Tech Suggestions

Introduction

This is a page for storing suggestions for tools or new site features. If something becomes agreed upon it can move over to the Todo List.

Online Help

Lionel brought up the issue of online help on the editor's list:

> Although I'd also eventually like to see a glossary of all the terms we
> used tied into the interface (both the end-user and the OI interfaces).
>   So that, as an example, if you see Imprint on the screen, it would be
> a hyper-linked word (along with all the other field labels).  Clicking
> on it would take you to an appropriate link in our wiki
> glossary/formatting document, where we'd spell out what the term means
> in general, and any particular quirks regarding our specific use of the
> term

DB Sanity Tool

It would be nice to have a tool that scans the database and compares all of the "cached" values with the authoritative values in the primary tables for the given column. For instance, if you compare the issue "numbers" for Catman Comics in the issues table vs the covers table, they are quite different. The issues table is the authoritative source in this case, so the differences should be flagged and the covers table fixed. There's a lot of stuff like that, I think. According to Jon, some of these things are checked and updated by the lasso code when a record is updated, but if it hasn't been updated since that code went in things might be out of date.

Cover Scan Management

Here's a conversation from the mailing list about covers:

And I would think that comparing pictures in this regard is technically
doable, the question is if easy accessible code for that is available.

Jochen

Lionel English schrieb:
> I think one thing that would also make the job easier is if we had a
> place for a "last known good" scan.  When replacement scans are loaded,
> the current scan would be bumped to a "last known good" area instead of
> deleted, and if there were problems with the new scan we could easily
> restore the previous one.
>
> It might also be nice to have a feature (and I don't know if this is
> possible) that would prevent people from loading a replacement scan that
> is identical to the current scan.  Maybe a mod to the program that
> resized the incoming image, then did some kind of checksum comparison
> against the current image, and if found to be identical the replacement
> would be rejected with a message indicating "The scan you're trying to
> load appears to be identical to the one currently marked for
> replacement.  Please load a new scan."
>
> Mike Nielsen wrote:
>> Well, I'm not a senior editor so I should probably shut the hell up
>> cause I don't know what you guys have talked about but here's my two
>> cents... :)
>> 
>> It's probably more than a one man job.  A couple of people who keep an
>> eye on the new covers directory, and maybe a mailing list for those
>> folks to discuss things about a suspect cover.  Then any requests to
>> the error list for a replacement cover can be sent to these folks to
>> look over and decide if a new cover is really needed.
>> 
>> Obviously, when I say someone needs "the balls" to tell someone no, I
>> mean we should be nice about it.  I assume that goes without saying. 
>> The Valente thing makes me angry, and I'm sure Jim is tired of marking
>> them only to see him reload the same damn cover over and over.
>> 
>> Which reminds me I need to scan my Essential Super-Villian Teamup book
>> and get it loaded so it's one less Jim has to deal with.  I'll try to
>> do that tonight Jim.
>> 
>> 
>> Mike Nielsen
>>
>> */Donald Dale Milne <[email protected]>/* wrote:
>>
>>    And, I think that if there's anyone here with the balls to tell a
>>    potential uploader that we already have a perfectly good cover, it's
>>    you
>>    too.
>>
>>    Actually, I believe that it's inevitable there will be problems with
>>    some contributor sooner or later, as some of our contributor's scans
>>    would be frequently deleted. I suspect that anyone who would be a good
>>    cover editor would have to bounce some scans, fix some scans as
>>    permanent, and maybe go as far as Mike suggests and outright ban some
>>    people.
>>
>>    - Don Milne
>>