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[edit] Other

[edit] Software version

Hi. I don't know if it's possible to upgrade to a newer MediaWiki version, but if you could do it, I think it would be cool. I think the new version supports auto edit reasons (when none given) and uploading of .svg graphics (at least, I think that's in the MediaWiki software and not in extensions).

But, seeing as there are some "extensions" which are more like "in-tensions", I have no idea how easy it would be to do this (without a lot of work / breaking anything).

Just a thought.

--Mischko <img src="/images/3/31/Talkicon.png" alt="Talk to me" /> <img src="/images/1/1e/EsperanzaIcon.png" alt="Esperanza Member" /> 15:54, 17 January 2007 (EST)

The new version also shows the number of added/deleted characters in the Recent changes list. Makes it much easier to detect spam. --Mischko <img src="/images/3/31/Talkicon.png" alt="Talk to me" /> <img src="/images/1/1e/EsperanzaIcon.png" alt="Esperanza Member" /> 06:03, 27 January 2007 (EST)

It would be a decent amount of work to pull it off without disrupting the site for too long, but it might be worth it... have you heard anything about whether it runs faster/slower on the server? -Sean Colombo 16:41, 27 January 2007 (EST)

[edit] API

[edit] REST returns REDIRECT

Querying a page with a redirect returns the redirect instead of the lyrics. E.g. the rhythmbox plugin tries to query the following page [1] and always returns

#REDIRECT [[Wir Sind Helden:Du erkennst mich nicht wieder]]

Ussaax 14:32, 19 February 2008 (EST)

The API can usually handle redirects... in this particular case, the reason it returned a redirect is that it was being pointed to a page with the same title, but the wrong capitalization. It then tries to fix this input to the correct capitalization and tries again (once again getting the same redirect page). It then detects the circular-redirect and stops from going any further.

I've moved the page to the capitalization which matches the Page name conventions that the API is using, so it should work now.

Thanks for letting me know about the problem,

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 14:38, 19 February 2008 (EST)

Thank you for fixing this page. I just checked alle the other songs from this band and found another one [2]. I tried moving Wir Sind Helden:Die Zeit heilt alle Wunder to Wir Sind Helden:Die Zeit Heilt Alle Wunder but failed as I cannot overwrite already existing pages. Could you please also take care of it. Thanks,

-Ussaax 16:35, 19 February 2008 (EST)

Fixed it. Thanks again,

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 08:49, 20 February 2008 (EST)

[edit] REST API artist name encoding

I observed problems with the encoding of artist names while using the REST API. Shouldn't "Maxïmo Park" be encoded as http://lyricwiki.org/api.php?fmt=xml&funct=getArtist&artist=Max%EFmo%20Park? However, this encoding does not return any results while http://lyricwiki.org/api.php?fmt=xml&funct=getArtist&artist=Maximo%20Park does. This isn't the desired behaviour, is it?

(Fuzy 07:17, 4 January 2008 (EST))

You are correct that this is an error... I'll try to fix it ASAP.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 21:02, 5 January 2008 (EST)

Thanks for reporting this encoding bug with getArtist()... I think I've fixed it now. The links above should both work for you now.

Thanks again,

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 21:42, 5 January 2008 (EST)

Great, thanks! But one more thing: Looking at http://lyricwiki.org/api.php?fmt=xml&funct=getArtist&artist=Armor%20For%20Sleep . I found another potential problem: <item>Walking At Night%2C Alone</item> Why is this encoded while Maxïmo Park (to stay with the first example) isn't?(Fuzy 10:51, 7 January 2008 (EST))

Turns out that was just the way someone typed it on the Armor For Sleep page... they literally used the "%2C" instead of a comma. I changed that to just a normal comma to make it a little less confusing.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 17:40, 23 February 2008 (EST)

[edit] Server Stuff

[edit] Upload Problems with LRCs

Sorry to dump so much on you at once, but another issue has come up. I have been talking with Senvaikis about getting timed lyrics uploaded and have run into a problem: .lrc files will not upload.

I don't really understand the LRC problem... they're on our list of ok filetypes. From what I remember way back when, this might have been a problem with the server's detection of MIME-types. TODO: Look into this more.

