Awards and Honors field looks very strange

For the past few days the Awards and Honors field has changed in regard to the date and layout.

For the Book

Phosphorescence
by Julia Baird

Awards and honors
The Indie Book Award Longlist ( 2021)
Australian Book Industry Awards ( 2021)
If you go to the Indie awards page all the 2021 entries appear on top like this. 2021 should be at the bottom

The Coconut Children by Vivian Pham square brackets 2021 square brackets
The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams square brackets 2021 square brackets
The Grandest Bookshop in the World by Amelia Mellor square brackets 2021 square brackets
The Happiest Man on Earth: The Beautiful Life of an Auschwitz Survivor by Eddie Jaku square brackets 2021 square brackets
The Left-Handed Booksellers of London by Garth Nix square brackets 2021 square brackets
A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing by Jessie Tu square brackets 2021 square brackets
The Morbids by Ewa Ramsey square brackets 2021 square brackets
Phosphorescence by Julia Baird square brackets 2021 square brackets

(if I leave the square brackets on this post it does touchstones)
A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville 2021

The Australian Book Industry Awards
Look like this Phosphorescence by Julia Baird Book of the Year ∙ 2021

Although I entered it Australian Book Industry Awards (Book of the Year, 2021)
The "strange" ∙, not a full stop, now appears instead of a comma

So what I am saying is that We now seem to have all the awards looking ( yyyy) instead of (sub category, yyyy).

The Subcategory has disappeared.

Unfortunately this is not very easy to explain... but what I am saying is the square brackets have now appeared all over the awards field resulting in touchstones

I have copied another book (copy and paste)

Such a Fun Age
by Kiley Reid

Awards and honors
Reese's Book Club x Hello Sunshine ( 2020, 2020)
NAACP Image Award Finalist (2020)
Booker Prize Longlist (2020)
VCU First Novelist Award ( 2020)
Goodreads Choice Awards ( 2020)
Goodreads Choice Award Nominee ( 2020)
Audie Award Finalist ( 2021)
Audie Winner ( 2021)
Independent Booksellers' Book Prize Shortlist ( 2021)
The British Book Industry Awards Shortlist ( 2021)
Australian Book Industry Awards Shortlist (International Book ∙ 2021)

All the sub categories are gone and everything is now touchstones

Was there any pipe or other fanciness to the coding for the awards?
What browser are you using?

>3 gilroy: Firefox on my computer

>1 bergs47: The history shows that you added the awards. What did you type when entering that data? Or did you copy and paste from somewhere?

>5 rodneyvc: I type the award , then the bracket (, Sub category eg Older children, then a comma , then the year, then close bracket)

>6 bergs47: I've just messed up the history (but you can see yours by selecting "All" rather than "Active"). When I added a third entry, and typed in "The Indie Book Award Longlist (2021)" it behaved as expected. I've deleted it since to return to your entry.

I'm using FF 92.0.1 on macOS 10.14.6. Just brainstorming: Do you have any autocorrect features active?

(Copied ovr from Talk > Common Knowledge, WikiThing, HelpThing)

>1 bergs47: Something horrible has happened to all your touchstones, probably through copying in "decimal dot, space, open square bracket, date, close square bracket". I suspect it is the same bug reported and bumped over the years for author CK, where bracketed content with pipes or commas is turned to dots, and dotted content is deleted down to the bare date.

This has started happening to other work CK fields as well. For example, The book-collector's quarterly, no. XVI, Oct.-Dec. 1934, people/characters includes "Honoré Daumier (Paris exhibition ∙ 1934)", where it used to be seperated by a comma.

Unfortunately, I've also started seeing people, places and events CK with just a date nested inside square brackets inside round brackets. So the same degredation of author CK is now started on work CK.

Tim and the LT team, please copy.

Author CK Bug Collectors discussion:

"Data disappearing when entering Common Knowledge fields", https://www.librarything.com/topic/145603#n7547273

I am about to enter Queensland Literary Awards 2021. I did the finalists in about August and am now doing the winners. I will leave the finalists in the awards field so you can comapre the 2,

I have done this one Queensland Premier's Literary Award (Work of State Significance, 2021) and it looks ok when I go to the complete list. Note I have entered them all using , yyyy)

Due to the bug in >9 Cynfelyn:, I've stopped adding and editing Awards info, and I suggest that (for now) you do the same. The complete data remains in the field, even though it doesn't display properly. Once you save it, though, the old data is gone -- and will be a pain to fix later.

Drat. Okay, I think I need to wait until Monday for this to be fixed--it's deeply Chris' code. But I'll take a look.

I don't see any problems here. Confused. Looking.

Okay, I have sort-of fixed it by replacing the bullet characters with a vertical line, which is what they start as. The code has changed a lot here, probably to accommodate new code that Chris has written, so I'm going to leave it to him to look at this on Monday.

Thanks for the update, Tim!

