillMak050389 14:41, 22 March 2008 (EDT)

Thanks for the head's-up. I had him update it... not sure why the cron-job doesn't work sometimes. He runs on a different server, maybe that server has problems some mornings :-/

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 14:47, 22 March 2008 (EDT)

Übertbot played an April Fool's joke on you by not updating it today. He's pretty intuitive... --WillMak050389 11:31, 1 April 2008 (EDT)

I got pwned by a robot. I'm such a n00b. I tried to have my guard up... but alas. *sigh*

Thanks for letting me know,

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 11:35, 1 April 2008 (EDT)

Oh, lol... the reason he can't update things is because he's getting rick-rolled! That should have occurred to me earlier.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 11:48, 1 April 2008 (EDT)

[edit] API

[edit] My plead for a fully functiong REST method

Dear Sean,

For starters, let me say, I completely adore your site. I have only recently discovered it, and it blew me away. Using the Wiki system for lyrics was a great idea and it has obviously worked out. I love the fact that you are a person who actually maintains his lyrics website, and not just a project with a data base that you purchased and threw some Google ads on to make a quick buck.

Allow me to introduce my self. My name is Zeve Salman, 18 year old college kid at UCF. I own and maintain Staylazy.net. I created a program called Canto Pod, which allows users to search for song lyrics and copy them to their iPods and iTunes libraries. Up until this point, I have been using the LeosLyrics.com API for my content, but it has gone down for more then 3 weeks and the 140,000 unique Canto Pod users (thats a real number - it was a top 8 download on Apple.com!) have been left lyric less.

This is where I am hoping that you, and LyricWiki, can come in. Canto Pod is coded on the leoslyrics function very similar to the one you have some what set up for REST. But the biggest thing is that it searches the database for similar entries, not just an exact match. So if I did a search that looked like search.php?artist=Bon Jovi&song= I would receive every song Bon Jovi has in the database with a url to it. The url (or unique code) would then be plugged into lyrics.php?lyricid=whateverthecodewas. This is crucial for the way Canto Pod works, and Im hoping you can add this seemingly simple feature into REST. That way, my users can get a list of results and make their selection from there on out.

Hopefully you will be able to throw me and my users a bone here. Any insight or suggestions would be appreciated as well. If you would like, you can email me at zeve (.) sal AT DONTSPAM_GMAIL_dot com

Thanks, and again, great work! I hope to hear from you soon. 132.170.35.7 16:18, 6 October 2007 (EDT)

That is definitely becoming top on my list of things to do. Querying for a song directly should do a decent job of getting close matches anyway since we do some tricks of our own. The API definitely needs to be finished anyway.

One small problem is that the API is so popular (more hits than the website), so we'll have to talk about expected traffic so that I can attempt to get the servers ready.

-Sean Colombo 16:54, 6 October 2007 (EDT)

NOTE: After a long trail of emails back and forth, CantoPod has fully integrated support for LyricWiki and has been running successfully for several weeks now.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 19:32, 4 November 2007 (EST)

Wow, they got it working? Can I get it working with this XHTML/Javascript Opera widget: http://widgets.opera.com/widget/7046/ ? That would be great! 41.225.250.70 09:52, 17 November 2007 (EST)

Yep, if you read the page that widget actually already uses LyricWiki.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 10:13, 17 November 2007 (EST)

Hello, I am the author of the Opera widget mentionned. This widget does use lyricwiki to retreive the lyrics of a song, but only when it already knows full name of the artist and the full name of the song, using the getSong function. However, I can't use the searchSongs function, I have to use leoslyrics API for that, excluding any results lyricwiki might have. So is a searchSongs function coming soon? Jadd 13:05, 19 November 2007 (EST)

Bah, I just noticed that even SOAP doesn't seem to have this function. Am I right? Jadd 13:06, 19 November 2007 (EST)

That is correct. Due to the large amount of traffic we get to the API (about 2.5 million requests per day and growing), I haven't figured out a solution that would allow searching quickly enough to not completely overwhelm the server. I keep this thought in the back of my head though, and if I figure something out I'll add it.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 10:39, 26 April 2008 (EDT)

[edit] REST API: No songs found

Hi Sean. It seems that the REST API is broken. http://lyricwiki.org/api.php?artist=Slipknot&song=Before_I_Forget&fmt=text only returns "Not found" while http://lyricwiki.org/Slipknot:Before_I_Forget shows that there is a text around.

Best regards

Fuzy 06:11, 25 February 2008 (EST)

Oops! That was my fault. Fixed now.

Thanks a TON for letting me know... it's been down since like 9pm last night.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 10:59, 25 February 2008 (EST)

Hi Sean

I'm trying with

http://lyricwiki.org/api.php?artist=Pearl_Jam&fmt=xml

No matter which artist I put, I always get an empty albums result set.