-Sean Colombo 20:00, 9 October 2007 (EDT)

[edit] Autotemplates

Also, Senvaikis came across another problem, one with the automatic templates. Pagenames such as The Band That Does Not Exist will result in an fLetter=B instead of the fLetter=T. It is stated on Help:Contents/Editing/Formatting/Artists#Artist Templatethat

Send "Sean Colombo/Archive/2008 Jan 27 - 2008 Feb 23" Ringtone to your Cell

The following guidelines apply to the fLetter entry:
* The very first letter should always be used, even if the first word is A, An, or The. EX: fLetter=T
* If the first letter is a number, then use: fLetter=0-9
* If the first letter is a symbol, then use: fLetter=Symbol

Send "Sean Colombo/Archive/2008 Jan 27 - 2008 Feb 23" Ringtone to your Cell

So either the template code needs to change or the Help section does.
- teknomunk (talk,E,歌) 16:06, 9 October 2007 (EDT)

Dang, somehow the docs got confused. One of the main purposes of having those categories (probably THE) main purpose was to organize by the first real letter, not "The [whatever]". I've fixed the docs.

Thanks for catching this,

-Sean Colombo 20:00, 9 October 2007 (EDT)

The problem is that the first letter of "The Rolling Stones" is T, not R. What there should be, is a subcategory for T for all the "The" bands. [[Category:Artists_T/The/R]] or somesuch thing, I guess. There was the recent question about why David Bowie was under D and not B. By this thinking, it should be under B, since he is a single person, who is normally categorized by last name. I think that this may be a slippery slope with more if/thens than is foreseen. Is this the way things are normally categorized in German, Italian, French? Der Kommissar should be listed in Category:Songs_K? Ace Of Base:L'Amour should be under Category:Songs_A? I definitely prefer the K.I.S.S. method. --Kiefer <img src="/images/5/58/KieferE.jpg" alt="Esperanza" /> <img src="/images/f/f9/KieferTalk.jpg" alt="Talk!" /> 20:53, 9 October 2007 (EDT)

I see where you're coming from. If we don't do "The" by "T", it's hard to have a simple set of rules that people understand. The motivation for not using the "T" was that many titles that start with "The", people don't even realize. For example The Prodigy and The Offspring... many listeners would be baffled if they looked at Category:Artists_P and Category:Artists_O and didn't find those (and wouldn't even think to look under Category:Artists_T). But if there is that rule, then it's hard to say why "A" and "An" are still under "A".

 :-/

I've reverted the docs back to the way they were.

Any thoughts on how to solve things like The Prodigy and The Offspring, etc.? My thoughts either:

1. It doesn't matter... they'll use the "search" box and find it. Categories are just for browsing. OR
2. Categorize them under both letters. The Prodigy would be under both "T" and "P".

Regardless of how this ends up, I'll update the autotemplates and we'll be ready to rock. I'm designing a second generation of ÜberBot that will do a bunch of things, and among them will be simple page maintenance of any page he touches. Also regardless of the decision: something has been messed up, so the bot will have to fix it.

Thanks for catching my blunder,

-Sean Colombo 21:14, 9 October 2007 (EDT)

I'm leaning towards listing them under both. A hard-wired Category addition can be done for the secondary letter after the article, and adding that instruction to the Artist Help page should be simple enough. (I don't think I'm much of a fan of trying this with the album or song pages, though. The sheer number of "The" titles will likely make the Categories so completely clogged with items that the list will be a true chore to go though to find an item and therefore basically useless.) The Search function should help find special items, though. --Kiefer <img src="/images/5/58/KieferE.jpg" alt="Esperanza" /> <img src="/images/f/f9/KieferTalk.jpg" alt="Talk!" /> 21:57, 9 October 2007 (EDT)

[edit] Software Update

Hello, are there any plans to update the mediawiki software? The version used now doesn't allow articles with a plus sign in it, while the version Wikipedia uses allows them as you can see in this article --MetalSnake

[edit] Case sensitivity and database changes

I know that I don't have the time to do this right now, but I think we discussed somewhere else about adding an additional field in the database to allow case insensitive titles. I know you are busy with getting the API load under control, but I thought I better at least put a comment here to remind you (and myself) about this. When both of us have time, remind me and I'll help get this started.
- teknomunk (talk,E,歌) 16:34, 6 November 2007 (EST)

[edit] Just so you know

I'm adding some Javascript code to MediaWiki:Monobook.js (the Collapsible tables stuff). If it breaks, I'm the one to blame. The reason I am adding it is because after adding a box that has all the songs in an anime (Anime:Inu Yasha) I realized how large it was and unsightly at the bottom of the page. So this is so that the box can be collapsed.

