Notes from #MetaBrainz Meeting 2021-08-09

[Freso]

MetaBrainz Meeting 2021-08-09

Meeting start: IRC Logs for #metabrainz | MetaBrainz Chatlogs

International Monday of the World’s Indigenous Peoples

Performance for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women

Agenda

• Reviews
• Make mb/user/edit redirect to mb/account/edit
• Improved MB monitoring
• MBS-9841: Warn about the new beta version on mb.o
• Trans deadnames and “credited as” as proposed in the forum

Reviews

@yyoung

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@yyoung

• Last week I enhanced the UX and UI of MBS-11680, implemented notices for existing URLs, fine-tuned details, especially tab focus and keyboard navigation, and wrote new tests.
• Added Flow support for URLCleanup.js and fixed detected bugs.
• Fixed old tests and adapted new tests for MBS-9902.
• Continued looking at code related to MBS-3774 and experimented modifying a little bit. (Surprised to find out that it seems no backend code change is required
• That’s all, thank you.

@lucifer

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@lucifer

Last week, I worked on migrating the remaining spark jobs to use new parquet dumps. all jobs are now able to use new format dumps. After that, i started reworking the tests. will continue working on that this week.
also, did some misc work on various PythonBrainz, some rabbitmq debugging. finally, a couple of brief discussions with @akshaaatt about the android app.

@rob

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@rob

last week I did some emails, some PRs, but mostly spent my time in a serious rabbit hole.
@mr_monkey pointed out that releases are not correctly matched in the mbid mapping, so I decided to add another pass to the lookup and identify and lookup albums in the listens stream.
should be simple, no?
right.
so now we have a solr (typesense is rather quite slow) index that if you pass it artist, release name, and recordings it will attempt to lookup the canonical release for that given data.
I’ve got a script that you can feed a release id and using just the metadata it will find the most canonical release.
that was a fun project and solr is dammned fast – I’m impressed.
next step is to throw real useful data at it to id albums.
but this too has been something we’ve needed for a long time – picard might be interested in using it. (@zas, @outsidecontext)
but I needed something with more text matching capabilities.
but this index is quite promising. hopefully once this work is done I will have an LB derived ISRC and spotify album, release and recording mapping.

@alastairp

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@alastairp

last week I pushed a PR to LB to start the task of moving the listens table to use user_id instead of user_name, this will make it easier for us to rename users. we think it’s almost there, I had some back and forth with @rob, and need to try a few suggestions
I worked with @lucifer on some pythonbrainz backend tasks, and had a large discussion about rabbitmq, lots of interesting questions about how we’re using it
@lucifer is doing a great job with looking at something in LB, saying “why are we doing it like that?” and then finding a bunch of improvements
I also continued some work on migrating AB react pages to typescript
oh, I also started some work on improving the way that we handle connections to external services (db, redis, rabbitmq) in LB, but this made me go down a, uh, rabbit hole

@yvanzo

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@yvanzo

Last week, I fixed search service once again but also welcomed @lucifer’s help with updating indexer’s code.
Reviewed @yyoung’s work always breaking through more issues hopefully identified soon enough and likely resolved today already.
Helped a bit @lucifer with setting RabbitMQ’s config for LB.
Plus support, and that’s all from me.

@reosarevok

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@reosarevok

Last week I mostly spent a fair amount of time trying to make sense of our guess case code, update it a bit to have flow types and whatnot
Also a bunch of Perl::Critic improvements (so, eslint for Perl, anyway)
And a bunch of small changes
Mostly recently requested things
This week I’m probably going to do more of that, really

@CatQuest

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@CatQuest

Have been pickling!
also been adding things to bb and writing up what will be more tickets for that.
so this week I’ll continue looking at bb and adding things and adding tickets!

@zas

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@zas

last week we got rid of old server williams, and got a new one, named patton
I reviewed and merged a lot of Picard PRs, mostly related to new feature introduced by @rdswift : options profiles
I also did usual maintenance, supervision, upgrades

@bitmap

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@bitmap

last week I worked on testing releases with tons of mediums in the relationship editor, integrating the new medium/track paging code we have for release pages
right now there is no paging at all…
also worked on improving performance when there are hundreds of recordings on the page. actions seemed sluggish at that point, and I was able to improve that quite a bit
other than that I was mostly reviewing @reosarevok’s guess case refactoring

@Freso

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@Freso

This last week I mostly dealt with a lot of reported editors and forum flags. Also dealt with some more potential LB spam. (Did delete one duplicate account who thought they had deleted that account already themselves.)
And other than that, just trying to be around and about.

@akashgp09

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@akashgp09

Last week I worked on: adding relationship attributes via relationship-editor
feat: set relationship attributes value in relationship-editor by akashgp09 · Pull Request #684 · metabrainz/bookbrainz-site · GitHub
Added new relationship for series and constructed some logic to separate series items from relationships
added new relationship type by akashgp09 · Pull Request #683 · metabrainz/bookbrainz-site · GitHub
Created Merge Tool for Series
feat: Series Entity Merging Tool by akashgp09 · Pull Request #685 · metabrainz/bookbrainz-site · GitHub
My GSoC task is almost done. I will finalize everything in 2-3 days and start preparing a report/blog on it.

