LyricWiki talk:Community Portal/Archive/2006 August 1 - 2006 December 20

From LyricWiki

[edit] Google AdWords

The inevitable question of funding... it would be nice for this site to have a dedicated server (run faster/handle more traffic/store more lyrics), or at least to be able to pay for its current hosting costs. If we had some revenue, we could even expand into other servers, buy some ads of our own to spread the word, etc. I'm personally very opposed to banners or popups (part of the reason I created the site was to avoid those), so this isn't going to slippery-slope into that, but I think it may benefit us have a small amount of income from Google AdWords.

I would like many opinions on whether you'd be able to cope with this and where you think the adwords would best be displayed on the site (left side-bar / single-line text link above menu tabs / floated to the right of lyrics / use-your-imagination). Thanks for the input.
-Sean Colombo 21:01, 14 August 2006 (PDT)

LyricWiki needs to show it's true potential, both through link exchange and co-operation with other sites. Google AdSense brings us a great opportunity to gain a higher ranking as a lyrics site in search results and to show adverts from others that want to specifically advertise on LyricWiki, all while making money per-click on those swell targeted ads. Check out the Google AdSense Tour. --Frontway 03:17, 15 August 2006 (PDT)

I think that AdWords would be a good compromise, at least until donations can be setup up and fully support the site. The least intrusive place I see that they could go would be between the navigation and plugins on the left side-bar. If it were there, it would be in a prominent place, it would not distort any existing page, and would not reduce the amount of area that lyrics have to be displayed. It would be nice if they were formatted the same as the other sections in the side-bar, but it does not look like it would be possible from the tour.

-Teknomunk 07:47, 15 August 2006 (PDT)

I'm kinda sad advertising had to be put but at least is not too annoying. What I don't like, though, is the fact that the search box is far to down. I'd put it right below "navigation" or at least above "plugins". After all, I guess the search function would be what ordinary people are most interested in.
(now, let's dream a little, imagine a world where musicians founded some kind of association where they assigned some small, but substantial fee that helped lyricwiki be maintained.......) --Jorgenmz 19:19, 15 August 2006 (PDT)

Sorry for chiming in late. I see the ads are already in place, being set up as I'm editing i see. As i have said before, I support advertisements provided they are non-obtrusive, well targeted, and that the proceeds go to supporting the community. One thing i have learned from watching the podcasting world, is that such adds are well accepted and even appreciated by the listeners. Adds are relevant to the subject matter of the show, and advertisements are relevant and informative to the listeners. I see, looking at the results from AdWords, they often loosely reflect the subject matter of the song, which is fine, but it would be nice to see adds more relevant to music, CDs etc. I'm not sure what can be done about this though, perhaps throw in some automatically generated amazon links under the Google links. Ideally I'd like to see Google targeting their advertisements better.

As for the placement, the sidebar is my preference, it is the least interfering to the site, while still clearly visible.

I think, despite the current problems, this is a step forward, the site ultimately needs to be self-sustaining. It would be nice Sean, if you could keep us up to date with the financial situation of this site.

--TrevorP 16:42, 16 August 2006 (PDT)

From reading the AdSense site, the relevance is supposed to increase over time as it indexes our site and as it sees which ads work. So hopefully that part will be self-healing. I've always sort of planned to make a page with finances like TrevorP mentioned above. I'll get on that. Since the ads started mid-day yesterday and today isn't over on the west coast of the US (where Google is) for another 2 hours, I don't have a full day's worth of stats yet, but once they're available, I'll post some stats on AdSense vs Google Analytics vs my own tracking code vs my host's tracking code which all differ quite greatly in our estimates of the amount of traffic on this site.