Also, I have begun some preliminary work on making MediaWiki case-insensitive. What I have right now allows case insensitive page views, but I still have a bit of work to do before it is stable. I'll let you know how it pans out.
- teknomunk (talk,E,歌) 22:40, 7 November 2007 (EST)

I worked on this a while ago and have some of the functionality working, but I ran into a bug and haven't gotten back to it yet.

[edit] Just thought I'd let you know

Don't know if you have a more definite answer, but from the best I can tell Chumbawamba:Fight The Alton Bill! was the 500,000th page created (using Special:Statistics and Special:Newpages). It was uploaded by none other than your Überbot. If it wasn't for my Physics class I would have tried to do it. So, I just thought I'd let you know and see if you had a more definite answer. --WillMak050389 12:06, 8 November 2007 (EST)

Cool idea to check! I really should have thought of that before spewing 15,000 more pages on top.

I looked at newpages, and stats, but I think we'd have to also look at the deletion log... (and then even take into account any of the deleted pages that weren't "good" pages to begin with). All of the pages that UberBot added should be good, but some that were added by humans might just be redirects or talk pages or whatever.

Hmmmmm....

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 12:20, 8 November 2007 (EST)

[edit] Uberbot Stuff

[edit] New Überbot Creations

Is it possible for Überbot to avoid creating pages with special characters? Looking at Special:Lonelypages, it seems that the bot has trouble handling quotes ("), amperstands (&) (see [3]), and other accented/special characters (such as ñ) (see [4]). Also, I found the following: 蜜雪薇琪:爱能不能不变, which is completely incorrect, but I imagine it has to do with the Japanese characters. Hope this helps. --WillMak050389 10:49, 5 November 2007 (EST)

Great catch. I've paused UberBot until I fix that.

Thanks,

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 10:52, 5 November 2007 (EST)

I've added htmlspecialchars_decode (well, a Perl equivalent that I just wrote) to ÜberBot, so he shouldn't have this problem anymore. We'll have to keep an eye out for this I guess.

Thanks again for finding that!

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 11:37, 5 November 2007 (EST)

Hey, concerning “special characters”, I’ve noticed that ÜberBot creates pages that contain literal HTML-Entities like &auml; or &szlig;. See for example Christian Anders:Du Gehörst Zu Mir. If you view the page source, they are even double-quoted: &amp;auml;. Hs 09:49, 7 November 2007 (EST)

[edit] Satarial (UberBot Encoding Probs)

Could you check Satarial please? Janitor added some songs to it, which were created by Uberbot, but no symbol seems to be correct at the names and lyrics. Seems like a encoding prob at Uberbot. --MetalSnake 13:35, 21 November 2007 (EST)

Wow, that's messed up. Thanks for pointing it out. I'll chase down the error.

Thanks again,

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 14:17, 21 November 2007 (EST)

I think it has to do with Cyrillic texts. Nokturnal Mortum has the same problem with a bunch of their songs. They are Ukrainian whereas Satarial is Russian (both use the Cyrillic alphabet). --WillMak050389 22:47, 22 November 2007 (EST)

But the song names of Satarial are more or less German, at least those song names I know. --MetalSnake 09:54, 23 November 2007 (EST)

Not Good!

I was looking at what Uberbot had been adding lately in the Special:Lonelypages section, and I noticed that songs 33400 to 32529 are...odd. They look a lot like Saterial, and there are quite a lot of them. Is there a way to massively rollback something that Uberbot did, or shall I get to it manually?

King_Nee1114lyrics 23:18, 23 November 2007 (EST)

PS: Upon further research, Uberbot cannot handle Japanese either. For Example: 宇多田ヒカル (Hikaru Utada):Workout appears just fine, but the song template shows by 宇多田ヒカル (Hikaru Utada)

[edit] Not Categorized Yet

[edit] Ads

There was an item brought up on Talk:Main Page that I somewhat agree with. Is there any way we can have fewer (or no) dating ads and more of stuff like the music ads I see every once in a while?
- teknomunk (talk,E,歌) 02:05, 12 November 2007 (EST)

Yeah, those get old. Unfortunately our ad service is AdSense which goes through to 24/7 if there are no AdSense ads, which means the majority of the ads come from content-analysis, then advertisers bidding on keywords. So in the current way... I don't think there is much control. The best solution would be to sell our own ads (which also pays way better since people can purchase based on demographics of your audience - which we know from surveys). Once I have a second to breathe, I think this would be a great thing to do since the ads would be a lot less annoying and a lot more cost-effective (which would make up for all of that API traffic). Who do you think we should target? I think it's best to avoid music companies directly since they may just pull the "well, we could just sue you if you don't give us the ads for free".

