SensCritique and MusicBrainz

MusicBrainz
#1

Hi everyone,

I am French website SensCritique music admin.
As some of you know, SensCritique uses MB for its music section. As a consequence, many of our users use MB to improve both our databases.
Unfortunately, some also decided to ignore guidelines and use MB the wrong way in order to force the changes they want to see on SC (all of our other sections are open wikis). For a recent example: https://musicbrainz.org/edit/74755931

We want to make clear that we never encouraged such abuses and that we will never do. We built the SC music section based on MB and we clearly benefit from a clean database.
Unfortunately, as our user base is substantial (1.6M users) some members choose not to respect the rules of both SC and MB (@pankkake made a great effort in listing a lot of them).
It was the case with user Eric_Haynes who happened to be the latest account for a repeat offender used to abusive edits. This kind of behavior is obviously unacceptable and we banned the user and his hundreds of accounts from SensCritique, thanks to proofs provided by @chaban and @Fabe56.

As stated before, we want the relationship MB/SC to be mutually beneficial (as lot of SC users are contributing correctly and profusely to MB). I believe that this mutual trust was improved when I was made auto-editor by some of you and we want to keep it that way.
That’s why we will improve our vigilance towards abusive users and will apply a strict policy against destructive and wrong edits.

I will gladly be your contact point for any SC-related issues and user reports. You can also contact @sc-content. If you have any questions, we will answer them under this thread.

Thanks to all of you and we look forward to working with you all to improve our databases,
Cheers,
Raton

15 Likes
#2

Great, thank you @Mapache_Del_Raton !!
I am subscribed to some editors repeatedly adding digital media as CD, and I can usually guess why :stuck_out_tongue:
It’s great to know I can get someone to give them a nudge from the SC side if it becomes too much.

Just out of interest, may I ask why SensCritique requires a physical medium? (I don’t know if it does, I just always assumed that must be the reason)
Any other differences we should be aware of that might influence editor behaviour? e.g. setting release country to France instead of [worldwide] (might be an honest mistake unrelated to SC)

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#3

@Mapache_Del_Raton thanks for this clarification, to be completely honest the situation was getting increasingly damaging, it’s nice to see that we’re going to be able to make things better :slight_smile:

SC takes data from all official supports, that’s why some added promo as official for example. CD or digital media should not change this!

1 Like
#4

Thanks for your replies @aerozol and @Fabe56 !
In fact, the release format is not the most important thing and we import CDs and vinyls as well as digital. The users who make this mistake are just confused I guess ?

To be more exhaustive, these are the criterion for the import script to work :

  • Only the first release that fits the criterion in the RG (we only take one release per group)
  • The release status has to be set to official
  • The primary type must be either album, EP or single
  • Some secondary types are excluded: audio drama, audiobook, interview, spokenword
  • A date must be set (there are some exceptions because of issues with our script though)
  • Country and label are facultative but of course we encourage our users to fill these fields
  • Only some release formats are taken into account: CDs, vinyls, digital medium and sometimes cassettes
    -> Among those formats some are excluded for now (CD-R, HDCDs or shellacs I believe)

If your french is good you can read our public guidelines here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bkighanKzonhcY5HEWcHL4xvqOuLDiH5DcH_cETfAJc/
We need to be more precise about cover art uploads by mentioning that the cover art must correspond to the release and not the general RG (I noticed that a lot of SC users were wrong in digipak covers).

I hope that I was clear enough and thanks again for your interest

2 Likes
#5

Why exclude HDCD?
It just plays as a regular CD in all CD decks.
It would be like excluding chrome cassette. :wink:

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#6

Actually, it was a simple mistake at the first creation of the import script. HDCDs and CD-Rs will be included as soon as we update the script !