-Sean Colombo 22:00, 16 August 2006 (PDT)

Alrighty, finished the finances page. It looks like we're nice and safe for a little while since the Amazon fees weren't shabby last quarter when we got Digged :). Hosting fees start up monthly in November. I think that the AdSense should have built up enough to cover them by then (assuming AdSense is good to us!). The page is a little sad because it makes us look like small-fries even though we have a ton of traffic... so don't show the press ;)

-Sean Colombo 22:35, 16 August 2006 (PDT)

[edit] White power bands

How do we approach the element of white power music? Should the lyrics be censored or not even added? There's this Swedish band called Storm (white power), that made a song called Fy Fan, Svenska Flicka (Damn It, Swedish Girl).
The first paragraph in those lyrics goes like this:

Send "Community Portal/Archive/2006 August 1 - 2006 December 20" Ringtone to your Cell Phone

Send "Community Portal/Archive/2006 August 1 - 2006 December 20" Ringtone to your Cell Phone

So, yeah? And here's a list of other right-wing bands: http://www.tolerance.org/news/article_hate.jsp?id=403 --Frontway 07:44, 30 July 2006 (PDT)

I think this simply boils down to the fact the song may cause offence (correct my if I'm missing the point). Shouldn't it just be marked as containing offensive themes, in the same way a song may be flagged as containing offensive words. It probably wouldn't hurt coming up with a few categories to separate 'offensive themes' out into more descriptive groups, 'racist', 'strong sexual themes', 'suicide/depression/death', etc. The problem becomes then, where to draw the line, but wikis are usually good at finding a good balance of consensus, so I wouldn't be too worried about that.

--TrevorP 08:17, 30 July 2006 (PDT)

agree, just mark them as possibly offensive, same as any other lyric with dodgy shit it in.--Naught101 08:54, 5 August 2006 (PDT)

Why the hell should you mark it with possibly offensive? Maybe someone finds it offensive, but you don't have to go warn people!

I agree - a disclaimer might be a good thing to tack onto something like that... but certainly don't censor or block things out... there's too much of that in the world already.--Infinitemusic34 15:04, 9 October 2006 (PDT)

Whaaaaaaaat?! Are you going to censore/delete Cannibal Corpse as well? You can't do that, censorship is Kryptonite to art. If art were Superman, of course.

Cannibal Corpse have been censored and even completely banned in some countries, and it's utter bullshit. --bleedwithme 17:07, 9 October 2006 (PDT)

Of course we don't want sensorship of any lyrics or artists. However, it would be considerate to allow those users who do not want to be exposed to certain types of language to avoid it.

- Teknomunk 10:28, 10 October 2006 (PDT)

[edit] artist and album categories

I wonder if it would be hard to copy the code for categories, and rename it to artist and album? that way you could just add [[Artist:Some Artist]] and [[Album:Some Album]] to the bottom of each lyric page, which might make cataloguing easier.

then again, perhaps you could just use [[Category:Artist:Some Artist]] and [[Category:Album:Some Album]] --Naught101 08:54, 5 August 2006 (PDT)

[edit] Album of the week

Album Of The Week

  Week 49, 2008
Artist: Yellowcard
Album: Ocean Avenue
Nominated By: A User
Reason: Music.

(nominate an album)

Just something to spice up the main page, feedback? Ideas? I would really like to see this site grow bigger, to step outside the boundaries of lyrics-only. To become somewhat of a multimedia portal for both music and movie industry. I know though those dreams are too great for us to accomplish at this moment.

I've been thinking about designing a web-based application that makes it easy for people to add new artists, albums and songs. If you're interested (and knows how to use AJAX etc) contact me.

Anyways, being numb now... ^{(>^,^)>} --Frontway 05:13, 10 August 2006 (PDT)

• That Album Of The Week is a sweet idea. I've used quite a bit of AJAX, but I think all we really need is JavaScript to make a good adding form. I created the front-end of an addition form, but MediaWiki is so mangled on the inside that I don't have the time at the moment to fill in the backend. If I can find the link to where I put the front-end, I'll put a link to it here. *wishes LyricWiki was his day job*

-Sean Colombo 18:17, 10 August 2006 (PDT)

[edit] Genre/Language Categories

I have come across a possible problem with regards to Genre and Language categories. There are some overlapping names, names that could be either a language or a genre. The two that I can think of are Category:Celtic and Category:Latin. Both refer to a type of music, and also to a language.