I was thinking these might be good advertisers:

1. T-Mobile (they sponsored a videogame, so they might be more hip).
2. Other mobile providers.
3. The US military (they love our demographic... but only the US part).
4. Ticket sales companies (Ticket Master / Stub Hub).
5. Video game companies (especially those that make Guitar Hero III or Rock Band, etc.)
6. Coke
7. American Apparel
8. Mountain Dew
9. MP3 Electronics companies (Apple's iPod, Microsoft's Zune, etc.)

Any other ideas??

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 02:15, 12 November 2007 (EST)

Any independent or less mainstream music artists would probably be a good idea; there have already been a few adds on the site of that type. Basically, I think that anything selling a product (music,games,computers,software,etc.) and not a service (like dating,translation,dating,etc.) would be good.

- teknomunk (talk,E,歌) 02:29, 12 November 2007 (EST)

It would probably be pretty safe to try the indie labels (esp A-F Records, Fat Wreck, Go-Kart, etc.- those guys are punk and don't seem very likely to sue you) though I don't know how willing they would be. I agree with Teknomunk about the products over services and I would also suggest avoiding issue ads and political campaign stuff.

CladInShadows 14:52, 23 November 2007 (EST)

[edit] How can donations be legal for a commercial entity?

(Originally in LyricWiki talk:Site support)
A commercial entity is supposed to take payments and give invoices. Only nonprofit organizations are legally allowed to take donations (and give special invoices in return). So I just wondered how does your company officially report this unofficial incoming money? Don't get me wrong, I'm actually curious. -Lwc 19:38, 17 November 2007 (EST)

I don't know how the law works in this regard, but if this is the case, this needs to be fixed ASAP.

- teknomunk (talk,E,歌) 19:43, 17 November 2007 (EST)

I'm not really sure what the deal is... I assumed that you could give money to whomever you wanted, it just wouldn't be tax deductible or anything. But this weird enough that I've commented out the donation section temporarily while I check with a lawyer. If people still want to "donate" maybe we can just be "selling" the link on our list of patrons/donors.

More info to come...

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 21:07, 17 November 2007 (EST)

I don't personally have anything against it, I just don't want to have any financial problems to cause the site to close and I thought it better to let you know that let it bother me.

- teknomunk (talk,E,歌) 21:48, 17 November 2007 (EST)

I checked it out with a lawyer, and it's on the up-and-up, we just have to make sure it's clear to them that they can't get a tax deduction for it.

Thanks for bringing it up.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 21:55, 18 November 2007 (EST)

I thought no one wanted to reply and then for a total unrelated reason came here and was suprised to find my question. Anyway, you all read the wrong thing from my question. Of course everyone can give money to anyone! The problem is...those (whether persons or entities) that file IRS reports at the end of the year cannot just take money from everyone without giving back an invoice (nonprofit organizations give invoices just as well). So please realize the huge difference between giving money and taking it.

See, I'm not worried at all about the donators. Their IRS reports won't even mention these expenses as they're not tax deductible. But it's the other side - the commercial entity - you - that I'm worried about. What will happen when your company files its yearly report to the IRS and won't have invoices to explain some of the revenues (that are probably documented in your bank account)? You can't tell the IRS those are donations because your company is not allowed to take donations. -Lwc 16:53, 20 November 2007 (EST)

Hi. We track donations (which it turns out that we are allowed to take) the same way we track any other revenue. It ends up getting rolled into EBITDA (earnings before interest taxation depreciation and amortization) and taxed as any other income. The long and short of it is that the IRS doesn't care if the money comes from a donor or from AdSense. The account balances on PayPal, etc. change the same regardless of the source and are taxed identically to other revenue.