Best regards

I regret to say, that in addition to REST Api, SOAP WS method getSong now also returns lyrics as "Not found" for all requests.

--Senvaikis 08:36, 14 March 2008 (EDT)

Hi Senvaikis,

Thanks for reporting this. The API was down because one of our servers wouldn't work as expected after a failed upgrade. We've been working non-stop on this for the last couple of days and now it's finally working again. For more information, check out the official blog. It is a great place to look any time there is something massively wrong with the site. If we know about major problems (like the site or API being completely down) we'll post there... and if we don't have a post there, please contact us ASAP.

Thanks again,

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 13:43, 16 March 2008 (EDT)

[edit] Please have a look

http://lyricwiki.org/LyricWiki_talk:SOAP

05:10, 25 April 2008 (EDT)

[edit] Once more about REST API getArtistResponse xml structure

Hi, Sean

We've been talking about that already here, and you accepted that current xml structure of getArtistResponse should be changed to better correspond hierarchic structure of real data. Now, after about 4 months of waiting for any changes I understood that I wasn't clear enough explaining reasons why such structure change is prefered. I'ts not only the matter of beauty, clarity or 'logical fulfilment'. There is more important argument for such correction - present structure is hardly acceptable for most standard algorithms of xml parsing. Try to use xsl styles, and you'll see what i'm talking about :)

--Senvaikis 16:53, 22 March 2008 (EDT)

I've looked into our schema, and we do structure the result (in the PHP code) as being an array of album results, so I'm not sure why it's getting flattened. If the SOAP standards say that the XML should be nested in the way that we thought makes more sense, then this means that there is an issue with the nuSOAP library.

If the nuSOAP guys don't know how to fix it, maybe there is an outside SOAP library for .NET that you could use to try to work around it? I haven't used .NET, but from what I've heard, you can use some other languages inside of it or something? If that's the case, maybe try Java's SOAP classes?

If this is something that the nuSOAP guys won't fix (or don't want to because that would break other languages), let me know and I might be able to hack the nuSOAP code so that we can optionally display it in a better nested way. If I don't hear anything from you and I get a chance, I'll take a look at it. From what I remember, the code is a bit hard to read though, so it might not be easy.

Later,

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 11:48, 23 March 2008 (EDT)

Dear Sean, I dare swear .NET has nothing in common with this issue. Sorry for repeating, but we are talking about REST API request getArtist response structure. You can easily ascertain this just entering request (like that) to Rest API into your browser address field, and studying xml response structure. You'll see, that all nodes <songs>, <year> and <amazonLink> are childs of the same node <albums> instead of being childs of corresponding <album>. I do believe you'll not use .NET for that ;), and hardly believe it might be not easy to tidy up :)

regards, --Senvaikis 18:51, 23 March 2008 (EDT)

Hi Senvaikis,

Thanks for your patience whilst I fumbled around with understanding what you meant! :)

I was looking at the SOAP result itself, the XML of which is generated by nuSOAP... but you're right, the API is generated by code I wrote, and changing it wasn't too hard. It's fixed now to wrap each set of album info in an <albumResult> tag. The only catch is that since there aren't "version" parameters in the system & I needed a way to make this so it doesn't break old programs, there is a new url parameter to provide to get the new format. Just add "&fixXML" to the url and it should work.

Here is an example.

Sorry for all of the confusion & such. Thanks for valuable input once again :)

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 21:16, 23 March 2008 (EDT)

Thanks, Sean, - nice! :) --Senvaikis 06:22, 24 March 2008 (EDT)

[edit] SOAP API Error: Not Found

Hi Sean, I think SOAP API is down today. Is there any updation going on SOAP API of Lyrics? I am getting Not Found error for every song. Please help.

Thanks --Top54u 01:33, 14 March 2008 (EDT)

We are currently having problems with one of our servers and as such the API is currently disabled. As soon as we get it fixed, the SOAP will be up.

- teknomunk (talk,E,歌,A) 01:38, 14 March 2008 (EDT)

And now we're finally back. The API should work as expected now.

Thanks for your patience,

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 13:39, 16 March 2008 (EDT)

[edit] Redirect in SOAP calls?

It came to my attention recently that certain songs, like "7 Chinese Brothers" by "REM", will return lyrics from a SOAP request like: "#REDIRECT: R.E.M.:Seven Chinese Brothers". I assume this is maybe due to your recent change? Also, I can't seem to comment on your wordpress site, the comment never shows up... Thanks. 24.8.193.244 00:48, 12 April 2008 (EDT)

Hi,

Oddly, that has nothing to do with the other redirects. Turns out it was because of that ":" after the word "REDIRECT". The webservice's redirect-handling didn't expect the colon, but now it allows it. All pages with that colon should work now. If you see any other redirects in the API or anything else weird, please let me know.