Basically, should we move all the genres and languages into a heirarchy like Category:Hometown currently is, except only a single level deep. If we were to do that, it would eliminate all possible overlaps between these two groups. You would instead have Category:Genre/Latin and Category:Language/Latin.

Anyways, I would like some feedback on this before I start mass-editing articles to use the way I suggested as it would require edits to more than 100 pages.

- Teknomunk 20:42, 19 August 2006 (PDT)

That would solve possible problems.
   hierarchy for teh win, --Frontway 00:32, 20 August 2006 (PDT)

Alright then, I will update the help, and start editing articles.

- Teknomunk 15:40, 20 August 2006 (PDT)

[edit] iTunes Affiliate Program

LyricWiki's already hooked up with Amazon, where you can buy music in its physical form, CDs. But what if LW would also join the Apple iTunes Affiliate Program, which offers well above 2 million tracks in a digital format?
   caterpillar, --Frontway 05:02, 3 September 2006 (PDT)

Interesting idea... I'll look into it!

-Sean Colombo 12:45, 5 September 2006 (PDT)

UPDATE: I signed up to check it out... now I think I have to wait for them to approve the affiliate account (it's through LinkShare, so that usually takes several days). When it is approved, we can make use of a feed of the top songs on iTunes. Any ideas on where we could use a list of the top songs? (main page/a special page for it/etc.)

A short feed of about 5-7 songs could fit below the Song Of The Day on the main page. It would be, though, if we could add the feed to the new layout over at Main_Page/Layout/Proposals/Frontway, where there is plenty of room under the SOTD, and is looking really good now (at least from Firefox).

- Teknomunk 22:18, 7 September 2006 (PDT)

Great idea, I'll start trying to get that feed crammed in soon (into the new layout that is). The approval from iTunes just came through, so now we are an affiliate :)

-Sean Colombo 08:04, 10 September 2006 (PDT)

As soon as you have the link format ready for use here, please let me know so that I can update Template:Artist and Template:SongFooter with links to iTunes.

- Teknomunk 11:48, 10 September 2006 (PDT)

[edit] iTunes Feed Outage

Of course it is needless to say this, because you have noticed this yourself already, but the iTunes top list on the main page has been empty for a few days already. --Mischko 04:50, 18 December 2006 (EST)

This looks like apple moved the location of their feed. I updated the link and it appears to be working correctly.

- teknomunk (talk) 14:59, 18 December 2006 (EST)

[edit] New batch of lyrics

ÜberBot has been hard at work and has gathered lyrics to quite a few (in the tens of thousands) of new lyrics that aren't on the site yet. The first time he inserted lyrics, there was nothing else in the database and there was no community yet... so he just threw song pages on. Now, the code will have to be intelligent and only add songs that haven't been added yet and insert links to the songs into already-created pages. This won't be a problem, but I have one question: Do you (the community at large) think it would be best to insert the lyrics as fast as possible (based on how much the server can handle without interrupting normal use) to get it done with, or put some sort of pause in between submissions so that they can be evaluated by hand? The first submission worked out without a submission flag primarilly because there have been so many pageviews that everything gets looked at eventually... that may work again. Please comment
-Sean Colombo 22:17, 5 September 2006 (PDT)

I think that they should be submitted as fast as possible without disrupting the site. However, it would be nice to flag inserted songs with a category/flag to make finding these new lyrics easier so that manual checks can be made. I think that there are still songs that have not been looked at from the first batch.

- Teknomunk 22:52, 5 September 2006 (PDT)

The faster the better coz' it's critical for a lyrics database to cover a lot of bands and songs. And a flag'd be useful. I wonder if it weren't a good idea if contributors could give a link to the bot to process so the bands they want got processed. Or at least a wish-list for processing which I have not yet checked if it does exist. - Adek336 29 November 2006

[edit] New Skin?