Thanks for your concern,

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 19:09, 20 November 2007 (EST)

How come you're allowed to take them without being a nonprofit organization? And do you give back invoices then? If not, maybe in your yearly report the IRS doesn't care, but should it ever check your books, then your revenues must match up to your invoices. -Lwc 20:10, 20 November 2007 (EST)

I guess the answer to "why" is simply "why not"... there is no law against it (and no reason for there to be one, I guess). As for the invoices, we haven't given any invoices for donations, but we also don't give back invoices to AdSense or Amazon when they pay us for ads/affiliate commission. As long as we balance our books and have records, everything is kosher. Conveniently, these records happen to be public if you're interested: LyricWiki:Past_Donations. I guess if a donor asked for a receipt of some kind we could give it to them, but it wouldn't do too much for them since it's not tax deductible.

Later, :)

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 20:22, 20 November 2007 (EST)

Again you're thinking of the other side. My question is how do you balance your books? A "record" for an income simply means an invoice. -Lwc 06:52, 21 November 2007 (EST)

Maybe we're just using different terms to say the same thing then? When you said invoice, I was thinking of basically a bill/receipt (see Invoice). But there are a bunch of other accounting methods, and since invoices (in the sense that I was using it) don't make sense with our business model, the "records" are just entries in a spreadsheet (example system).

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 09:53, 21 November 2007 (EST)

Just a side note - please reply about the newarticle template (just search my name above).

Anyway, when you buy, say, in a supermarker, you get a piece of paper with your, say, $100 bill, right? You can call it invoice or call it something else, but the bottom line is you get a piece of paper. Then, if the IRS ever checks their books and asks "where did that $100 come from?", they'd show the IRS their copy of your bill. Now imagine you walk in, give the clerk the same $100 but tell him "this is a donation and I don't want to buy anything". The supermarket is not a nonprofit organization, which means you walk out without a piece of paper. If the IRS then ever checks their books and asks "where did that $100 come from?", it would be like it dropped from the sky and trouble would follow for them. -Lwc 11:27, 21 November 2007 (EST)

[edit] Server optimization

I just wanted to let you know that lately some odd things are happening, with the most frustrating being a 30 second to 2 minute lag between a page being updated and the page showing the updates, along with longer load times when loading an edit page. I know you are busy with this, so I just wanted to let you know what was happening with what I have seen.
King_Nee1114lyrics 14:35, 18 November 2007 (EST)

[edit] Band Name Being Interpreted Incorrectly

Hey Sean, there's this band called StorySide:B, and I noticed that their page was incorrectly titled "StorySide", and then I realized that this was, of course, because of the colon in the name. Rather than the ":B" being attached to the band name, a "B:" is in front of all the song titles. Just wondering what to do about this? Thanks! Lizz7372 22:38, 3 December 2007 (EST)

Hey,

Thanks for letting me know. It was a quick fix so I went ahead and moved the artist page and updated the links (the pages were already in the right place conveniently!). Check it out: StorySide:B

Thanks again,

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 23:24, 3 December 2007 (EST)

[edit] Malformed Pages added By Uberbot

Sean, could you have a look at Special:Lonelypages. At about the 600th item it starts listing pages that uberbot messed up the encoding on. There are so many of them I don't want to delete them manually, but I also don't want to unleash a that I wrote on it (not that I really have time to do it right now, I need to start studying for finals). I don't really have any suggestions on how to fix it, but I wanted to at least let you know that it is happening.
- teknomunk (talk,E,歌) 17:21, 8 December 2007 (EST)

Wow, there are a LOT of pages there :[

I'll put that on my list of stuff to look into. Thanks for the heads-up,

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 20:22, 8 December 2007 (EST)

[edit] Autogenerator Problems

Do you know much about the autogenerator that some use? The last few days, every autogenerated page has had /* Empty */ where the lyrics should go. I've been deleting most of them because quite a few have had track numbers in the pagename or other problems as well. (04.Garth Brooks:Good Ride Cowboy, for example, versus Garth Brooks:Good Ride Cowboy which has lyrics.)    Kiefer    talk    contribs    admin   13:55, 11 December 2007 (EST)

Not sure what the deal is there... it's with the WikiLyrics plugin that User:Attendant made though, so I'll see if he knows what's up. Thanks for pointing this out,

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 14:27, 11 December 2007 (EST)

[edit] iTunes Importer

Hey Sean, just wanted to let you know about a little Google code project called ilyrics, which imports lyrics from this site into iTunes. Seems to work great so far, check it out! Tjg50311 21:20, 22 January 2008 (EST)

[edit] ÜberBot just doesn't like me...

Or at least not some stuff I do.  ;-) He appears to have a problem with em dashes (—), which are a quite valid character for Unicode, and insists on replacing them with A's with circumflex accents (â). Noticed he did that when moving today's SOTD over.

