Future album three month limit - Suggestions

Rhyner

soft silly music is meaningful magical

Gender: Male

Age: 38

Location: Utah

Here's a suggestion.

It doesn't make sense to add unreleased albums to year, decade, and all-time charts, and it doesn't make sense to rate tracks of an unreleased album, so if an album's release date is in the future, then these things simply shouldn't be allowed. It could still make sense to add the album to custom charts, such as "Future Releases I'm Looking Forward To" or similar, so that would be allowed, and really should be the only way that future releases are added to the site anyway.

And then, since rating unreleased tracks makes no sense, maybe unreleased albums shouldn't even have the option to add the track lists yet. (And anything other data moderation aspects that are consuming Romanelli's time.)

Users who have unreleased albums on custom charts could receive a notification when those albums' release dates arrive, and then they would have the option to add them to charts that contribute to the point scores (and add the album's tracks to the database). If, however, an album is never added to any points-contributing charts, it could exist in a sort of limbo where its unmoderated status doesn't show up the same way in the "Newly Added Albums" tab (and thus Romanelli doesn't have to add a track list), and then after some period of time (perhaps six months or so?), if it still hasn't been added to a year, decade, or all-time chart, it is flagged for deletion. At this point, perhaps another notification could be sent to any users who have the album in a custom chart, to give them one last chance to add it to their other charts and make it a permanent database addition.

To guarantee future releases are properly flagged, perhaps it should be a requirement that a release date is entered when adding an album to the database. (Year at least, and if that year is the current year, then the specific date as well.)

And if an album is leaked early, someone could flag it as such and a high-level moderator could manually switch the album over to be in the released state, so users can add it to charts and rate tracks, etc.

Unless I'm mistaken, this would solve most if not all of the issues.
Data moderation would be much less of an issue, because only albums that are eventually added to points-contributing charts would ever need the full treatment of it, and albums that don't ever end up on such charts would vanish quietly.
asimpkins could add and track future releases without fear of their contributions being deleted.

I'm sure I'm missing something, but I hope this idea at least nudges the conversation in the direction of an agreeable solution.

Cheers!

albummaster

Janitor

Gender: Male

Site Admin

Rhyner wrote:

It could still make sense to add the album to custom charts, such as "Future Releases I'm Looking Forward To" or similar, so that would be allowed, and really should be the only way that future releases are added to the site anyway.

Thanks very much for all your thoughts, but as far as I'm aware, that's the only way a future release should be added right now as they don't qualify for other types of chart (people might try and add these albums to other types of chart, but they won't be awarded any points and they'll have limited visibility).

Rhyner wrote:

And then, since rating unreleased tracks makes no sense, maybe unreleased albums shouldn't even have the option to add the track lists yet. (And anything other data moderation aspects that are consuming Romanelli's time.)

In the distant past, it was decided to allow this as albums are 'leaked' ahead of release and people wanted to be able to rate them (Smile Sessions might have been one of these). Track lists help validate whether an album qualifies for the site (or not), and so are a by-product of allowing future releases (and track lists are pretty useful for site visitors).

Rhyner wrote:

Users who have unreleased albums on custom charts could receive a notification when those albums' release dates arrive, and then they would have the option to add them to charts that contribute to the point scores (and add the album's tracks to the database). If, however, an album is never added to any points-contributing charts, it could exist in a sort of limbo where its unmoderated status doesn't show up the same way in the "Newly Added Albums" tab (and thus Romanelli doesn't have to add a track list), and then after some period of time (perhaps six months or so?), if it still hasn't been added to a year, decade, or all-time chart, it is flagged for deletion. At this point, perhaps another notification could be sent to any users who have the album in a custom chart, to give them one last chance to add it to their other charts and make it a permanent database addition.

Additional reminders are definitely worthy of more thought, but I'm not a big fan of deleting albums & reducing the database. Some albums are late burners, nobody notices them at first and a while later they are acclaimed.

Rhyner wrote:

And if an album is leaked early, someone could flag it as such and a high-level moderator could manually switch the album over to be in the released state, so users can add it to charts and rate tracks, etc.