I think the skin for LyricWiki should be customized a little... If you ask me, it's a little bland at the the moment. Reminds me too much of regular Wikipedia. Something I had in mind:

• http://bluwiki.org/go/BluWiki:Skin

So... What do you guys say? --bleedwithme 10:37, 30 September 2006 (PDT)

[edit] Non ASCII characters messing up

I was using the LyricWiki plugin for amarok, non ascii characters that look compltely messed up on the site are replaced by a ' in the plugin. Is it because of no UTF-8 support? The lyrics with messed up characters look VERY bad. 68.220.48.99 13:04, 1 October 2006 (PDT)

I also noticed this for a Rammstein song. I saved the webpage to a file and did a hexdump on it. It turns out that it was not encoded right. For example, ü has value U+00FC, and the value I found on the lyric page is U+FFFD. I would recommend manually fixing anything that's wrong, although it wouldn't be a fun job. The source of the problem? [ÜberBot]. Now that's irony. Incripshin 04:00, 7 December 2006 (EST)

[edit] Eager to help :)

I've stumbled upon this great site through Amarok's script manager, I'm very eager to help but have noticed that many of the bands with a "The" prefixed to their name lead to a incomplete page, and many of the bands such as "The Doobie Brothers" have a more complete Artist, Album, Songs page as "Doobie Brothers" when that's in fact not their true name. This also holds true for The Guess Who. Also the duos of Simon & Garfunkel and Seals & Crofts are incorrectly featured as Simon And Garfunkel and Seals and Crofts (the and usage is only proper in the URL of sites pertaining to the band) I've worked a bit towards fixing this, throwing in a few redirects. I'm very interested and thrilled to help out, does anyone have anything to say regarding this matter or could ellaborate more so I'm not messing too much up? :) Off to get some sleep now, take care! Penguinstarship 23:37, 10 October 2006 (PDT)

If you are interested, Sean has a script that can do mass moves. Just add to the list at Category:Requests_For_Moves. Anyways, welcome to the site, we can use all the help we can get.

As a side note, it seams that lots of people are finding this site through Amarok, myself included.

- Teknomunk 06:00, 11 October 2006 (PDT)

Thanks for the reply! I've been compiling a list of band/artists who may need some name work done to them, your input is greatly appreciated :) Penguinstarship 13:49, 11 October 2006 (PDT)

[edit] Not sure what I did

I'm new to Wikis and was playing around in the Sandbox to get the formatting correct to add a new artist/album (The Portugal Japan). Then I was gonna go ahead to create the actual page, but seem to only have a blank artist template now. How exactly do you start a new artist/album page? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Larryni (talk) .

Not sure what happened, it doesn't show the text in the page's history. Anyways, the artist belongs at The Portugal Japan. I put what I could find there.

You may want to look at the help section for a few pointers on getting started. Also, have a look at the source for existing artist. If you have any additional questions, please let us know so we can help you and so that we can update the help with that information.

- Teknomunk 18:08, 16 October 2006 (PDT)

Thanks Teknomunk, appreciated. I did have the Help and a artist source page open in separate tabs when I was entering the info, just don't know where I went wrong after that. -Larryni 04:06, 17 October 2006 (PDT)

[edit] Call For Album Of The Week Nominations

In preparations for updating the main page with Main Page/Layout/Proposals/Frontway, an initial set of nominations for the album of the week are needed. When nominating an album, please write a short paragraph on why the album should be an album of the week. To make a nomination, head over to LyricWiki talk:Album Of The Week.
Thanks.
- Teknomunk 08:42, 16 October 2006 (PDT)

[edit] Things that a Bot could do

1. Erase all the blank spaces in the start of lines between <lyric></lyric> tags
2. Look for articles in Songs (Song_A...) categories that have no <lyric> tag, and put them in an Category such as lyrickize (:P)
   • For the pages that use the old format (spaces at the beginning of lines), it could just automatically convert to the new format. -Sean Colombo
3. Same as above but with pages with no Song or Songfooter template
4. If there is no special page for that (i think wikipedia there is). Look for all pages with no Categories and put them in a Uncategorized category or something

More Ideas?? --Unaiaia (talk) 10:22, 14 November 2006 (EST)

Coolness. There is a big list of bot ideas on ÜberBot's user page. These could probably be rolled in there.