Mind taking a peek at that sometime? I'd be willing to compromise and forego some of the more exotic Unicode characters, but I'll defend my em dashes to the death.  ;-)

—  jF 00:43, 26 January 2008 (EST)

BTW, ÜberBot also missed placing the badge on the appropriate page.  ;-)

—  jF 06:40, 26 January 2008 (EST)

[edit] On Silbermond - Das Ende vom Kreis

http://lyricwiki.org/Silbermond:Das_Ende_Vom_Kreis

I was listening to the song. On the last line, she sings "am Ort, wo vor dir keiner war", not "am Ort, wo keiner vor dir war". This line is also sung as the 6th of the song, and it is written correctly there.

[edit] User Access Problems

Aqualover (talk • contribs) notified me about a problem he is having with his account (You can find pictures here on my talk page) I don't have any idea what would cause this beyond a messed up browser or incorrect code generated by MediaWiki. When you have time, would you look into this.
- teknomunk (talk,E,歌) 12:23, 28 January 2008 (EST)

WTF? That's crazy. Will respond on the main convo -Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 13:56, 28 January 2008 (EST)

[edit] Song Template alteration

I've added a new comment at Template talk:Song#Altering template about changing {{Song}}. I'd appreciate it if a few of the "veterans" around here looked at my comment and replied before I changed our most used template here. --WillMak050389 14:37, 30 January 2008 (EST)

[edit] Page templates

I don't want to pile too much on you, but I thought that I'd mention this to you before I forgot. When you create a new page, it guesses what type of page you are trying to create, but if it is wrong and you try to select one of the other templates, it just gives you <artistTemplate> or <albumTemplate> or <songTemplate>. --WillMak050389 00:20, 31 January 2008 (EST)

[edit] Esperanza Newsletter Updated for January

[edit] Changes to {{Song}}

I don't know if you have seen us working on this yet or not, but I thought you would probably want to know about us tinkering with one of the main templates here, {{Song}}. We have yet to switch over to the new version, but what we have done so far should be backwards compatible with the version already in use. The discussion so far is over here. I will also be leaving a note in the community portal to see if we can get additional feedback before the switch is made.
- teknomunk (talk,E,歌) 03:51, 2 February 2008 (EST)

[edit] meet the admin template

In the making of {{admin}}, I noticed (while I was hijacking the code for my sig) that some color codes in there that were not being used. I was wondering, was this more what was the original plan? It at least makes the links uniform, until one visits them (as I couldn't get vlink working).
Also: Have you had any luck with batch-adding watch pages?
King_Nee1114 (talk page • contributions • deletions) 01:56, 4 February 2008 (EST)

I think you're right on their original intent, but I didn't make that template so I'm not positive. I do like the template though, that's cool :)

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 11:21, 4 February 2008 (EST)

[edit] Cannot Edit John Prine:We Are The Lonely

Hello Sean, I'm trying to cleanup the John Prine entries, but I cannot edit "John Prine:We Are The Lonely" because of the lyric "Seeks x-x-x at the g-y-m" These are the actual lyrics ... John Prine is a funny guy. The spam blocker complains. It says to contact you or another admin. I am just trying to add the album link to the Song and SongFooter templates. BTW, this is my first time adding to a talk page, so I hope I do it correctly. Thanks, Augie 18:40, 6 February 2008 (EST)

Hi Augie,

Thanks for the help! The part of that lyric which is being blocked unfortunately has to stay in the filter (there's quite a bit of spam for that), but since the filter doesn't apply to admins, I fixed up the page a bit. We probably need a better way to handle pages like this where they have known issues with the spam filter, because the page is basically frozen to everyone but admins right now, and that's kind of lame. :-/ I'll keep it in the back of my mind to try to figure out a better way to handle this.

