DB Continuous Development Thread v1 ("Beta" Thread)

[Vlansix]

Hi Guys,

This will serve as the alter-ego to the LaunchBox Beta Testing thread.

Please let us know if anything doesn't work as advertised, or anything needs revamping a bit :). I'll post most of the new developments here so as to not flood the forums with updates.

Thanks!

 

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Useful Links:

Console Metadata Thread

LB Beta Testing (6.8+) Thread

Chrome Extension - DB Search Thread

Firefox Addon - DB Search Thread

Edited November 12, 2016 by Vlansix

[SentaiBrad]

Sweet! This is exactly what we needed, a slightly more active place to discuss and figure out some Database stuff. The BitBucket is great for reporting and keeping track of things, but it still doesn't beat a thread!

[FistyDollars]

Alright, let's get it started:

SO I was submitting Alternate names today, and going through the Changes Status pages, it looks like some games had names submitted that I had added to different games. I've attached a screenshot because I'm not sure how to describe it. There are quite a few errors like this in my pending changes.

[Vlansix]

Hi Fisty, I'll look into that right away. I'm thinking it's just a listing issue, shouldn't actually affect anything other than display right now, although I don't like seeing that o.O, thanks for the catch

EDIT: @FistyDollars - Fixed now. Lemme know how it looks :).

Edited November 12, 2016 by Vlansix

[SentaiBrad]

[Vlansix]

Just found an issue as I was looking for an example of a game alternate name moderation request. Please don't select the "Year Only" checkbox and then add a date with special characters in the text field below. The server won't like it, and it'll crash the moderation pages with a 500 internal server error. I'll filter most of them out from now on, but it's still good practice not to do it :).

In any case, i'll fix it in a few minutes, but aye. Special characters are bad. If you fall on this entry, it won't go past moderation until I get to it. 

Edit: Fixed now. But ugh

Edit 2: Going to go to sleep now, I'll get back on this stuff in the morning working on the comments made on the announcement board. Be aware, we're encountering some instability due to some characters being encoded somewhere and causing problems with our form validation and crashing everything. It's something I'm looking into as well, so, if you encounter a 500 internal server error, please report it to the bug tracker with as many details as possible :).

Edited November 12, 2016 by Vlansix

[Vlansix]

I lied. Last quick fix is being uploaded now. The moderation view will now show the impacted game, like any other change request. Enjoy :).

[Cebion]

Man Alex you're god send  

With Jason on LB and you on the DB this is going to the next leve.

[FistyDollars]

My issue's fixed, thanks @Vlansix!

[Vlansix]

Morning guys,

So, quick update- fixed https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/issues/170/bug-multiple-images-section-in-new-game 

I'm currently looking into making the details page look a bit better. Once i'm done with that, i'm either jumping on the encoding issue that's causing all the random crashes or fixing the extremely slow moderation speeds. Let you know once i'm there :).

@Cebion - Thanks! We're doing our best :). To be fair, I'm not a webdev guy, so this is taking a bit longer than it should, but I'm glad to be of help :).

Edit: Introduced another error while fixing the above bug. Already fixed, will be pushed up shortly, as well as fixing the aesthetics of the details page.

Edited November 12, 2016 by Vlansix

[Vlansix]

So. Currently fixing the bloody crashes that have been happening randomly (see https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/issues/145/confirmed-server-error-in-application )

 

Here's the thing. We have a lot of corrupt data in the database. It's nothing major, as the fix I'm implementing will remove it whenever someone sends a change request to an impacted game, but the issue is as follows- It'll send the correction as a change request, which needs to go through moderation. Sadly, due to the limitations of text processing (and the fact that I don't have a supercomputer to do the text analysis required), I won't know if the fact that there are four linebreaks in a row, all encoded differently, was intentional. Or if there's a bunch of ampersands, all encoded differently, was intentional. So, all i'm doing now is correcting their encoding so they don't break anything and work with the rest of the database's systems, but it may cause some edits to look odd. I was thinking of adding a header to the change that says something like "[AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED CHANGE - PLEASE ALLOW]". We'd still need to remove that afterwards, but it'd help mods notice that "Oh yeah, the fact that these two paragraphs are separated by fifteen linebreaks is normal. We'll just need to fix it afterwards."

 

EDIT: Actually, nevermind. It's obvious in the edit screens what's happening, everyone will see it. Here's a screenshot.

 

Edit2: Online now. I've ran it through a bunch of problematic entries, and it seems to work well. Lemme know if it doesn't :).

Edited November 14, 2016 by Vlansix

[Evil_Orko]

thanks for the progress!

[Vlansix]

So. Moderation speed has been fixed now, just waiting to pass it through Jason first, and I'll upload it. Should be ridiculously fast. I'll be adding a way to see your prior archived changes in a little bit. (i.e. you won't be able to see any changes that you had approved/denied prior to today. This is normal. It'll be fixed shortly :P)

 

Matchplan for today is-

1. Get the mod speed fix online (EDIT: Done)

2. Upload the platform metadata @In virtute Dei has painstakingly scraped together to the platforms, as well as edit all of the images that need editing

2.a - @Cebion - Started looking into fixing the alternate character issue. Depending on how it goes, the DB should be able to support pretty much every single language when I'm done. The issue i'm seeing is scraping through LaunchBox for those characters, but we'll look into that later. Basically, what I'm saying is: Half of it will work (the DB), but LaunchBox may not be able to scrape those characters until jason or myself start looking at the parser within the executable to make that possible. Still, it's an improvement :).

3. If there's any time left (depends on how long 2 will take), start working on some of the moderation enhancements on the issue tracker.

 

Edited November 16, 2016 by Vlansix

[Vlansix]

So, mod speed increase is online. As stated above, all the approved/denied changes that were previously sent in for moderation have been archived. I'll add a means to see those soon, but, for now, just enjoy the speediness of it all :).

[FistyDollars]

Not gonna lie, I'm a little sad that the number of changes/moderations I've done is gone. It was kind of a point of pride. But whatever, I'm glad mod speed is a lot faster now!

[Vlansix]

No worries, it'll come back :). Just gotta make it parse the archived tables as well.

[Cebion]

It's ridonculous fast! Well done alex!

[Vlansix]

So, worked a bit on platforms, but we've had a few hiccups on the way. Going to check out the bottom navbar positioning bug now and get back to that in a bit.

[grupoapunte]

Hey Guys!

I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask but wouldn't it be great to have some crowdsourced fields like:

- Number of times a game was played (This way it would be easy to create a ranking internally in bigbox to sort the games)

- Average number of start or votes for a game (same as above it could be used as a sorting method)

- Number of users that have the game between their favorites (another sorting method)

- Most used emulator per game (to help people better setup their games)

Of course this should all be aggregated metrics in order to maintain privacy.

 

Thanks, and please let me know if I should post this in another place.

 

By suggestion of @In virtute Dei here's the ticket for this feature: https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/2064/add-community-db-fields-like-total-number

VOTE FOR IT IF YOU LIKE IT!

Thanks.

Edited December 8, 2016 by grupoapunte

[In virtute Dei]

@grupoapunte Those are great ideas, but they probably would not be implemented for quite awhile as they get other things done on the database before moving on to stuff like that.  If you leave a enhancement ticket on the bit bucket, I'm sure people would upvote it though .