-Sean Colombo 11:13, 14 November 2006 (EST)

Copied there. --Unaiaia (talk) 13:52, 14 November 2006 (EST)

[edit] LyricWiki in Wikipedia

Do you think it's a good idea to put links to lyricwiki in Wikipedia? Maybe you don't want that much exposure, or maybe you are already doing this, we could create a template such as {{lyricwiki|Artist}} that shows a pretty bos that says... Lyricwiki.org has lyrics for the songs by XXXX, with the logo  :D --Unaiaia (talk) 10:22, 14 November 2006 (EST)

Sounds like a good idea. I think someone made a LyricWiki template at some point (I obviously don't use it that much because ppl would call it self-promotion). There is a Userbox on there ({{user LyricWiki|LyricWiki_Username_Here}}) too. I think that'd be cool though if someone did that.

-Sean Colombo 11:04, 14 November 2006 (EST)

Now we have a LyricWiki Template. Use this template to mark pages that have lyrics in LyricWiki. {{LyricWiki|Band_Name}} The Band_Name parameter is optional, use it if the Wikipedia PAGENAME it's diferent from LyricWiki's

--Unaiaia (talk) 19:29, 17 November 2006 (EST)

The Template got deleted marked as SPAM, and also because this site has copyrighted material. Well, i'm pretty upset with this... I think this is a good site and i thought that it could be cool for wikipedia articles to be linked with this site, but it looks like it's not. --Unaiaia (talk) 16:34, 10 December 2006 (EST)

Well, there are a handful of bitter people on Wikipedia it seems, and unfortunately even if 10 people want to create and edit an article, when 1 person gets bitter (or paranoid of the RIAA), they can get things deleted quite quickly. I've seen a bunch of articles on there that just keep getting deleted and recreated :-/. It's sad. Thanks for trying anyway Unaiaia! Keep your chin up! :)

-Sean Colombo 20:24, 10 December 2006 (EST)

[edit] SOAP/Server Responsiveness

Hi to everyone. Really enjoying using LyricWiki, but I'm having some problems updating the Amarok script I've created to fetch lyrics. Namely, I'm attempting to make use of SOAP. I have a procedure in place to search for lyrics so the search function only returning Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven doesn't pose a significant problem, but the time it seems to take the server to respond to requests is where I'm running into trouble.

The problem is that the script must contact the server to create a WSDL driver when it first starts. Theoretically, this isn't a problem, but the server seems to take up to a minute to respond, which means for the first minute Amarok is loaded the lyrics function won't work. It also takes about the same amount of time to respond to specific requests, but while inconvenient that isn't likely to result in people believing it is a buggy script. While the script is not as efficient as it could be using SOAP, it does work now and I'm not receiving complaints that the script doesn't work for the first minute after Amarok has loaded.

In a nutshell, What I'm wondering is if this is merely a server load issue or if its a problem on my end. If it isn't a problem on my end, can I expect to be cleared up and begin implementing SOAP or should I wait for now?

I'm not complaining about the site by any means, I just want to know whether or not its worth the effort to implement SOAP. Thanks.

-Rede 15:28, 15 December 2006 (EST)

It seems to have cleared up. I wonder if its just time of day...

-Rede 01:57, 17 December 2006 (EST)

From the Official Blog:

Dec 14th 2006 - Server in pain

The server is in a bit of pain at the moment. Pages are taking a little while to load and some are getting dropped.

This is a problem that we haven’t had since moving to the new server about a month ago. 
[...]

--Unaiaia (talk) 06:17, 17 December 2006 (EST)