Thanks again for reporting the issue and for all of your contributions on the site,

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 19:56, 6 February 2008 (EST)

Thanks for fixing that page. Maybe you could let only users with accounts bypass the spam filter. Or make users type in the text from graphic box (ala TicketMaster.) Regardless, keep up the good work! I enjoy LyricWiki a lot. Augie 11:37, 7 February 2008 (EST)

[edit] foxytunes

For a while now, a web extension called Foxytunes had a widget that used LyricWiki's site for lyrics (which is actually the way that I found my way here, a long time ago). In the last week, they have removed it, cutting us off from a lot of people. Assuming we do want our site on Foxytunes, I suggest that anyone who has Foxytunes to tell them that it's unfair. They seem to have replaced our page with Yahoo Lyrics, which hasn't worked for any songs that I tried to find (ironic), and I've seen Yahoo make some other great apps into crapheaps.
King_Nee1114 (talk page • contributions • deletions) 20:39, 6 February 2008 (EST)

As it turns out, there is some backstory to this. When FoxyTunes was adding LyricWiki to FoxyTunes Planet, they contacted me directly to help me solve some of the unicode issues with the API. They have a very multi-national team and were a great help. Recently they were acquired by Yahoo (hence the switch) and right away, Alex contacted me to explain why they had to take down LyricWiki support (I hadn't noticed yet). He went out of his way just to let us know and to say that he was sorry it had to be like that.

From what I understand, Yahoo! Music is the flagship customer of GraceNote's lyrics program, through which they pay money to GraceNote for using lyrics. As part of this deal, they probably have to use GraceNote for all of their lyrics. FoxyTunes really doesn't have a choice now that they're a part of Yahoo! Music. I'm just happy that the conversion went by without any legal issues since GraceNote is the most likely candidate to spark off any future rounds of legal battles in this area. Now we basically know that they're aware of us and they haven't decided to jump on us.

It's sad to see FoxyTunes go since they were a great service and I think we did a much better job of serving results than the new system, but in the end it's just a weird contractual obligation, and I'm honestly more afraid of provoking GraceNote (the legal fees to fight these things are annoying and the site might end up temporarily down until something like that was resolved) than I am worried about trying to regain this partner.

I probably should have posted something as soon as Alex emailed me, but I didn't think realize other people would care so much (I'm quite pleasantly surprised! :D)

Thanks for bringing this up,

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 21:54, 6 February 2008 (EST)

OK, that makes sense. I am sad to see it go, too, but as soon as I saw the Yahoo logo, I knew it was probably a contractual thing...Hey, that's life.

King_Nee1114 (talk page • contributions • deletions) 22:22, 6 February 2008 (EST)

felixen

Hi. First of all I've never posted on these wiki-things, so sorry if I'm just editing one post and not posting a whole new post.. Not really sure what to do here :)

Anyway, awesome program. I use it with my iPod touch. The thing is that I have a lot of hiphop music, and it doesn't seem that very much of it is covered in this program. I know this site called ohhla.com, which is very accurate and has almost all the lyrics for my songs. I was wondering if you (or I) could somehow embed the lyrics over there into your program, so it would update my songs?

Again, sorry if this is not how I should contact you. I looked for email addresses and everything, but this is the only way of communicating I could find. my mail is oliversaylor2@hotmail.com if you need to contact me via mail and not here..

Thanks

[edit] Testing

See if you get an email.

[edit] New Disam Template

I came up with a way to create a placeholder for songs with several parts (i.e. Arcade Fire:Neighborhood 1 (Tunnels) and Arcade Fire:Neighborhood 5 (Hockey)). I took some cues from Wikipedia and made a {{Disam}} template. So, I just wanted to let some know it's there. It's great for multiple 'hidden tracks' from one artist, or about a third of Pink Floyd's songs. Category:Disambiguation Page
King_Nee1114lyrics 03:52, 31 January 2008 (EST)

P.S. I am interested in feedback, if any, but right now I am going to sleep, so leave a message.

[edit] I Hope That Makes Things a Bit Better

First off, once again I archived stuff to help out, so I hope you don't mind. Next, on to business.

[edit] Bug in Batch Move script

I found a bug while using the batch move script. If for some reason the target prefix has a space in it, that space will be used, when it should not be. Feel free to send me the script and have me fix it if you don't have time yourself.

Left a note to get clarification... will pursue asap after response... should be a quick fix.

Like for instance 'Utada Hikaru' to '宇多田ヒカル (Hikaru Utada)_', where there is a _ or a space at the end of the name. Basically, the artist name.