@akshaaatt

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@akshaaatt

This week I was mainly focused on preparing the documentation and finalizing how I could scope post GSoC.
I’ve been thinking of ways to do that
Other than that it’s been a few weeks of studying a lot of concepts and stuff
Will work on finalizing stuff this week.

@jdaok

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@jdaok

last week I worked on some frontend stuff for the CritiqueBrainz review modal
and continued to refactor some code to implement making pins listenable with brainzplayer.
I still have a few tasks left for GSoC but will get some PR’s in this week.

@diru1100

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@diru1100

Hey Everyone Hope y’all are doing good, I am Rohit from last summer haha. Just wanted give an update that I finally graduated and working full time now :). Thank you so much for the support, especially @yvanzo for helping me out when I reached out. Looking forward to contributing back to the community

@ritiek

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@ritiek

last week i mainly worked on implementing search on more entities:
feat: implement search on entities by ritiek · Pull Request #69 · oknozor/musicbrainz_rs · GitHub
there are a few more entities still left and should be done this week

Make mb/user/edit redirect to mb/account/edit

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@Freso

So, turns out I’m not the only one having been caught by doing Editor “Edit” - MusicBrainz when they meant to go to Log in - MusicBrainz
Additionally, it turns out that the “edit” account has been unused since 2006 (almost 15 years now), has no edits, votes, ratings, tags, … to their name either.
They don’t even have an e-mail address.
The account would eventually get removed by some of the MBS tickets to clean up accounts, but I’m thinking it might be good to do it sooner and make /user/edit redirect to /account/edit
Any objections to going down this path?

It was noted that /user/edit redirecting to /account/edit might be confusing, so instead it was suggested to “take over” the edit user and put a note in its Bio text linked to /account/edit instead. This latter approach was agreed to be the path to take.

Improved MB monitoring

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@rob

so, we have a telegram group that we get reports about our services being in bad health.
but, it seems that it is easy to turn off notifications – something I really try and avoid.
for obvious reasons.
and in the end only @zas and I get the messages as of late and then have to digging around to see what is up.
I’d like to improve on this.
let me go on a tangent for a minute…
back at EMusic my boss told the web and hosting teams that every 500 error will get a “page” to the whole dev team.
every single one. at all times of day.
he felt that 500s were totally inexcusable and made the punishment for them rather high.
I’m not advocating that.
but I think it is an interesting engineering philosophy. what can we do do bring out 500s to near zero?
that is a more philisophical question, I would like the dev team to think about.
more specifically, I would like the MB team to think about how to improve this. turning off telegram notifications will happen again, so that isn’t a good solution.

@alastairp noted that there is currently not a lot of distinguishing between teams in the alerts, making it hard to tell what’s relevant to you.

@zas mentioned that he has “a bunch of ideas about improving monitoring and alerting”.

@alastairp additionally noted that he feels “like many alerts aren’t actionalable by anyone”.

@zas noted that he’s “delaying upgrading to grafana 8 which has many changes to alert system, and I would like to get rid of influxdb and replace it with prometheus (which would also make us able to get rid of nagios): then we need “per team” telegram alerts, which is quite easy to set up”

@rob and @bitmap agreed that @bitmap would coordinate with the MB team to figure out a short-term stop-gap measure. Also to have more team-specific alerts.

MBS-9841: Warn about the new beta version on mb.o

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@reosarevok

The general idea of that ticket is “how do we get more people to beta”
Do people think it’s too invasive to have a “go check beta” banner on prod whenever beta is out?

A full banner was deemed too intrusive. It was suggested a more targeted banner might be more appropriate, e.g. for auto-editors or experienced editors.

@Freso mentioned that the reason he doesn’t use beta is because he doesn’t want to remember to remove the “beta.” from copy/pasted URLs, which others were in agreement with.

In response, @Rob suggested routing traffic to beta based on configuration setting, so the URL would be the same. E.g., https://musicbrainz.org/edit/user would serve https://beta.musicbrainz.org/edit/user if a user has set the beta setting/cookie. This approach was generally deemed a good idea and @Rob asked the MB team to talk to @zas about implementing it.

Trans deadnames and “credited as” as proposed in the forum

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@reosarevok

The last issue involves this volunteer waiting in the forum:
Looking for advice on how to implement "credited as"
(only bringing it up because of them waiting)
We were talking earlier and their implementation seems like it would be misused a lot, and I was especially curious about @Freso’s ideas on how to deal with this.
One option would be to have some specific subset of users (account admins?) be able to set a specific alias as a deadname somehow
And that to make us treat credits differently
But I don’t have a good idea of how to do / maintain it without also bringing more unwanted visibility to the names, so
For now, does it seem fine to tell them that we’re looking at the idea in-team and seeing what we can come up with?
So they don’t just wait there for some answer?

This was acknowledged as a decent approach/response for now.

[jesus2099]

@Freso

MBS-9841 : Warn about the new beta version on mb.o

@reosarevok

The general idea of that ticket is “how do we get more people to beta”

for auto-editors or experienced editors

I did not realise it would be better that experienced editors would use beta more.

I would gladly participate!

But I have same concern as @Freso about leaving beta URL links everywhere behind me.

@Freso

@Rob suggested routing traffic to beta based on configuration setting, so the URL would be the same

The beta/main switch and route could be done the same as the language switch and route are done today, for instance.

[jesus2099]

@chaban

I use a clipboard manager that automatically removes [the beta. in URL]

It sounds good tool in general, could you tell its name?