Comments on: New feature: Achievements

By: Sean Colombo

Sean Colombo — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 21:43:39 +0000

Killerc: just to follow up: we’re only required to have copy/paste on Gracenote lyrics (not community lyrics) now, so the copy/paste restrictions have been removed from the main namespace (ie: all normal pages which don’t start with “Gracenote”).

Yay
– Sean

By: Sean Colombo

Sean Colombo — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 21:42:32 +0000

Hi adsf,
I agree that those pages are annoying, but the good news is that they’re going away.

We’re required by Gracenote to make it so that users cannot create pages that have titles on the takedown list which includes dozens and dozens of badly named titles, misspellings, and duplicates. Originally, we thought that creating these pages and protecting them from editing was the only way to safely accomplish this, but one of our admins has figured out that we can use MediaWiki’s “protecttitle” feature so that we can prevent users from making pages without having all of these essentially-useless placeholders gunking up our database, our special pages, and even our search results.

The admin (LWChris) was working on the bot to get rid of these yesterday and I imagine it will be done within a week or so.

This is still a community-run site and we’re all working to make it better every day, so we obviously don’t want junk pages. We don’t create any empty pages to bait people in with lyrics we don’t have. For example, if you google for lyrics you will often be brought to competitors sites which have pages which just say “We don’t have these yet… will you add them?”… on our site, we just have red links (like any other MediaWiki site these are used to indicate that the page doesn’t exist yet but we want to make it) and the destination page won’t exist until we ACTUALLY have content there.

Cheers,
– Sean

By: adsf

adsf — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 21:03:42 +0000

Lyricwiki seems to have converted to a spam approach. Many lyrics are “fake” in the sense that they start with a few words, and then go into the “unfortunately we don’t have permission…” line. This seems designed to artifically boost lyrics use statistics and pollute downloads.

Congrats at ruining a promising site.

By: Sean

Sean — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 16:24:16 +0000

Hey Killerc,
I completely agree that disabling copy/paste is counterproductive. It is a current requirement of our licensing through Gracenote (both of the possible licensors have the same requirement).

We’re working to try to get it changed and I’m pretty optimistic that we should be able to do-so within a month or two.

Thanks for the feedback,
– Sean

By: Killerc

Killerc — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 04:40:47 +0000

I’ve been away for a while, but disabling copy and paste on the lyrics section, really? are you that worried about people nicking content, it now makes it hard for me to update or correct people cause i have to retype or take out tags, neither of which is hard but makes the whole thing pointless to begin with. Enjoy, i’ve done alot of adds, updates and corrections cause i thought this was a great site, sorry im done. There are others doing this better, just thought this could become top, i will focus my efforts on the others. Ciao, muppets :s

By: Sean Colombo

Sean Colombo — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 17:55:13 +0000

Hi Jonathan,
Thanks for reporting that problem. There isn’t anything special you have to do to advance the counter, this appears to just be a bug (we weren’t aware of it previously). I created a ticket for it in our bug-tracking software, so someone should get around to fixing it soon.

Sorry that the feature is misbehaving, but I’m glad to hear that you like the feature other than that

Thanks again!
– Sean

By: Jonathan Titus

Jonathan Titus — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 01:11:56 +0000

I really enjoy the achievements, but it seems the counters for each achievement are not working as they should. For example, I have uploaded a number of pictures but the counter does not seem to advance based upon each upload (sometime it does and sometime it doesn’t). Is there something specific that I need to do to make sure the counter advances properly? Other than that I do enjoy adding information to the site.