Why not use Coalesce() in the Bestographies?

[MadhattanJack]

Okay, here's another low-priority issue.

I'm assuming most, if not all, of the data we see on BEA comes to us via SQL queries. Albums that don't appear high enough on any charts have a rank score of either zero (0) or NULL (an empty value). If the rank score is NULL, and you look at the detail page for that album, it tells you in the "Bestography" section that [album name] "is ranked - best out of" [total] albums by [artist] on BestEverAlbums.com.

If all the albums by an artist have NULL rank scores, you also get "The best album by [artist] is No album found which is ranked number 0 in the list of all-time albums with a total rank score of 0."

Now, it strikes me that none of this looks quite right, and — assuming it wouldn't slow down the server or something — it could probably be fixed by using the handy "COALESCE()" function in the relevant SQL queries, to make all the NULL rank scores come out as zero wherever it would be appropriate. (Alternately, the NULLs could just be updated to zero on a regular basis.) And if an album has a zero rank score, maybe just have the Bestography say [album title] "is unranked"?

Again, low priority, but I guess if you see it enough times it looks like a bigger deal than it actually is.

[albummaster]

thanks for reporting, not noticed that before (I must get blind to some of these things after a while). Which artist/album did you notice that for? All items in the database are obviously zero if they have no score e.g. this one & this one. If it's a brand new album to BEA, it might be possible that a score (or rank) hasn't been calculated yet, but might be missing an edge case by the sounds of it (or looking in the wrong place).

EDIT: found some examples - made a quick fix (artists with only unranked albums like you said e.g. Macaco - hidden bestography for now where there are no ranked albums for an artist, but making a bigger update in the background to mop up some other issues)

[MadhattanJack]

I see you've done some work on this and essentially fixed it, so thank you for that! However, there are still a few bugs of this nature buzzing around, some of which I didn't want to bother you with because they only affect unranked albums/artists that few people care about. But I do have one that you might want to look into in the near term, since I suspect it affects mostly better-known artists.

When an artist puts out albums under multiple name variations, the Bestography section tells you the artist-ranking of the album within the specific name variation rather than the rank for all that artist's names together. (I doubt this is intentional, but it theoretically could be, in which case just ignore this post...?)

Two good examples of this are John Mellencamp and Elvis Costello. Mellencamp has released albums as "John Cougar," "Johnny Cougar," and "John Cougar Mellencamp," as well as "John Mellencamp"; Elvis Costello has released albums with multiple backing bands (The Attractions, Brodsky Quartet, etc.) along with the ones credited only to him. (There are also lots of good examples in the Hip-Hop genre — Madlib is a good one.)

So... currently, if you go to the page for Mellencamp's Cuttin' Heads, the Bestography says it's his "3rd best out of 33 albums," but when you go to the artist page for John Mellencamp, it's ranked #8, because there are five other albums released under different name variations that are ranked higher, but still included in Mellencamp's overall list.

Likewise, with Costello's Spike, it's saying it's "3rd best out of 37 albums" when in fact it's #10. It's the #3 album credited to Costello by himself, just as "Cuttin' Heads" is the #3 album credited to "John Mellencamp," but obviously it looks wrong (since all the albums are combined into the one list).

As an aside, IMO it would also be better if the Bestography would say "[title] is ranked best out of 12 albums by [artist]" instead of "[title] is the best album by [artist]" (i.e., without the total count). But I guess that would just be more of a "nice to have."

Thanks as always!

[albummaster]