As for your comments on the blog, they showed up as getting blocked by Akismet. That's the first time I've had a report of someone getting blocked by Akismet, but I'm kind of worried that it happens more often. If anyone leaves comments on the official blog and they don't show up soon, please let me know! I've never blocked a real comment intentionally, so if your comment doesn't show up something is wrong.

Anywho: your comments have been marked as "not spam" so they should be showing up now.

Thanks for the info on both of those problems,

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 11:02, 12 April 2008 (EDT)

[edit] Uncategorized

[edit] Public Financial Information

Sean. Things are going well with LyricWiki_talk:Site_support#Paypal_Donation_extension, and I'm starting to think about writing a section to publicise basic financial details, showing hosting (and other) expenses and income (ads and donations). Obviously there will me a minimum requirement of entry of relevant data once a month, but I would like some suggestions from you as to exactly what information is required.

This is a rough data structure for comment.

Period:
*end_date

LineItem:
*date
*title
*amount (positive or negative)

Procedure:

1. At the start of each period, a new Period record is created
2. details of this months expenses added
3. income from last months ads added (for simplicity, last months ads shown on this months balance)

I'm not sure how to simplify things without losing flexibility.

Notes:

• a period extends from one end_date to the next end_date
• the date of a lineitem will place it within a period
• a total of donations for each period will automatically (dynamically) be added.
• it might work better to only use dynamic donation figures for the current month only (as a guide to visitors and donors). Once they are finalised, a final figure can be added (taking into consideration bank fees, rounding, or anything that may slightly alter the totals)

It is very rough, the only time I've spent on this section is writing this, so at this stage I just want to make sure nothing is grossly wrong before I make a start tomorrow.

Feel free to contact me via IM if you want to know more.

-TrevorP 10:35, 6 April 2007 (EDT)

Wow! That extension looks sweet... can't wait to use it :)

As for the public info, that structure looks good. I was going to suggest adding an optional notations field for the line-items but on second thought that probably just makes unneeded manual work? The structure looks really well though out though.

I'll be AFK for the holiday weekend, back only to put out any fires, then I'll be back for real on monday.

Thanks,

-Sean Colombo 03:17, 7 April 2007 (EDT)

OK, The donation extension is more or less done. Here is a brief summary of what I have provided:

• An extension that allows people to donate money, records their details. Other functionality is provided by additional "plugins" for this extension, as follows:
• A Special page that shows a list of people who have donated.
• A Special page that allows a treasurer to record financial details in the wiki database.
• A Special page that generates financial reports for public viewing
• A progress bar added to each page showing donation status for the month. This is more a proof of concept and demo, it may not suit, but could be modified to suit.

Still to do, if we decide to do it, is to disable ads for people who have donated.

I will be away for a few days, (leaving Thursday/Friday), so I'll leave it in your hands for about a week, to have a look at. I suggest you install it on a test wiki, and set up a paypal developers account to test donations. The documentation in my wiki should be enough to get you going.

Recently I have just been tidying up and securing small sections of code, without a lot of testing, so hopefully I haven't broken anything. I'll do a little more testing in the next day or two.

As always if there are any problems, or you feel something needs changing to suit the wikis needs, let me know and I'll get onto it as soon as I get back.

btw, I'm not sure what you meant by an "optional notations field". If you think it could be worth adding, can you describe it for me?

-TrevorP 00:18, 10 April 2007 (EDT)

Sweet! I'll get working on setting that up asap. What I meant by the optional notations field is like an additional text-field (and database column) for extra notes about the item... just in case the name wasn't descriptive enough to visitors or this month's value was unnaturally high||low, more info could be given.

Thanks for the extension, it looks like it's going to be sweet!

-Sean Colombo 00:30, 10 April 2007 (EDT)

I see what you mean, and I wonder if that would be better suited attached to a line item, or to a period (so you can have a sort of monthly report if there is anything noteworthy). But then, this is a wiki, I think a wiki page could serve this purpose better than we could with an extra database field. Perhaps a Financial history page, noting major events, a change in advertiser/hosting, an excess of donations due to publicity, whatever it may be.

What do you think?

-TrevorP 00:54, 10 April 2007 (EDT)

Hey, noticed you started to implement the extension, I haven't seen a lot of progress since. Just writing because I don't if your just busy, or if your having trouble. If its the latter, please contact me, userpage, email, irc (I'm always in the lyricwiki room), IM, whatever, I'd be happy to work through any problems with you.

