Alpha status and roadmap

BookBrainz
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Probably since the beginning, BB has a banner message saying “Under development — adventurous users, please test and add data! Give us feedback about bugs, glitches and potential improvements at MetaBrainz JIRA!” and the footer marks it as “alpha software”.

For a long time, I didn’t bother adding anything to BB, because “alpha” generally means there’s the risk of data destruction, I only started contributing when I thought it wouldn’t be too much work to add the same data to the OpenLibrary and BB. After years contributing here, I think this makes no sense, BB isn’t alpha, and it’s highly unlikely anything will be destroyed, but surely many aspiring editors give up before even trying when they see these warnings.

So, first of all, I don’t think we should be calling it alpha software, or warning editors against contributing in the home page. There’s no point warning that it is “under development”, all software is under development if it isn’t dead. It would be fair to call it “beta” or something similar, but nothing that would scare contributors always.

But, second, I think the main reason why it has stayed like this is that there is no clear roadmap to leave alpha/beta as far as I can see, there is no list of issues to resolve or features to implement, and if we don’t do that, there is no reason to think it will ever improve.

So I would like to give my list of top issues that need to be worked on before we can consider BB a mature project like MB.

  1. A subscription system that will notify/email you any changes to subscribed entities. (Ideally, automatically following any entity created, like in MB.) Currently, anyone can undo all your work and you would never know.
  2. Notifications/emails for notes/comments on your edits and replied on edits you commented on. We have notes for edits, but it’s completely useless, because nobody will be informed of notes.
  3. Web links to official pages, encyclopaedias, etc. (similar to MB).
  4. A clear view for entities, possibly with tabs, similar to MB. Currently, everything is dumped on the same page, often under no clear order. For entities with few relationships it’s usable, but for artists with many works, it’s already a horrible mess.

The following I think aren’t necessary to consider BB as mature, official MB’s project, but should also be on the roadmap:

  1. A 7-day delay on destructive edits. It seems to work quite well in MB, and makes perfect sense here as well.
  2. Votes on edits. Same reasoning as above.
  3. Images for covers and front mater (all pages that consist only of metadata and are not copyrightable).

The points above are just my opinion, I would welcome discussion and suggestions.

10 Likes
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It’s nice that your optimism is back, or still there? :wink:

The plan is good, but let’s look at reality.

The last attempts to program a functioning admin system date back to 2023, as far as I know. And look at the last three proposals submitted by programmers. What are they about? Setting up BB Internationalization and adding a Calibre plugin. Do we really need that right now?

I haven’t made any suggestions for improvement for about three years now. First, the basics need to be in place… those are the ones you mentioned, and nothing’s happened so far.

I’m not blaming anyone; the programmers are focused on MB, obviously.

BB will remain in alpha as long as any troll can simply delete data.

But as always: hope dies last…and it’s good that there are still people who don’t lose sight of the bigger picture :upside_down_face:

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I’ve never been an optimist, and I’m still not. I think BB, even in its current sorry state, is the best DB for books we have. There is no other that allows you to enter books and follow them across editions and translations, etc.

I also see what you mean, it’s clear it hasn’t seen much interest from the developers on last few years, who are mostly focused on MB.

I don’t think the proposals you mentioned are a problem. They’re mostly from students from GSoC who naturally need smaller, more manageable projects for a short period of time. They’re not moving BB forward, but they’re welcome.

The issue is we have no developer fully dedicated to BB, so naturally they only “put out fires”, fix something when it’s broken. But I keep thinking part of the problem is there is no clear roadmap, no plan. We’ve mentioned all of these things, like we mentioned the little things. What I am proposing is we decide what are the essential features that are still needed — I don’t think we actually ever did that. We can define a clear roadmap, with specific features, and decide when those are done, we can call BB a mature official project.

Of course, no matter what, we still need developers to take an interest — I can’t help with that.

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yeah, to my understanding, the big thing is the lack of developer hours on BookBrainz, and I think a roadmap might help, both as priorities for potential devs and for clarity to BookBrainz editors

one thing I might add (if not to the core roadmap, then to the extended roadmap) is documentation and style guidelines. I know @ApeKattQuest_MonkeyPython has been working on these a good bit

y’all think we should create a Jira ticket for this too? I think the Epic ticket type would work quite well for collecting multiple sub-tickets like this (and that way the devs that do come along would be a bit more likely to see it). I wouldn’t mind creating such a ticket

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I went ahead and created a ticket for this and added the already existing tickets to it

also added tickets for the voting system and destructive edits delay while I was in there

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hi! I’ve been meaning to reply here!
I agree very much with what people have been saying!

I agree “alpha” doesn’t quit fit BookBrainz anymore, but also especially that we need emails on revision notes and an in-site ability to communicate, like on MusicBrainz before it’s truly in “beta” territory.
infact, I created a “minimal usable interface” fix version that I’ve used for tickets I felt we’ve needed before we’re truly in shape, so please feel free to put some of those in the epic roadmap tickets well!

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yeah, quite a few of your tickets were already in there, @ApeKattQuest_MonkeyPython, but I did add some that weren’t already, lol

also, @mr_monkey, since you’re the BB lead, would you mind taking a look at BB-890 when you get a chance?

I don’t mind anyone adding to it or even taking stuff out, by the way, lol

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I’m glad to see support on a clear way forward for the project. But we really need to hear from the developers, if we are to have any hope of actual… development.

I wouldn’t. Additional documentation isn’t structural and doesn’t require significant work from developers. @ApeKattQuest_MonkeyPython can work on it as needed, and all of us can help. The bottleneck in this project is the frozen development, not documentation.

1 Like