With Twitter/X slowly (and at times, impressively quickly) devolving into a dumpster fire, we’ve decided to start offering alternative channels.
You can now also get your low-char count MetaBrainz news from:
Due to recent changes in the administration of the freenode IRC network, all MetaBrainz IRC channels have migrated to the Libera.Chat network effective immediately.
The main channel names are all the same, #metabrainz, #musicbrainz, and #bookbrainz, though some special purpose channels were renamed in the move to better align with our project namespace (e.g., #brainzbot is now #metabrainz-bot).
Most of the MetaBrainz team will be around using the nicks you know already (e.g., bitmap, yvanzo, reosarevok, Freso, zas, …) but a few have had some changes: Mr_Monkey is now monkey and _lucifer is now lucifer.
Hopefully this will have minimal impact on users beyond having to update your IRC server in your client. If needed, Libera Chat provides a guide for how to connect to their network, including client specific guides for a number of IRC clients. They’re working on their own web client, but for now, Kiwi IRC can be used if you don’t have a local client running. For those of you relying on Matrix or Tor to connect: Libera.Chat staff is working on both of those and they should hopefully both be up within a week. Stay tuned on their Twitter: https://twitter.com/LiberaChat
As always, you can find information about our IRC channels and guidelines on our IRC documentation page. Wikimedia have also migrated to Libera.Chat and have written this handy guide which might also come in useful for migrating: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC/Migrating_to_Libera_Chat
As a last note (and I am admittedly biased being both former freenode staff and current Libera.Chat staff myself): it is my personal belief, as community manager, that freenode is no longer a safe network to be on for our users. The new freenode staff does not seem trustworthy, making policies to retroactively justify their own breaches of their policies, refusing to give a clear answer on “whether slurs, racism and transphobia are allowed on Freenode”, getting staff on board that were kicked from other networks for privilege abuse, and leaking staff-internal information (channel closure reasons) to non-staffers. I highly recommend disconnecting from the network ASAP and, if possible, overwrite your NickServ registered e-mail and password and possibly dropping your NickServ registration as well if you can and are able and willing to. If you have used your NickServ password for anything else, my recommendation is to consider that password compromised.
The 2019 MetaBrainz Summit took place on 27th–29th of September 2019 in Barcelona, Spain at the MetaBrainz HQ. The Summit is a chance for MetaBrainz staff and the community to gather and plan ahead for the next year. This report is a recap of what was discussed and what lies ahead for the community.
Continue reading “State of the Brainz: 2019 MetaBrainz Summit highlights”It’s hard to stress how much MusicBrainz depends on the community behind it. In 2016 alone 20.989 editors made a total of 5.935.653 edits at a continuously increasing rate.
But while MusicBrainz does collect data on a lot of different entities, its users are not one of them, and the privacy policy is pretty lean.
Unfortunately this does make it fairly difficult to find out who you are, how you use MB and why you do it.
Seeing as this kind of information is fairly important for the upcoming project of improving our user experience, I volunteered to create a survey to allow you to tell us how you use MB, what you like about it and what you don’t like quite as much.
So without further ado, click on the banner to get to the survey: (It shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes of your time.)
Now if you’re still reading this blog post, that hopefully means you’ve already completed the survey! I’d like to thank Quesito who joined this project earlier this year and has been a great deal of help, our former GCI student Caroline Gschwend who helped with the UX part of the survey, CatQuest who has been around to give great feedback since the first draft and of course also all the other people who helped bring this survey to the point of release.
If you’ve got any feedback on or questions about the survey itself, please reply to the Discourse forum topic.
Continuing our story from last time…
Tamburica: 2017 January 6th to the 25th:
Initially, what I found to be the hardest part of adding instruments was actually the addition of aliases. It was a cumbersome, time consuming and annoying part, and I often clamoured for someone to write some sort of Batch Alias script. Then, in March, loujine came in like a superhero with a batch alias script! Now thanks to this script I can add aliases en masse, which has helped me tremendously!
