Site News & Announcements
back to news archiveAn update on updates
10th September 2024Those of you who visit this site regularly will have noticed that database updates over past year or so have been few and far between. To start with I'd like to apologise for that. It is still my intention to keep hosting this site for the long term, but hopefully you understand that sometimes life can get in the way.
With that out of the way lets talk about the future. My promise going forward is that there will be at least one update per week and if I'm going to be away for longer than a week then I'll post a news post about it here. That is presuming of course that there are any updates waiting in the queue. But I have been consistently surprised at how many entries are still submitted each week and doesn't show any sign of slowing yet. It just goes to show how incomplete the original database was. There's been nearly 2000 new entries since this version of the site first launched.
A common question has been "would you like help moderating the queue?". The answer to this in the long term is probably yes. But at the moment the back end systems aren't really ready for this. I put this site together rather quickly and the main focus was getting the user facing front end functional. The back end admin systems are the bare minimum. There are quirks and workarounds that only really work because I wrote the thing. It would never really make sense to anyone else. There are still regular edge cases which need a manual database edits because there isn't a system for editing it yet. But now I'm back on this site more frequently I can start to develop and improve these systems for the long term. If/when I do form a moderation team, it will be users with a history of good quality submissions/edits to the site who get asked first.
The backlog of new entries and edits is mostly clear now. There are still a handful waiting to be processed but these are special cases which require extra attention. Particularly when it comes to edits they often end up with conflicting information and the only way to be sure is to source and watch the media myself to verify, which takes time. Some times in the past in my rush to clear a backlog I've let some less than accurate entries in and I'm trying to avoid that. If you ever submit something which doesn't appear then it's probably been flagged for additional verification.
Finally, there's the contact form. If you've tried to get in touch recently then unfortunately the message is probably lost in a sea of spam. Coming up with a new option to deal with that is high on the list of things to fix soon. I also have to admit I've been avoiding the message boards a bit knowing there there will be a bunch of messages asking why the site hadn't been updated, but you'll probably see me back there again soon.
Thanks for understanding, now let's look forward to the future.