-TrevorP 07:07, 29 April 2007 (EDT)

 :( I've put this on the backburner indefinitely. A couple of reasons 1) I couldn't get it working when I tried so it's been sitting idle for a YEAR (wow! I'm epic-lazy) 2) Nobody donates :-/ .. we've been live for over two years and had less than enough donations to pay for 2 weeks of hosting (this extension might, of course, help that out but probably not enough). 3) Ad space seems to earn more money-per-pixel so we can have less stuff on the page (and I'd obviously like as much Lyrics and as little junk as possible... if only ads were smaller!). 4) Since Motive Force is a private company, showing our finances might bring up legal issues or at the very least would be too revealing (and I could get sued for being irresponsible). 5) When thinking about donations, I think I'd prefer to avoid putting them in people's face... in our case it would almost be like panhandling: the people who would see the request frequently enough to get guilted into donating (and I don't think anyone should give us money out of guilt) would be the people who use the site very frequently and are probably contributing to the community quite a bit. In this way, we're taking money from the people who already help the most, and that feels "bad" to me.

This is really annoying to me to have to put this aside. TrevorP put a bunch of hard work into this thing, and I hate seeing someone's hard work not get the use it deserves. For what it's worth, Trevor, I'm really sorry. Even though the extension didn't work right away, that probably has the most to do with differences in configurations, etc. I've seen your code and it's quality. If you continue to be involved, I will of course appreciate everything you do. Even though it's not getting used, I really appreciate the effort you put into making the extension.

Thank you,

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 10:09, 26 April 2008 (EDT)

[edit] This was in the wrong place, and it was my fault

Sorry to hassle you (as I understand you are a busy man) but I was pointed in your direction by User:Kingnee1114 as I'm having a few problems setting my local time and he said you was the guy to talk to about this.

My problem is such that I am 30 minutes behind the server but my settings refuse to accept that. It simply adds 30 minutes, no matter what I do to try to correct this. Strangely enough, it would accept it if I was 1 hour behind, just not anything under 1 hour.

Also, the time stamps attached to my signature are showing incorrectly. For example it is 3.26am 23rd February (and I'm fast at typing - lol) but you can see from below that is not the time stamp attached to this message...

So I'm wondering if these are bugs, or if there is something I'm missing here?

Thanking you in advance.

Redxx 23:07, 22 February 2008 (EST)

For the record: This was due to the system clock on the server being behind by 30 minutes and was just fixed earlier this week.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 10:26, 26 April 2008 (EDT)

[edit] Thanks

I just wanted to thank you so much for creating this site. I was getting fed up with SongLyrics and other sites, because of the ads. Tigersfan1992 10:06, 24 February 2008 (EST)

Thank you for caring! :) I'm glad people find this site useful.  :D

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 10:26, 26 April 2008 (EDT)

[edit] {{Disam}}

Thanks! It is limited right now, and I'd like to add to it. But the original goal was met: I haven't had to re-delete Arcade Fire:Neighborhood, or any of the others since!
Lately, I have been trying to come up with ways to do things differently, and not fall into 'well, I've always done it that way...'
King_Nee1114 (talk page • contributions • deletions) 20:17, 24 February 2008 (EST)

[edit] The Old Search Function

This may seem strange, but I still use the old search function to get where I need to go (I have a search bar for it on firefox) because it jumps straight to the page I need. I was wondering if you had changed something server side, because now searching something like Cake:Nugget will return 'could not find Cake%3ANugget'. Arg!
King_Nee1114 (talk page • contributions • deletions) 00:07, 25 February 2008 (EST)

Another oddity crops up when creating a new album. In the footer, instead of putting in the album name, it just has {{ALBUMN}}

That one was actually my fault. I've already fixed it. For future reference, this can be changed by administrators at MediaWiki:AlbumTemplate. There are also pages for artists (MediaWiki:ArtistTemplate) and for songs (MediaWiki:SongTemplate). If the page has not been created yet, you will need to copy the existing code over, which can be found at Special:Allmessages.

- teknomunk (talk,E,歌,A) 02:03, 25 February 2008 (EST)

For the search thing, I don't have that problem right now... I think most likely that having the newest version might fix it (just a guess though). If uninstalling & reinstalling doesn't work, please let me know.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 11:04, 25 February 2008 (EST)

About the search function: I reinstalled it, and now it works like it should.

About the albumtemplate bug: I had looked for the error, but I was looking in the wrong place. Thanks.

King_Nee1114 (talk page • contributions • deletions) 18:49, 25 February 2008 (EST)

[edit] Spam Report??????

A spam report doesn't seem to be constructive enough because for now, it's located on your talk page!!! Shouldn't we have a more central reports page (A.K.A. LyricWiki:Spam Reports, LyricWiki:Counter-Spam Unit)?? Θ Sean gorter Θtalk|Esperanza 22:01, 3 March 2008 (EST)

I just have it off of my talk-page because this way I can get email alerts every time someone makes a report (and I'm the only one who can change the spam filter at the moment because the way the filtering works, you need to manually edit the LocalSettings file on the server). If I made it another page, I don't think I could get email-alerts about it unless I changed it to email me for my whole watchlist instead of just talk pages (and my watchlist is rather massive by now). Are you thinking we need a more central place just to keep all of the contributors up to date everyone knows what to look out for?