This is part of the reason that a big pool of future releases on BEA is so high maintenance. Albums are already checked manually every day (by myself and others) to see if official release dates have been met, and release dates adjusted if not (leaks do not count as official releases). On Fridays (the most popular day, by far, for new releases to happen), this is a massive time hog.

asimpkins wrote:

In the absense of this dedicated source field, would moderators find it helpful if I left a source URL in the admin comments when adding a future album, or would that just be messy and/or an innappropriate use of that feature?

Anything like that is always helpful, thank you (and a perfect use of the comment field).

asimpkins

Quote:

maybe unreleased albums shouldn't even have the option to add the track lists yet.

Another downside I see to this is that the original contributor might often not return prompty to add the tracklist on release day and now the moderators are looking at finishing the tracklist for dozens of albums. It seems much easier to me to let the tracklist be added when announced (or any time after) and then the moderator only needs to verify on release day (and occasionally make tweaks). If contributors want to add data for you, then you should let them!

Quote:

This is part of the reason that a big pool of future releases on BEA is so high maintenance. Albums are already checked manually every day (by myself and others) to see if official release dates have been met, and release dates adjusted if not (leaks do not count as official releases). On Fridays (the most popular day, by far, for new releases to happen), this is a massive time hog.

It's not important, but I still am having trouble understanding this part, and it might be why I'm having trouble seeing the value in a date cutoff in the first place.

I assume you don't literally check every future release every day to see if the release date has been met? I assume you run a query to see what unverified albums are scheduled for today (or prior to today) and then verify those?

If it's the former, that seems like a crazy amount of work and maybe you shouldn't do that? If it's the latter though, I still don't see why delaying when an album can be added changes how many you ultimately have to verify on a release day. It doesn't matter if that Gorillaz album is added months in the past or months in the future, you will still need to verify it one time on 3/26/2026. There seems to be a belief that a temporal rule will lead to quantity outcomes that I'm not understanding.

Romanelli

Bone Swah

Gender: Male

Location: Broomfield, Colorado

Moderator

The more albums added, the more work. It doesn't get any simpler than that.

Some users do the work on albums they add. Those users tend to not work on albums they didn't add.
Some users add albums (lots of them) and leave them to be worked by others, and do not work on albums added by others.
And some people (maybe 3) add albums, do the work on them, and do the work on albums that other people add.

Speaking for the third group, I think that until more people decide to help out with data moderation as part of that group that there should be no new concessions to existing rules that add (even a little) to the existing workload of data moderation.

I think that's fair.
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MadhattanJack

Just to end the list

Gender: Male

Romanelli wrote:

I think that's fair.

For what it's worth, I agree completely — I tried being in the third group a few months ago for about 3 weeks, and it was OK at first, but the problem (in my opinion) is that well over half of the albums that come in that way will never get a single ranking point. It's a bit frustrating.

I'm not saying it's a complete waste of time or anything like that though, since (also in my opinion) it's good to have more-obscure records already there in the database in case someone eventually wants to rank them somewhere. (Or maybe not, I don't actually know!) But the backlogs — which I realize aren't always that extensive — would definitely be a lot smaller if people had to add new albums without artwork and tracklists to "point-bearing" charts.

Which actually reminds me of another suggestion I had, by the way: Every item in a single-year chart, even #100, should be worth at least one point. I know that will cause a lot of reshuffling in the "middle of the pack," probably in favor of more-recent releases, but I actually think that might be a good thing.

asimpkins

Huh, well I think the point that restricting when albums are added has pretty much no long term effect on the number of albums added is pretty simple too. But I won't beat a dead horse.

On the subject of the "third group". I'm happy to help the site out, but I honestly have no interest in completing other user's half-assed entires that nobody else seems to care about. I'm diligent about making my entires as complete as possible. When I come across data issues on other entries I'm looking at, I try to report them. I've added a lot of recognized charts and done my best to fill those in. If there are other opportunities to chip in, I would strongly consider them.

But some random person on the internet that wants to dump a bunch of obscure titles and then take off? No way. It goes beyond not wanting to do the work to not wanting to incentivize that type of behavior. It's like if my kids walked into the kitched and dumped their finished meal on the floor. Sure, I could clean it up, but I'm not going to. I'm not going to setup a precendent that I will do your work for you.

