While sorting the bands for WOA 2010 Event I had an idea.
This has probably been discussed to death and denied for a couple of thousand times but I decided to give it another go.

I realized that when ordering bands by popularity (which we are to do by metalstorm law) the only means of differenciating bands is by their fans index. But said index is generated by parsing the varchar[255] field in each profile and recognizing bands by name. This has a side-effect that is unique to metalstorm. The biggest players in the scene are set off from the others far more than elsewhere. Most of us obviously feel we should only include our most important bands in our fan list and mostly decide (because of the small size of the field) to leave the less 'important' ones out.

Now I don't know why this is handled in this pretty esoteric way. Usually one would have an extra table in the database that would hold 'fanship' records saying 'user x is fan of band y'. Apart from the possibility to be a fan of an arbitrary number of bands, this would also have the advantage of the database itself being in charge of data-handling. I assume that the parsing of the favourite-bands-field is performed by the controlling logic of the page, which would mean it's done in php. A database is highly optimized for parsing these kinds data which can't exactly be said about php. So there's the advantage of increased speed and gained flexibility at the cost of one more query per display of a users or bands page or the top list.

So I suggest this to be changed. Hold the fan-relation in it's own table and allow users to add bands to their profile at will. The old system could then be used to point out the real favourites from the others or be discarded alltogether. I would say there are about 30-50 bands that I consider myself enough of a fan of to add them to my list while there are about five of them that I would carry to the forsaken island and therefore the list as it is now.
After the users have adapted to this change, I think the top bands list will look quite a bit different, with more of the (now) less preferred bands further up the list and an overall closer reflection of the market situation which is normally used to derive preferences.

I can't imagine you guys haven't thought of this. But it is still beyond my why one would go for a system like the one in practice on favor of the clean relational solution.

Actually, there's a separate table connecting users with featured bands. The text input (the list of your favorite bands) is only parsed when you edit your profile or when a new band is added. So it's not entirely backwards and inefficient

However, you have a valid point here - I can just add another field to the user-band table for non-featured bands and get rid of the text field in user profile table altogether. Will take care of it tomorrow if I have time.

I see you did it. Cool. Let's see how it develops then.

One other thing I realized today is this:



Every band has an invisible band with a random number as first similar artist. I don't know if it's related but I first realized it today.

That isn't a new bug. I have seen it quite a few times before, but then when I edited the band or made them visible or something, it went. That's all I can say though.

Now it looks like a time-variable phenomenon. This afternoon when I first saw it, all the bands I was looking at for testing had it. Including Slayer. And now none of them show the bug anymore.

Wait, so now there's no limit to how many favourite bands we can have in our profile?

Written by Warman on 21.12.2009 at 03:06

Wait, so now there's no limit to how many favourite bands we can have in our profile?

positive.

Written by corrupt on 21.12.2009 at 02:23

Now it looks like a time-variable phenomenon. This afternoon when I first saw it, all the bands I was looking at for testing had it. Including Slayer. And now none of them show the bug anymore.

That's because I fixed it

Just a question: when calculating your neighbours in your collection it seems it doesn't take your favourite bands into account any longer. Is that on purpose?

Written by GT on 22.12.2009 at 11:57
Just a question: when calculating your neighbours in your collection it seems it doesn't take your favourite bands into account any longer. Is that on purpose?

I assumed the previously-100-ish points for a same favourite band were greatly reduced in order to eliminate a bug, but it looks like a bug is still present: even after clicking to Update my neighbours, the hover-tooltip for one of them says we share one favourite band, but looking at our profiles it's actually more than five.

edit after v - looks good now, thanks

Eh, silly mistake on my part. Now it's OK

OK, here's another suggestion that came up in the Wacken thread. Sorting bands in Events such as festivals automatically by popularity index. For normal tours or concerts, the order in which bands are submitted matters of course, but for festivals, more and more bands pour in over time and it's at the hands of the one who's submitting them each time to put them in the right slot. In the WOA thread I took about half an hour a couple of weeks ago to order all bands by their (at that time) current fans index. (It's possible for two or more bands to share the same index btw). Now GT had the idea to sort bands by name instead of MS relevance and there my work is gone. And there's the other side-effect of a seemingly different appreciation of the same bands through different events. A unified way of dealing with this, in my opinion is a (albeit small) aspect of the 'face' of a community. Help people who come from other places to find event pages on MS to see how the lineup is valued in this one.

And it's not more than one ORDER BY statement before presenting the data anyway