I think it would make more sense organizationally to have it on another page, but the email alerts are pretty important to me.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 02:01, 4 March 2008 (EST)

Alright, I get the idea. Thanks for the comment, Θ Sean gorter Θtalk|Esperanza 22:37, 4 March 2008 (EST)

[edit] Signatures

I just wanted to get your feedback on signatures-as-templates. Currently 3 users have them (Redxx, Kiefer, and I), and I noticed that Wikipedia have some rules against doing this. I know this is not Wikipedia, and I would argue that we can do what we want here. I think that I could manage anyone who might use a signature (I am going to be adding some extra code to them for that), but I just wanted to make sure that I wasn't doing anything counter-productive).
King_Nee1114 (talk page • contributions • deletions) 19:43, 5 March 2008 (EST)

Hmm, well at first guess I would assume that Wikipedia isn't doing that just because of managing templates... that's not too big of a challenge: I'll bet the overriding reason is performance. When templates are on a page, the wiki has to look up and process the template every time a page is rendered. Since there is a lot of commenting on the site, this could eventually slow things down quite a bit (templates aren't the fastest thing in MediaWiki :-/).

At the same time though, adding a restriction like "no-signatures-as-templates" does seem harsh to just do blindly. To help me better understand: what is the motivation for using a template as a signature? Something with the HTML not working in normal signatures?

This seems like something we could fix with technology :)... whatever the reason is for using templates now, hopefully we can change something and make it so that people don't need to do that anymore.

Good catch though, if the site had slowed down it wouldn't have occurred to me to look at the number of templates per page or anything.

Thanks,

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 08:51, 6 March 2008 (EST)

I was afraid performance was the reason for that rule...

For some time, Kiefer had a long signature (about 700 chars) and Sean gorter called him on it here. So I figured out how to make it a template, and gave it to Kiefer as a favor, so he could continue using his signature. Since then (because I figured out how to do it) I made one for myself. Since then, rather recently, a new user Redxx copied Kiefer's sig. The main motivation here is that the signature can be large and complex, without taking up almost any space on the edit screen. Kiefer's used to take up several lines, and admittedly made it difficult to see where his message ended and sig code began.

King_Nee1114 (talk page • contributions • deletions) 16:04, 6 March 2008 (EST)

I want to point out, that I have started a little project that seems to be going well so far, at User:Kingnee1114lyrics/Firefox Extensions. Its designed for promoting add-ons for Firefox that help our editors, as well as promote add-ons for new users that picked up Firefox because of our promotions. I started it yesterday, and already I've had 5 suggestions from other users, despite me just quietly making the page and not announcing it at all.

Ain't "My Watchlist" a wonderful thing?  ;-)

—  jF 02:05, 8 March 2008 (EST)

[edit] New policy, need looking at

I just created LyricWiki:Assume Good Faith, similar to that of Wikipedia's. I thought you might want to take a look at it. Θ Sean gorter Θtalk|Esperanza 07:31, 10 March 2008 (EDT)

Shweet, thanks for pointing it out. I grabbed some of the content from the Wikipedia page and merged it in. I think it originally might have come off as a little threatening which probably wasn't the intention. Hopefully it still gets the point across.

Thanks,

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 10:57, 10 March 2008 (EDT)

[edit] My Own Bot

Hey Dude, I just ran across some bigger error collections like Category:Language/Español. I was wondering if I could request a bot account? I have run Python Wikipedia bot on my own site (contributions) with no trouble and I am used to not having to do big jobs myself. Could I create a BotUm account here too? Perhaps I could float each task I'm thinking about assigning it past the group somewhere? Also, why are Janitors' edits not auto-patrolled? Is it 'cause it's not a Sysop? Do we need to be reviewing its every move? --Åqúàŧĩkī - É - Ŧ 12:06, 12 March 2008 (EDT)

Hawt. I'm not sure why Janitor's edits aren't patrolled, but by default bots aren't shown in Recent Changes anyway. I wonder if there is a way to fix that... hmm...

Anyway, yeah: go ahead and make a BotUm. His edits look safe & I assume that the Python Wikipedia bot engine was pretty well tested, so I'll chuck a bot-flag on him after you make him.