After reosarevok fixed INST-723, I could link hybrids with the instruments they were hybrids of, therefore a batch of “hybrid” instruments came next.
Hybrids: 2017 February to March:
By this time a community discussion came out about the use of disambiguations and descriptions (instrument exclusive fields, which, unlike disambiguations, are translatable), with some users suggesting they were too long, some pointing out issues with translating and yet others suggesting the description field should be dropped altogether. While this discussion didn’t reach a clear resolution, it’s definitely something we should revisit later.
Stay tuned for part three!
Oh boy, oh boy. It’s been a while. Again. Huh? Well, now we’re back! Really! And so, so much has happened in the last while that we’re in for quite a ride here. So strap in!
Hello all members of the *Brainz community, I have got something in store just for you!
Some people may have noted talks and whispers about a grand and glorious move to use Discourse for various discussions related to MusicBrainz and all other MetaBrainz projects. The intention of it is to replace and unify both the now-dead mailing lists (R.I.P.) and our current forums. Guess what? The day has come at last!
The MetaBrainz Community Discourse can be found at https://community.metabrainz.org/ and is our new home for all discussions about MusicBrainz, BookBrainz, AcousticBrainz, and whatever other kind of *Brainz you want to talk about.
One of its major features is that it does not require yet another user (like the current forums, our ticket tracker, the wiki, …). When you press “Sign Up” or “Log In” it will ask you to authenticate with MusicBrainz to access some basic information. Once given permission, it will direct you back to the Discourse site and you’re logged in. (You can revoke the permission at a later point, should you need to.) No more having a dozen username/password combinations, just to participate in the community!
The site does still have some rough edges though, and various things are likely to get tweaked over the coming weeks, but today being the 1st day of (N. hemisphere) spring, I thought we should enjoy this season of “rebirth, rejuvenation, renewal, resurrection and regrowth” with this new baby of the MetaBrainz community.
A couple of people have already gone and started some discussions there, but feel free to go there yourself and start your own discussion. If you have started a discussion on the current/old forums, now is also a good time to restart/continue/move that discussion to the Discourse site as the forums will be put into read-only mode any day (posts will not be moved over).
If you don’t know where to start, start with reading the FAQ and after that, you could post to the introduction thread and introduce yourself. To get an overview about what’s going on, https://community.metabrainz.org/categories has a list of the categories currently in use and https://community.metabrainz.org/tags has a list of the tags in use. You could also just go to the front page, https://community.metabrainz.org/, and see what discussions are active right now and join in there. 🙂
I hope to see a lot of lively and friendly and constructive discussion going on there, so head over there and start making it happen. 😉
Your friendly neighbourhood community manager,
Freso
During the last MusicBrainz summit in Barcelona we decided to start working on finding possible ways to implement two features that have been requested for a long time:
Since MetaBrainz is more than just MusicBrainz these days, we also want to integrate these features into other projects. That, for example, means when a user is reading reviews on CritiqueBrainz they can see notifications about comments on their edits on MusicBrainz. Same applies to messaging. These features are intended to encourage our communities to communicate more easily with each other.
http://tickets.musicbrainz.org/browse/MBS-8721
The only ways of communication we have right now are two IRC channels, forums that we plan to replace with Discourse, and comments on individual edits. Sometimes we end up sending private emails to editors for one reason or another. Perhaps it is better to have our own messaging system for this purpose? I imagine it being similar to messaging systems on forums, reddit, etc. We would like to know what you think potential uses are for this and how it might look like to be useful.
http://tickets.musicbrainz.org/browse/MBS-1801
Site-based notifications are another thing that people have been asking for a long time. For example, these notifications can be related to edits on MusicBrainz, reviews on CritiqueBrainz, datasets in AcousticBrainz, etc. It can be an addition or replacement for email notifications that we currently have in MusicBrainz. Maybe something similar to the inbox feature that the Stack Exchange network has. People should be able to choose if they want to keep receiving email notifications or only use the new site-based notifications.
We looked at a couple of ways to implement this functionality.
