The option to view unofficial release groups should be more prominent

I don’t think it’s obvious enough that the discography is only showing official releases (groups). I’d like it if alongside “Discography” it said something like official only / all / various artists, perhaps as buttons with official only highlighted. This would make it easier to change (currently you have to scroll to the bottom), and more obvious, particularly to new people, why they might not be seeing the releases they’re looking for. It would also avoid the use of the wording release groups which might not be understood by all (it’s not common parlance like discography).

I would create a ticket but wanted to get some opinions on this first.

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100% in agreement, this has come up a few times.

Something like:

Seems like a no-brainer?
I’ve avoided making any fancy changes, keeping all the same UI etc :slight_smile:
There’s definitely scope for stronger layout changes as well.

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I don’t like the „tabs-within-tabs“ idea so much. How about putting the word „Official“ before „Discography“, and put the two other options into links as before, but directly under „Official Discography“ in a smaller font?

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Not my personal preference, but here’s a mockup:

I left out the ‘official’ addition you suggested because then you’d have to change the next two selections to ‘Unofficial Discography’ + ‘Various Artist Discography’ - which seemed like a hassle when I was doing this, but now that I think about it might not be too bad an idea…

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I’m not a big fan of “Official discography” because right now that also includes stuff without a status set (to make it easier to see and fix). If you officially call it “Official discography” though, it feels wrong to show those, which might not be official at all.

I’m mostly happy with bootlegs being kinda hidden, because it’s a very power-user kind of thing (I don’t think many people follow the bootleg scene at all after all) so I’m not sure if it makes sense to make it so prominent - but if it’s something that people want, I guess why not.

I’m not sure what would be good UI for it but I’m not a huge fan of nested tabs either.

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There already are filters available to customize the list of “Discography”. Maybe it can be highlighted differently and improved to allow to list more release groups (by including “Various Artists” credits and “Official” status)?

On a side note, the “Official” status is mapped for releases, not for release groups which are listed in the “Discography”. Still, release groups without “Official” release are listed here.

I was thinking something like:

though I recognise my efforts are pretty ugly and I’m not dead set on the wording.

I see what you mean but we do currently say “Showing official release groups by this artist” or “Show only official release groups instead”.

Me too, I just think it should be obvious they’re hidden and how to unhide them. I see duplicate bootlegs, promos and various artist releases being added much more regularly than official releases.

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You’re right. And I remember when it was first implemented that was where I looked before I found the link at the bottom

That actually looks pretty neat I think!

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Thanks. I was meaning the spacing and such. Another option would be adding a count of release groups, though that would get confusing with various artist releases (count of release groups)

I never noticed it before … :open_mouth: 100% in agreement too with your proposition!

Buttons placed on the same line as “Discography” looks pretty neat indeed.

I would suggest “with various artists” rather than “various artist releases” which brings confusion of releases and release groups.

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hmmm, I’ve just noticed that we currently split the various artist releases by official / all as well. Would we still want to do this? To me it seems like overkill.

If we were still doing this and having the buttons there could be two buttons lit up when various artists was selected, but then that might seem a bit weird. Or it could be integrated into the filter like @Yvanz suggested.

Having inofficial VA releases in a separate category may not be overkill for popular artists that feature in a lot of bootleg „best [genre] songs of all time“ releases. Don’t know how prevalent this is.

Sure thing, although it would need to be totally clear when a button is actually „lit“ – that’s not that easy¹! Maybe reach back to boring metaphors like the bog-standard checkbox?

¹ and I’m leaving issues like colour-blindness to the easily ignored footnotes

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I don’t know either. I suppose I should do some research. I’m not sure it’s a problem anyway, in that I think if someone is looking there they are wondering where else are songs by this artist available. Which is different than wondering what were the releases that this artist wanted to be out there (not that that’s the only model of how stuff gets into an official discography but I think that’s one of the main drivers for them being separated).

yeah, which is why I guess it’s not my preferred option. I wonder whether it’s worth having a wider think about the way filtering is implemented and adding more options in there including these for power users, but having three simple buttons for everyone else?

Of the 134,960 Various Artists release groups, only 2,034 include bootleg releases, although 12,251 contain promotional releases.
For The Beatles, there are 162 official VA release groups out of 213 VA release groups.
For Britney Spears there are 1,271 official VA release groups out of 1,368 VA release groups.
For 50 Cent there are 451 official VA release groups out of 652 VA release groups.

For me I’d just leave all VA release groups together. Does anyone feel strongly they should be separated into official/all?

[quote=“tommycrock, post:15, topic:61953”]
For me I’d just leave all VA release groups together. Does anyone feel strongly they should be separated into official/all?
[/quote]I think this is a UI issue, not a preference issue.
If we figure out a way to make an intuitive and clear ‘show unofficial releases’ button, then there’s no issue with including it in the VA releases as well. So I think we should hold off on decisions like this until we’ve figured something out.

That said, I think displaying things differently in different sections would add to the existing confusion.

[quote=“aerozol, post:16, topic:61953, full:true”]

It’s definitely a UI issue. However, the UI that you showed in tabs and I showed in buttons had three options not four.

Designs that would enable showing VA releases as official/all include:
1: Add a fourth button
2: As @sparkinson suggested, two checkboxes or similar (option buttons?) could work as long as the wording was right
3: perhaps some integration of the options in the filter
or
4: we have 3 buttons and VA releases includes all

1: I think would start getting quite wide and over-complex
2: might work but not be as neat
3: might be confusing, but may work combined with the three buttons visible and option buttons in the filter
4: I would do this. I think it’s prosaic and fits with the way people will want to use it. I expected this to be the behaviour anyway (we don’t say they’ll be official only VA releases until you’ve clicked on the link and scrolled to the bottom of the page again).

If it’s a UI issue, we should fix it by continuing to develop ideas for the UI.

Here’s a mockup that uses your nice button layout, as well as an idea for showing unofficial releases that I think would make sense on the VA page as well:

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Thanks for coming back on this. I wasn’t trying to suggest we shouldn’t consider more UI ideas, just that having the 3 options seemed best to me. However, I like your suggestion. Especially as it stops the artist’s appearances on VA compilations being part of their discography.

For the wording, would “other appearances” and “show bootlegs and promos” make more sense? Often they’re featuring on another artist’s album and bootlegs and promos avoids mentioning releases.

I actually appropriated that term from Discogs, where they do use just ‘Appearances’ - which I think is super elegant.
But adding ‘Various Artist…’ seemed to be the best way to really spell it out for a non-savvy user. But there’s probably a better way, or a middle ground, I don’t have strong opinions on it though. I didn’t think about their features etc/ that aren’t really Various Artist.

To me pretty much everything on MB is a ‘release’ so I don’t really mind having that word by the checkbox, but again, no real strong opinions on the wording.