Thanks,

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 12:16, 12 March 2008 (EDT)

OK, he's made. I'm just finishing up something on my site and them I'll move that category.--Åqúàŧĩkī - É - Ŧ 12:52, 12 March 2008 (EDT)

Botified -Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 13:10, 12 March 2008 (EDT)

[edit] Linking to YouTube

Hey,

Just wondering what the policy is on linking to YouTube. I've seen some pages link to "Official" videos on YouTube, like Plain_White_T's:Hey_There_Delilah, but other popular songs not, for example Cascada:Everytime_We_Touch, whose YouTube page has 13+ million hits, but isn't "official".

--Flyashi 20:14, 22 March 2008 (EDT)

Hi Flyashi,

I don't think there's an official policy on this, but my opinion would be that Official videos are best, but when in doubt, just add the link. YouTube is policed so heavily by record labels, that if they really didn't like that video (or thought there was a better, more official alternative), they'd just have it taken down in almost all cases.

Thanks for your contributions :),

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 22:16, 22 March 2008 (EDT)

[edit] Function / implied redirects failures

Hi, I've started noticing some weird behavior when querying songs files like: http://lyricwiki.org/Ellen_Page:Anyone_Else_But_You

I know this might be an empty page, but why do I always get the failure message below? Fatal error: Call to a member function exists() on a non-object in /var/www/html/lyricwiki.org/extensions/lw_impliedRedirects.php on line 99

Is it a known error or something? I just see it sometines, not very often though. Also, I didn't know who to ask about it, or where to submit such thing. I'm sorry for the incovenience.

Great catch! That's an error with a feature I just released tonight. I'll get right on it.

Thanks for letting me know!

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 00:43, 30 March 2008 (EDT)

It ended up being a quick one-line fix. Let me know if you see anything else strange on the site.

Thanks again,

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 01:03, 30 March 2008 (EDT)

[edit] Help?

Sean, as far as I'm concerned, I'm working on Jason Lo (not well known, but still in case fame comes up) and I want to update Jason Lo:Evening News by changing tl|Song|The Fall (2006)|Jason Lo with this: tl|Song|The Fall (2005)|Jason Lo, but it triggered the spam filter. Could you do that for me? Thanks, Θ Sean gorter Θtalk|Esperanza 23:33, 30 March 2008 (EDT)

Fixed it. Unfortunately the spam filter works on the whole section you're editing, not just your changes. It's annoying, but algorithmically it makes sense, otherwise a bunch of edits could be used to circumvent the filter. Thanks for reporting this.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 23:39, 30 March 2008 (EDT)

[edit] Artist Redirects

As an FYI to anyone popping on this page to ask about the new Artist Redirects, here is a description of what it does. This page will list the artist redirects on the site so that spiders can find and index these misspellings, allowing users to more easily find our pages even if they don't know the correct spelling or use the same form (abbreviated, vs. longhand) that we do.
-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 04:27, 31 March 2008 (EDT)

[edit] BotUber seemed to have made some artist flipped pages

With some work I've been doing with deleting Other Songs pages, I've noticed that there are several old, small, pages that are the names of reasonable artist pages, just inversed. (Faces Changing for Changing Faces, Faith Blind for Blind Faith, you get the idea, it's only two word names) They are unlikely search terms, but sometimes I find one or two songs that should be switched. So what should/could we do with these pages?
King_Nee1114 (talk page • contributions • deletions) 00:39, 1 April 2008 (EDT)

A quick way to handle them is to put {{mergeto}} on the wrong page, telling it to merge to the right page, and put {{mergefrom}} on the right page telling it where to find the bad one. Someone will generally go around and fix it when they get a chance. In the long run they pretty much have to be manually merged (if they are really big, there is a trick that can be done with the BatchMove script that admins can use which does a merge).

Thanks for pointing that out,

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 11:45, 1 April 2008 (EDT)

OK, so they should be merged. The next question I have is would it be possible to do a server query of all pages that are converses of each other, that aren't a redirect from one to the other? This is kind of a large undertaking, I understand, and I wouldn't ask you to do it now (I am elbows deep in a few other projects right now as it is) but I just need to know if it would be possible so I know whether or not I can wait, or do all now while I have the Other Songs pages showing me some of them. Thanks again.

King_Nee1114 (talk page • contributions • deletions) 14:36, 1 April 2008 (EDT)

I could write a script to do it, so you don't have to jump on it. Remind me at some point because I will forget :/

Thanks,

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 16:01, 1 April 2008 (EDT)

PS: Haha, BotUber, I just got that ;)

[edit] Pssst.