First suggestion was to use the Layer toolkit. The problem with it is that we don’t want to be dependent on closed software and another company’s infrastructure, especially in case of such important features.
Second was to use the XMPP protocol to handle communication and notifications. We tried to implement a proof of concept using this protocol and encountered several issues at the start:
Repository with everything that was implemented so far is at https://github.com/metabrainz/xmpp-messaging-server. Given these problems we started considering implementing our own server(s) for this purpose.
You can take a look at the document where we collect most information about current progress.
There’s plenty of feedback on the site-based notifications feature request, and we have a pretty good understanding of what’s needed. This is not the case with the messaging feature. We explored several options for implementing this kind of functionality and decided that it’s time to refresh the list of requirements to get an idea of what needs to be done.
The goal of this blog post is to encourage discussion and gather ideas. If you are interested in these features, please share your thoughts and suggestions.
If you’re like me, you may have noticed a sudden drop in activity in #musicbrainz-devel (if you’re not like me, you may still have noticed it). This is not because we all suddenly dropped off the face of the earth (not all of us anyway), nay, we simply decided to move to #metabrainz!
#musicbrainz-devel was registered on Freenode on February 16th, 2009. That’s almost 6 years and 7 months ago! However, over the last months, it has been as much (if not more!) about AcousticBrainz, CritiqueBrainz, and two brand new members of the Brainz family (stay tuned for more news on these!) as it has been about MusicBrainz. The channel has also been home to a lot of non-MusicBrainz specific MetaBrainz talk, e.g., talk about my hire, Roman’s hire, upcoming hires (stay tuned for news on this as well!), server administration, finances, … – you get the picture. In light of this we decided to rename #musicbrainz-devel to #metabrainz, and also merge the more quiet channels of #bookbrainz and #bookbrainz-devel into this new channel.
So thank you to #musicbrainz-devel for your proud service over the years, and welcome to #metabrainz, I hope you do us just as much credit as your predecessor did! I hope to see a lot of you in #metabrainz over the next few days, to join in the celebrations with a nice virtual cup of tea or other beverage of your choice.
Sincerely,
Freso, your friendly neighbourhood community manager ❤
Ohoi m’hearties, it’s time for the first monthly Community Revisit, where we’ll revisit what happened in MetaBrainzLand during the last month. Ready for the ride? Leggo!
The primary thing happening this month has likely been the changes in the MetaBrainz employee line-up following Ian’s departure in July. In the beginning of the month, Freso (wait, hey, that’s me!) was pulled on board as Community Manager (a brand new position for MetaBrainz too!), and just at the end of the month, GSoC wonder child Roman “Gentlecat” Tsukanov was hired as the new software engineer. So hi to us two! 🙂
Speaking of GSoC, the Google Summer of Code, this year’s edition is also fast coming to an end, and our four students and their projects are closing up and giving their work the final touches to have them ready to go live. Don’t be surprised if you hear more about these projects soon.
One thing that did go live during August, in no small part thanks to Ben “LordSputnik” Ockmore and Leo_Verto: the new IRC chat logger! Chat logs from IRC are now available at http://chatlogs.metabrainz.org/ – the site still needs some MetaBrainzifying, but Ben has done a great job of importing (pretty much) all the old chat logs to the new system and the bot is running in all the official MetaBrainz channels. If you’re on IRC (or you just like poking at the IRC logs), be sure to say “Thank you!! <3” to LordSputnik and Leo_Verto next time you see them around!
Another person who has made a mark in the last month was Alex a.k.a. caller#6, starting up the discussion about the current situation of MusicBrainz’ Area entities. Be sure to check out that blog post and let your voice be heard, if you don’t feel like it’s being represented already. The next instalment should be out before long.
We also had two server updates (pretty much all bug fixes) and an updated Virtual Machine image was finally released for the more tech oriented people.
This about rounds off the August Community Revisit. What do you think about the format? Did I miss any important community happenings? Any other comments? This is a brand new venture, so nothing’s set in stone yet!
From Denmark with love,
Freso
MetaBrainz Blog