Of course, if other people are okay being part of that dynamic, that's fine. But as MadhattanJack mentioned above, I suspect that's probably a big part of the reason why you aren't getting much extra help in this area.

There also seems to me to be some incoherence here. I hear stuff like "BEA has never been the place where every album needs to exist" as the justification to not make multiple other requested changes. But isn't this situation the perfect place to apply that foundational thinking? You sound seriously overwhelemed by this task. Do these obscure albums that were mentioned once by someone who didn't care enough to add any details really need to exist here? Could your time be spent more productively elsewhere?

Rhyner

soft silly music is meaningful magical

Gender: Male

Age: 38

Location: Utah

albummaster wrote:

Track lists help validate whether an album qualifies for the site (or not), and so are a by-product of allowing future releases (and track lists are pretty useful for site visitors).

asimpkins wrote:

Another downside I see to this is that the original contributor might often not return prompty to add the tracklist on release day and now the moderators are looking at finishing the tracklist for dozens of albums. It seems much easier to me to let the tracklist be added when announced (or any time after) and then the moderator only needs to verify on release day (and occasionally make tweaks). If contributors want to add data for you, then you should let them!

Good points. The idea of not allowing tracks for future albums is probably the wrong approach. I hereby retract my endorsement of that idea.
But I still stand behind the idea of treating albums differently (data-moderation-wise) depending on their release status, and whether they're on "points-bearing" charts or not.

albummaster wrote:

Additional reminders are definitely worthy of more thought, but I'm not a big fan of deleting albums & reducing the database. Some albums are late burners, nobody notices them at first and a while later they are acclaimed.

I don't know. If it's true that:

MadhattanJack wrote:

well over half of the albums that come in that way will never get a single ranking point

...then what's the point of having them in the database? If an album gets deleted for inactivity and later turns out to be a late burner, it can always be added again. Is avoiding that potentiality for the relatively few late burners really worth all the effort of data moderation for all the albums that are never added to points-bearing charts?

albummaster, you've reiterated multiple times that BEA is not intended to be a comprehensive database of all albums. Discogs and RYM exist already, after all. This is a site for ranking albums in charts. If an album is never ranked in a chart, what's the point of it being on the site? I say delete it from the database. (In the rare case that it turns out to be a sleeper, it can always be re-added later.) And if it's never going to be ranked in a chart, why bother putting in the effort to moderate its data?

Romanelli wrote:

I think that until more people decide to help out with data moderation as part of that group that there should be no new concessions to existing rules that add (even a little) to the existing workload of data moderation.

Bingo. Don't make Romanelli do admin for albums that no one cares about. Just delete them.

But regardless of your ultimate decision on whether to delete albums with no activity, I still think data moderators such as Romanelli should not feel compelled to spend hours tidying up and making presentable albums that will ultimately fade into complete obscurity. The solution could be as simple as redoing the "Newly Added Albums" page to hide--well, not exactly hide, but make harder to find--albums that have a high likelihood of never really deserving to have their data fully moderated. Maybe such albums (unreleased albums, and released albums on no points-bearing charts) would only be findable on the "Newly Added Albums" page under a tab on the "View albums" drop-down menu that only appears to level 8 members, and maybe only in red font or something, to indicate that there's no expectation for anyone to bother moderating them until they're actually ranked on a chart. You could also add an obvious warning on the admin page for these albums that says something along the same lines. (Eg. "Warning, this album has no chart points! If you want to moderate the data on this album, consider ranking it on one of your year, decade, or all-time charts first. You are not expected to do data moderation work that may ultimately be in vain.")

This would make those albums basically invisible to anyone who's not actively looking for them. Anyone could still find them by searching (which includes the search bar to add them to a chart), but maybe making them much less visible to the general user would make data moderators like Romanelli more comfortable ignoring their "unmoderated" status. (I don't know, Romanelli, what do you think?)
The data moderation workload would then be restricted to only those albums that get chart points. I think that would make things easier for Romanelli, and asimpkins and anyone else who wants to could still add future releases to their hearts' content. Am I missing anything?