A note came my way regarding Rick Roll    Kiefer    talk    contribs    admin   00:58, 1 April 2008 (EDT)

[edit] SOTD April 01, 2008

Hi Sean Colombo! I'm just here to tell you that your nomination of Rick Astley:Never Gonna Give You Up has won Song of the Day for April 01, 2008!
Thanks for nominating a song and for contributing to LyricWiki!
-ÜberBot 11:51, 1 April 2008 (EDT)

[edit] Auto-template for Albums

The auto-template for albums currently puts {{ALBUMN}} in the AlbumFooter as opposed to {{ALBUM}}. Is there some way that admins can edit these auto-templates? (It's great that the User talk pages don't auto-template anymore, BTW.)    Kiefer    talk    contribs    admin   01:03, 2 April 2008 (EDT)

Well, the template should be editable at MediaWiki:AlbumTemplate, but after looking at that, it appears to already have {{ALBUM}} at the bottom of the page. Strange. I'll have a look at the code to see why that page is not being used for the template as soon as I get done with the mass of homework I have (should be Thursday). Sean, to fix this, open lw_templates.i18n.php and change line 60 to |album = {{ALBUM}}

- teknomunk (talk,E,歌,A) 01:18, 2 April 2008 (EDT)

teknomunk ftw!

Uploaded the fix. Thanks guys, :)

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 01:35, 2 April 2008 (EDT)

[edit] Edit count bot (or no bot)

I'd like to know if there is a bot for checking how many edits you made, because going through Special:Contributions takes too long. If there isn't, could you request one to be made? Thanks, Θ Sean gorter Θtalk|Esperanza 05:37, 2 April 2008 (EDT)

I'll second that. Could you just switch the Contributions page from bullet points to the # format?

King_Nee1114 (talk page • contributions • deletions) 15:43, 2 April 2008 (EDT)

Hi, I didn't want to mess with the contribs page (because that would probably be lost when we upgrade versions), so I looked around and found an EditCount extension. To see your counts, check out the special page for Edit Count.

Cya,

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 12:12, 6 April 2008 (EDT)

[edit] Batch Move

When trying to do a batch move, I discovered that the program makes sure you want to do the batch move. Unfortunately, it tells you:

"Are you sure you want to move "Los Fantasmas Del Caribe":* to "Fantasmas Del Caribe, Los":*? This can possible be a large operation and will be difficult to reverse."

In the confirmation page, the names are reversed, but the operation still performs correctly. It threw me off, so you might just need to switch two variables, so no one gets confused. --WillMak050389 17:55, 3 April 2008 (EDT)

Good catch. It should be fixed now.

Thanks,

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 18:05, 3 April 2008 (EDT)

I just tried to do a batch move and found out that it cannot handle apostrophes. When I tried to move "Orion's reign" to "Orion's Reign" it just chopped off everything after the apostrophe. It moved pages that started with "Orion". Just thought I'd let you know. --WillMak050389 17:05, 12 April 2008 (EDT)

Good catch. Forwarded to Teknomunk

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 17:22, 12 April 2008 (EDT)

Alright, I have a fix for this and I will send Sean an updated set (the whole directory again).

- teknomunk (talk,E,歌,A) 18:44, 13 April 2008 (EDT)

[edit] User Scripts

I just wrote a Greasemonkey script for Last.fm song pages that fetches lyrics from LyricWiki using the REST API, and I was wondering if I should add it to the plugins page.

As you may know, there is also a not-quite-as-good-looking one for YouTube, an Opera widget, and probably more...

- Escapist 05:00, 15 April 2008 (EDT)

Sure, add away :)

One quick request: would it be possible to have a link back to the page the lyrics come from so that people can fix the lyrics if they're wrong? Thanks!

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 07:46, 15 April 2008 (EDT)

There already is, I use the URL from the response :) I just hope the misspellings that abound on Last.fm won't result in more lyrics with misspelled song titles being submitted here.

- Escapist 09:59, 15 April 2008 (EDT)

[edit] Send to a Friend extension

Hi Sean,

saw that you and Teknomunk had updated Send to a Friend extension recently — any chance to get its source code, please? It's very cool and I'm sure a lot of people would like to use it, including me. :-)

Cheers, --Jack Phoenix _(Contact) 06:23, 19 April 2008 (EDT)

Hi,

Yup, it seems to be working now. We're probably going to open source most of that code (all except the spam filtering part) pretty soon, but I'll email you guys a copy of what we have.

Later,

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 15:22, 26 April 2008 (EDT)

[edit] Stuff

First off, the ads up top are not showing up for me at all (in either Firefox or in Konqueror). I don't think this was intended, so I'm letting you know it is happening. I don't know for certain if it is a problem on my side (some sort of ad block thing or other) or if other people are having the same problem. I'll check on another computer later today to see if that is the case.

Man, that's weird. I saw that happen once or twice also. The new ad network defaults to the old one (which defaults to AdSense), so you'd figure someone would have something to throw in there unless something is broken.

I'll keep an eye on this, but please let me know if you figure anything out w/this.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 21:20, 24 April 2008 (EDT)

Next, the Recent changes is strange, I'm getting edits done tomorrow at 13:47, which is impossible unless two of our admins learned the secrets of time travel (and if that is the case, I could use a few more hours in the day ^_^) Anyways, another item for the todo list.