- teknomunk (talk,E,歌,A) 18:22, 23 February 2008 (EST)

Oh, cool... I've added the following line to the beginning of the doBatchMove() function:

$from = trim(str_replace("_", " ", $from)); // SWC 20080223 - removes trailing spaces

The next line converts the spaces back to underscores, so that should be safe.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 22:47, 23 February 2008 (EST)

[edit] Possible Admins

I don't know that we are in need of additional administrators, but I though I would let you know this anyways. There are a few people I have been watching for a while that seem promising. The main two are Aquatiki (talk • contribs) and jF (talk • contribs). They have been around for a while and have the type of attitude that is needed. I have my eye on another user, but he hasn't been around long enough for me to say that I would be comfortable nominating him. If you want to know the name, I could email it, but I don't want to let everybody know until I was comfortable nominating him.

Every time you nominate someone, the first thing I tend to think is "wow, they've been all over, I kinda thought they were already admins".  :) Always great suggestions. I've left them messages on their talk pages to see if they're interested.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 16:41, 23 February 2008 (EST)

I only nominate people that I see often in my RSS feed, make good edits, do good discussions, ect. In other words, admin-like activities. And they have to be around for a while doing these types of things.

- teknomunk (talk,E,歌,A) 18:21, 23 February 2008 (EST)

Rock on. Aquatiki is now an admin and jF declined due to lack of time.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 22:47, 23 February 2008 (EST)

[edit] The extension that could do so much (and yet is still sitting in the inbox)

This is a reminder that I send you some code that does the following:

• Adds several magic words to the software.
• Allows additional page templates to be created by admins (list would be at MediaWiki:ExtraTemplates, and templates would be at MediaWiki:*Template)

Uploaded & added to LocalSettings. Although I don't see the new page for ExtraTemplate (yet? could be a caching issue... always hard to tell), the other stuff appears to be loaded correctly.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 16:54, 23 February 2008 (EST)

It is behaving correctly; no additional page should be added. It is set up so it has to be done manually by an administrator.

- teknomunk (talk,E,歌,A) 18:21, 23 February 2008 (EST)

[edit] Japanese

There seems to be a surge of users adding Japanese lyrics, to the point that I am considering filtering the RSS feed so that I can manage the Japanese and everyting else separately. This is one of the reasons that I would like to see the move extension added is that myself and another user DarthNemesis (talk • contribs) have been adding listings of anime opening/ending/insert themes here and the complexity of the code basically requires copy+paste. An extra template would make this easier.

With the new extension stuff in there, you'll be all set then? Or did I miss something?

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 17:11, 23 February 2008 (EST)

It should be. Thanks.

- teknomunk (talk,E,歌,A) 18:21, 23 February 2008 (EST)

[edit] Album Page Transclusion

Also, it seems that there is another couple people interested in transcluding album pages into the artist page so that changes to album pages are shown on the artist page. I've let them know what problems I ran into when I tried doing this some time ago. While I was thinking about some of the problems, the idea came that one of the magic words in the above extension would make things much easier.

Cool, which magic work are you referring to? I think the main issue with transclusion (beyond speed) is just that newcomers will come to the site and try to edit an artist page and just be totally confused if they see a bunch of lines like {{:ArtistName:Album Name (9999)}} and no track listings in sight. We could lose a lot of potential contributions if ppl are confused or intimidated by that kind of thing. That alone doesn't mean that we shouldn't do it... it's just something to keep in mind. If we go into album transclusion, maybe we should figure out a place on the page to add some explanation of what that code means so that newer users can understand it.

Back to my question... which magic word was it?

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 17:11, 23 February 2008 (EST)

Specifically, {{PAGETYPE}} and the parser function {{#ifeq:{{PAGETYPE}}|Album|Album page only stuff here}} would be what I was looking at.

I would love to see page transclusion stuff, but I will be taking things slowly, especially since this has failed once already here.

- teknomunk (talk,E,歌,A) 18:21, 23 February 2008 (EST)

As always, it is your site and you get the final decision on what goes on the server. I don't know what kind of CPU increase this will cause; there will be up to three additional regular expression matches per page not in cache.

If you ever need anything, please let me know, I'm more that willing to help.
- teknomunk (talk,E,歌,A) 15:57, 23 February 2008 (EST)

Thanks for all of your help. I'm sorry I let things get so far behind. I hate doing that, especially with things like your extensions where someone has put a bunch of work into something and they're just sitting around waiting for me. Speaking of which, I still need to look into that SOAP stuff for .NET (blargh! that's tricky).

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 17:11, 23 February 2008 (EST)

Not at all (the extension took something like 15-20 minutes to write). And in regards to .NET, why does microsoft always make things harder than they need to?</rant>

- teknomunk (talk,E,歌,A) 18:21, 23 February 2008 (EST)