I still think albums that get added to the database and then are ignored for the rest of time could be deleted without causing any issues. You could even make the rule ridiculously forgiving, something like "If an album is in no points-bearing charts and has seen no rating or chart activity for five years, it gets flagged for deletion."

asimpkins

I would be disappointed to see completed data get deleted even if it had no points. Sure the primary purpose of the site is the charts and the rankings, but if it wants to draw the attention and traffic that supports that purpose, there needs to be at least a little flexibility for other album related endeavors. Albums might be on my chart and fall off, but still have valuable ratings, comments, and flags set. Or maybe I'll change my mind and want to bring it back. I have to-do custom lists of albums I plan to check out eventually. And custom charts allow for other fun ways to group music that provides more reasons to come to this site and contribute.

Not to mention that already completed albums are not driving the heavy workload. If anything deleting completed albums just opens up the door for them to be readded and reprocessed over and over again.

But older albums that get named dropped somewhere with no details? How notable can they be if they've never showed up on a recognized chart? How notable can they be if not one single champion has bothered to add and fill in the details for the last 20 years? What could be more "not all albums need to exist on BEA" than something like that?

albummaster

Janitor

Gender: Male

Site Admin

Rhyner wrote:

albummaster, you've reiterated multiple times that BEA is not intended to be a comprehensive database of all albums. Discogs and RYM exist already, after all. This is a site for ranking albums in charts. If an album is never ranked in a chart, what's the point of it being on the site?

The fact an album has been added at all, means it's already in a chart (and others here have already said they don't want their albums being deleted), so whose albums shall we delete?

We've had thorough debates in the past (very interesting discussion where a lot of current policy was decided) and will continue to do so (this present discussion is very useful in that regard).

The site has had a 90 day policy for over a decade (which has mostly been working fine accepting the huge load) but only in the past few days is one person questioning it. I thought we'd reached a conclusion a few posts posts ago, where we spoke about the suspect period in addition to the 90 days period, which I thought people were content with (it's how the site has functioned for a long time and the site has always been a bit lenient with future releases if they are a few days over (coincidentally, linked album also an example of where a title was changed prior to the release date, demonstrating there is data maintenance of future releases).

Rhyner wrote:

But regardless of your ultimate decision on whether to delete albums with no activity, I still think data moderators should not feel compelled to spend hours tidying up and making presentable albums that will ultimately fade into complete obscurity.

There's no need for anybody to feel like they have to do everything (no matter how amazing their contribution). I've been in that position before (it's how the data on the site got seeded for the first six years before the admin pages were created and then opened up after thousands of albums had already been added). It's a struggle when you're the only person, which is why data admin tools were added in the first place, but there's a collective of people here, and it's the collective that can help (if they want to get involved), and that goes for all aspects of the site and not just data admin.

Rhyner wrote:

The solution could be as simple as redoing the "Newly Added Albums" page to hide--well, not exactly hide, but make harder to find--albums that have a high likelihood of never really deserving to have their data fully moderated. Maybe such albums (unreleased albums, and released albums on no points-bearing charts) would only be findable on the "Newly Added Albums" page under a tab on the "View albums" drop-down menu that only appears to level 8 members, and maybe only in red font or something, to indicate that there's no expectation for anyone to bother moderating them until they're actually ranked on a chart. You could also add an obvious warning on the admin page for these albums that says something along the same lines. (Eg. "Warning, this album has no chart points! If you want to moderate the data on this album, consider ranking it on one of your year, decade, or all-time charts first. You are not expected to do data moderation work that may ultimately be in vain.")
..
I still think albums that get added to the database and then are ignored for the rest of time could be deleted without causing any issues. You could even make the rule ridiculously forgiving, something like "If an album is in no points-bearing charts and has seen no rating or chart activity for five years, it gets flagged for deletion."

Those ideas are great (and practical) and could definitely help with the existing setup; and if these kinds of changes are successful, maybe that's the catalyst that helps ease the burden (takes the pressure off) and allows rules to become more relaxed.