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#7

Without the name, here is a good example (translated from french):

I do it for me, I don’t give a fuck about the community, I add the stuff I want to see in my senscritique’s collection and here’s your opinion, I might as well say that I wax my asshole with it, it’s not important, I don’t give a fuck, there’s no criticism or what I don’t do, I don’t do any work, I add data on a site that’s all rotten and badly coded 3/4 of the time, if you don’t agree with that your opinion I don’t care I didn’t design the cover of yungblud I went to google it I don’t have a review to get on it, so if you have a better one you change it and then that’s it I don’t care about your review I didn’t do anything, if you have a criticism to make you go see his graphic designer I don’t give a fuck you don’t piss me off, I think you have something else to do than to be the vigilante on the musicbrainz forums, I hope in any case.

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#8

Pure French poetry. :wink:
Where is the SC forum?

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#9

Lovely folks. They are of course right, there is no obligation to care about this community or be part of it. I hope they were shown the door.

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#10

What would maybe help is also another small change to the import script: if cover art would only be uploaded to Sens critique once it has has been accepted by the MBz voting process, the editors had a motivation to follow MBz guidelines. Now berserk editors seem to be rewarded by getting their cover art at SC whatever damage they do to MusicBrainz, even if their edit fails here …

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#11

Love a bit of quality poetry I do. Such eloquence. Think we need to hear that in the proper accent.

1 Like
#12

This is some crazy behavior right there. It is obviously unacceptable and we already sent a message to the little Rimbaud exhorting him to strictly respect the code of conduct. If he persists, his SC account will be suspended.
Sorry for the wait, I didn’t receive any notifications but I can assure you we care. We will do everything in our power to protect MB from trolls and immature users.

@jesus2099: Also, we don’t have any forum.

@chabreyflint: It could be a solution indeed. The problem is that even if we (admins) can add artworks ourselves, we would have major releases without an artwork for a week. First, we will deal with all of the users deteriorating MB with crappy artworks and we will think about an update if it is not enough.

About that, what would you say is the type of edit where SC users are doing the more mistakes / are the rudest / deteriorates MB the most with ?
And to how many users would you estimate these rogue users coming from our side ?

Cheers !

5 Likes
#13

Well, this may be the price to pay when we using a third-party service? There is an incompressible validation time and that leaves time for volunteers to make the required verifications. Without a verification process a rogue user could add tons of porn pictures or whatever, isn’t it more time consuming to correct after the harm is done than to validate before?

Cover arts, mostly error with digipak vs square format from digital media. Also, status official instead of promo because otherwise it is not replicated on SC DB.

Difficult to estimate from my side, firstly because for example just one same user creates like a three digits accounts on MB after multiples ban. Also, because lots never answer to any comments, maybe @chaban has some stats :wink:

#14

Well, this may be the price to pay when we using a third-party service?

@Fabe56 : the problem is that there are few abuses for a lot of new releases. I can’t help but think that such a solution would mean to throw the baby out with the bath water.
We will still think about it but first we changed our guidelines and put some emphasis on the cover arts.

We also added several warnings about users breaking the MB code of conduct. Now it is clearly stated that inappropriate behaviors will be punished.

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#15

Indeed, if MB’s goal is to be considered the music database, called upon by every music website and application, then we can look forward to more of this kind of trouble.

If we can’t handle a single big site grabbing art then there are bigger issues that need to be looked at in terms of editing, community, and where MB expects to be in the future.

5 Likes
#16

Unless I’ve missed something the ideal compromise seems to be to remove cover art from SensCritique as soon as it’s removed from MB.

MusicBrainz would gain the ability to better combat abusers through the voting system without SC having to detriment its user experience plus SC stays better in sync with MB.

Some editors replace lo-res cover art by hi-res versions. Currently it seems removed and since-replaced cover art remains in SC.
Wouldn’t it be in SensCritique’s interest to get rid of redundant and inferior cover art as well?

4 Likes
#17

You’re absolutely right @chaban

It’s not something we don’t want but it’s a flaw in our import script. When a front cover is synchronized, the following ones (better/worse/alternative) are just added to the queue without removing the faulty one.

I do agree we would both benefit from a better sync on this level. I will share it to the devs and script experts ! We desperately need a complete rewrite of the script but we don’t have the ressources right now.
The user who uploaded a ridiculously tiny version of the cover art also received a message from us :wink:

3 Likes