Notes from #MetaBrainz Meeting 2025-03-24

[aerozol]

Meeting start: IRC Logs for #metabrainz | MetaBrainz Chatlogs
Meeting wiki page: MetaBrainz Meeting - MusicBrainz Wiki

Agenda

• Reviews
• AI Defence

Last meeting: 2025-03-17
Next meeting: 2025-03-31

@reosarevok: Welcome to another MetaBrainz Monday Meeting!

Reviews

@derat

[mailed in] I sent a fix for MBS-13967 and uploaded an early draft for MBS-13711. Still working on the latter to try to make false positives less likely.
[MBS-13967: URL fragments are escaped by doc_link TT macro]
[MBS-13711: Prompt beginner users about likely capitalization mistakes]

@aerozol

[mailed in] A bit sick again! What the heck. It’s crazy. Others here have been sick more than usual this winter as well. Maybe this is the new normal?
MeB work wise, still quiet times, the usual keeping on top of social channels and a few ticket discussions.

@ApeKattQuest_MonkeyPython

[Jigen] Same as last week, had a good meeting with Monkey, working on TOC, spanish and zine.
easter is cmming up! taking a break and watching LoTR then

@jasjeet

[jasje] Last week was business as usual
PR reviews

• Reviewed gsoc proposals

@yvanzo

Last week I deployed a Jira security update for our tickets.
Thanks to bitmap, lucifer and reosarevok, getting MB search development back on track.

@zas

Last week, I spent a lot of time mitigating extra traffic generated by scrapers (as the week before…). More on this later during the meeting.
Apart that, usual system supervision, upgrades, Picard PRs and reviews, user support.

@outsidecontext

Last week I did a small feature for Picard’s disc ID lookup dialog (adding a format column) and simplified our macOS code signing code.
Also PR code review and handling some ticket discussions

@julian45

Hi! Did some prep for MeB admin SSO stuff (pinged zas about next steps), and am currently wrestling a bit with Atlassian support to try to figure out the best way to get from our current Jira version to a more recent LTS version before our current one goes EoL

@bitmap

early last week I helped prepare the schema change announcement & started working on some of my tickets
we had a quick search meeting and I ran some additional sir python3 tests on hip, which were all promising
in the middle of the week I profiled some MB web pages (due to the increase in traffic/load) and identified a major performance issue in one utility function…after deploying a fix there was a noticeable effect on response times
other than that I did some code review and submitted a couple other minor cleanup PRs related to perf/unused code

@lucifer

last week i helped with porting SIR to python3 and testing it. also did continued work on adding OpenID to MeB OAuth provider. finally did some work on calculating similarities of entire MLHD dataset, still a WIP.

@mr_monkey

[monkey] Last week I continued reviewing the Bootstrap4 migration in progress
Deployed a new version of LB which broke quite a few pages…deployed a fixed version on the heels of that, then spent a bit of time figuring out the issue in question with a dependency (dompurify)
I investigated some improvements to our cover art loading, adding a better fallback when we have some adequate metadata
Worked with Jigen on the BookBrainz user guide
And finally, did a lot of ticket triage, PR reviews, and welcoming and helping out new GSOC arrivals

@anshgoyal31

[ansh] Last week, I mainly spent time upgrading Bootstrap 4 in LB. Things are going pretty well!
Reviewed and merged holycow23’s PR for introducing a new stat on LB Stats Page.
Great work on that!
And Reviewed some GSoC proposals

@rob

[mayhem] last week was the usual guff running MetaBrainz.
but I spent most of my time porting the fast-fuzzy code to C++. while C++ has gotten a lot more modern, I had forgotten how much I hate C++. and what a pain it it is to work with.
but we need this code to be fast, so I delved in.
running the same code in python took 3 minutes.
after a week in C++, its still not working, lol.
(I blame nmslib)

@kellnerd

Last week I’ve implemented seeding of external links for recordings in Harmony.
I mainly did this as a bonus because I wanted to improve Harmony’s error messages in case someone looks up a “track” URL instead of a release URL.
After I did a release, it turned out that this isn’t just a niche feature to give hardcore users RSI syndrome like I thought.
Apparently many people like it or were even anticipating it (to improve BrainzPlayer’s matching accuracy, for example) and the forum thread was flooded by feedback I still have to work through…
(I am still busy with university, but I see one more candidate for an MBS ticket in there, the seeded recording form loses ISRCs which were added while the tab was open.)

@reosarevok

My main task for the week was schema change tickets, primarily MBS-9253
[MBS-9253: List EP release groups above singles on artist pages]
I also started MBS-13768
[MBS-13768: Add MBIDs to mediums]
Other than that, the usual small tickets, releasing prod today, and community work
(on second read, that makes it sound like I was picking up trash, doesn’t it)

@suvid

So I finished my first draft of GSoC proposal this week and put it on the community forum
Also worked on 2 PRs:

1. A UI fix for the volume slider
2. An existing ticket, implemented check to see if the last.fm user existed when connecting it to listenbrainz

@rustynova

I’ve started to work back on Melba after getting reminded that it existed by the many GSOC applications. I plan to contribute slowly but surely now that it’s in a somewhat stable state and not bound by someone else’s GSOC.
Last week I made 3 prs, one to clean up the code of the poller, another to merge an useless crate, and lastly one for wider dependency updates.
Planning on checking the tests very soon as some decide to fail if you look at them wrong

AI Defence

@zas

Since 2 weeks we are trying to mitigate web traffic originating for AI web scrapers
they try hard to evade any rate limit, robots.txt etc..
They use rotational residential proxies (basically they do only few hits a day using one IP), randomized User Agents
For us, it meant something like 5 to 10 times the normal traffic on MB website
So it translates to up to 10x more servers to handle that, IF it doesn’t increase
For our users, it meant very degraded response times (for example, for 0.5s to 5 seconds per query)

@rob

do you have a sample of what the user agent strings look like?

@zas

Yes, like thousands of perfectly legit user agent strings
They also use techniques to simulate normal browsing
There’s no point in “identifying” them… we can’t.
Some rotational proxy services claim to have 100M IPs
So, we need “something” to limit their impact, but I doubt we are able to totally get rid of it

This was quite a long discussion, please check the logs if you are interested.

A summary of options that were discussed:

• Having a “prove you are not a robot” page
• Cloudflare/Anubis
• separate MB website & web service more (using a separate domain), in order to improve filtering
• “The problem with API gateways for MB API is that we do too much stuff on gateways right now, so we need to review things and it’s not really a turnkey solution, but we definitively need to go in this direction” (zas)

Time runs out, and another AI defence meeting is scheduled.

absent: Gautam Shorewala (1)