I messed up while fixing the clock yesterday. We'd been ahead by half an hour which made it really hard to figure out what was going on... but while fixing it, I fatfingered the time and a few changes were made in the next few seconds before I fixed it. Oopsie! Oh yeah, that and Kiefer && Kingnee1114lyrics have been testing the new SpaceTime Extension for MediaWiki. It's in beta, but we might change it to a special page: "Special:Relativity". ;)

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 21:20, 24 April 2008 (EDT)

Also, if you mentioned about having logged in users have the option of where to put ads. If you need help with coding this, just let me know. It will probably be the weekend before I have any decent amount of time to work on it because of projects, but I'll help out the best I can.

Shweet... if I get some LyricWiki time this weekend, I'll chill in the IRC room and hopefully we can figure something out.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 21:20, 24 April 2008 (EDT)

Well, I think that is about it for now. If I come across anything else, I'll let you know.
- teknomunk (talk,E,歌,A) 14:51, 24 April 2008 (EDT)

It appears to be a problem on my side; on another computer it works just fine with IE and Firefox (unfortunately it is a Windows machine). I'll look into things more when I have time.

- teknomunk (talk,E,歌,A) 15:33, 24 April 2008 (EDT)

I want to say that I'm glad to know what I'll be doing tomorrow at 3:00-ish. Nice. Since I know this, I'm going to go skydiving, wrestle a few starving alligators, and finally tell Crash, my 6'-4", 260 lb. neighbor with all the snake tattoos, to stop revvin' his Harley at 2 a.m. or else I'm gonna kick his ass. See you tomorrow at 3!

On a more serious note, I'm also noticing that the "Send To A Friend" button is doubled on Artist, Album, & Song pages. Or maybe it's just me.    Kiefer    talk    contribs    admin   15:50, 24 April 2008 (EDT)

Shazzbot, yeah I have to fix that. I'll do that right now. (update: see note below next section)

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 21:20, 24 April 2008 (EDT)

It's not just you. This is because there are currently two different "Send to a Friend" pages on the server, one is a stand alone PHP page (yellow background), the other is a Special Page extension to MediaWiki (not the yellow background). Two different methods were used to insert the link at the top of the page. For the PHP version, the skin file was modified to force the link to appear whereas the extension uses a hook to modify the output. The PHP version will be removed when Sean gets time to do so (at least I hope so).

- teknomunk (talk,E,歌,A) 17:53, 24 April 2008 (EDT)

Yeah, I definitely intend to get rid of the old one. I started poking at the new one and found some weird bugs (probably because of the differences between your server and the LyricWiki servers?). They all look very quick to fix, so I'll attack them first thing tomorrow. Until then I just disabled the extension version. In addition to the tweaks, I want to figure out how to make the extension's new button show up on all pages (I don't think most users will know that this is caused by different namespaces and might be confused by seeing them sometimes and not others), then I'll switch to using just the extension button (I'll put the icon & such in there so it'll still look the same but will be super-cool because it'll use the special-page version). Man, I hope I get enough time to get this out tomorrow (looks like maybe half an hour will do).

If it's not up by noon EST, call my bluff and leave me scathing messages, lol.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 21:37, 24 April 2008 (EDT)

I am going to go ahead and vote that the new ad layout is a little less cool than the last. A) Having the ad right at the top like that causes problems when trying to click on 'watchlist' and 'contributions' and what-have-you. B) Its also coded so that if you block that particular frame (the ad itself) you get a void the height of the ad, anyway. If there is a way to fix this on my end, let me know.

King_Nee1114 (talk page • contributions • deletions) 20:42, 24 April 2008 (EDT)

Yeah, that new layout just isn't ready yet. I've reverted temporarily. I made it so that the page doesn't "shift" during loading by putting the CSS that makes room for the ad appear higher up in the HTML. It still has issue though since sometimes a shorter ad is shown, or no ad is shown and the tabs react poorly to these changes. More work to come on this. Hopefully I can iron it out soon enough for some people to be able to use it when we have the logged-in-ad-style-choosing deal going.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 21:20, 24 April 2008 (EDT)

As always guys, thanks for all of the input, feedback and help. I don't know how I'd do it without you all! (I'm barely pulling it off as-is, lol... I'm swamped).
-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 21:20, 24 April 2008 (EDT)

[edit] Software Updates

The code updates I sent in seem to have fallen through the cracks; it has been over a week and I haven't seen any changes to Special:Version. If there was any problems with any of them, please let me know so that I can get them fixed. Thanks.
- teknomunk (talk,E,歌,A) 13:08, 12 March 2008 (EDT)