Thanks Tim. I’ve also stopped entering awards for the moment. I think I’m one of the most prolific award entered. Make up about 40000 of my 80000 entries

Tim and I have talked and we want a clarification on how members expect/want awards CK values to behave.

Take these examples:
Test Award (Runner Up)
Test Award (Runner Up | 2004-2005)
Test Award (Runner Up | 2004-2005 | 2004)
Test Award (Runner Up | 2004-2005 | 2004,2005)
Test Award (Runner Up | 2004-2005 , 2004 ,2005)
Test Award (Runner Up | [2005])

What do we expect each to do?

The last one is a bit of a curve-ball. I see those in the data but I think they are artifacts of our bug and not values that people actually want.
Square brackets have never been a parenthetical in CK, although they were once included as extra links to allow people to click and search CK results for only the year if you included a fully-formed date...although I think that is no longer the case.

Anyway, I don't want to go plugging around in the code and trying to fix something that isn't broken while breaking something that doesn't need fixing. So here's our chance to come together and have a meeting of the minds.

And there are obviously other variations on the examples above that you can bring up.

>17 conceptDawg: A bit of pedantry to begin with. Pre-existing LT examples don't have a space on either side of the pipe, e.g.:

Author/Education: "Mississippi State University (BS|Library Science)"
Work/Important events: "Battle of the Bulge (1944|1945)" - although this should surely be 1944-1945.

If you're going to hardwire things in, will a bare pipe as used in other fields do nasty things if used instead of "space pipe space" in Awards?

I thought the pipe/vertical line was to separate the "sort" characters from the "display" characters, has that changed?

>17 conceptDawg: Yeah, I agree with >19 norabelle414:

So based on what was given:
First example would show the Runner Up like normal in the award page
Second example would try to sort on Runner Up and display 2004-2005 (I think?)
Third and Fourth examples should kick back as an error
Fifth example would try to sort on Runner Up and display 2004-2005 , 2004 ,2005 (I think?)
Sixth example... Sort on Runner up, and fail on the display? (No clue)

>18 Cynfelyn: But the author/education example should be a / not a |, I thought.

So the real question isn't what they "do," but what should show before clicking on it to edit. Right now it's showing every pipe and bit of data. Before it did not do that.

>21 timspalding: In the CK field? I think it should be showing exactly what is in there - or we will have more people copying from elsewhere (not in Edit mode for the field) and pasting and wondering why it behaves differently.

>22 AnnieMod: I don't think it's quite as simple as "showing exactly what is in there" -- not for awards. Some of the info creates numbered clusters, so that different categories appear together. Annual awards can have a lot of categories, so clustering nominees together is important.

The US National Book Award has a longlist, a shortlist (finalists), and then the winners:
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/National+Book+Award+Longlist
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/National+Book+Award+finalist
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/National+Book+Award

The Lambda Literary awards announce finalists and then winners -- in twenty-some categories:
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Lambda+Literary+Award+Finalist
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Lambda+Literary+Award

>17 conceptDawg: Yes, the square brackets are an artifact of the bug.

Previously, the raw info (that is, what I typed into the CK field) looked like this:

National Book Award Longlist (2020.5|Young People's Literature, 2020)

where
2020 = award year
5 = category order

ETA: This was for Cemetery Boys.

Er, does this answer your question, Chris?

>24 karenb:

Yes this is how I have often entered more complex awards. Of course a lot of them have been stuffed up with square brackets.

For authors I have entered and seen stuff like "Nobel Prize (Physics, 1980)"

So I don't think any of the formats listed by conceptdawg are what I would expect to see.

>21 timspalding: No, it's not currently showing every bit of data. The display has mucked up somehow around the sorting info, changing the sorting details into the year surrounded by square brackets. Unfortunately, clicking to edit shows only the mucked-up info. Though the original data remains there, somewhere, as the categories continue to sort properly in the award lists.

CK used to show every bit of data before you clicked to edit, I think. That changed a couple of weeks ago.

>23 karenb: The question in >21 timspalding: was what to be visible in the CK field before you press edit, not how it should work or what should be visible on the awards pages… And in there, it is that easy indeed - show the same data that you see when you do press edit.

The order and clustering on the award pages is a function on the usage of the pipes for ordering.

I dont think I need to say much more than what the others have said

I wish to revert back to

Booker Prize Longlist (2020) , Sorted alphabetically in the year

CBCA Book of the year Shortlist (Younger Readers, 2021) also sorted alphabetically in the year.

When I click though on my computer (Firefox) I expect to see exactly what I have typed...
Book title on the left side of the page, year or sub category, YYYY on the right.

No square Brackets, no double year ANYWHERE
eg Reese's Book Club x Hello Sunshine ( 2020, 2020)

>24 karenb: Yes, this is the usage I'm familiar with. Using the pipe/vertical line to separate sort from display.

>21 timspalding: The problem is that when you edit an award that you entered, it does not display the same text that you entered. Anything else can be worked around, but not our own entries being changed.

Ok. Thanks for all of the input here. I'm going to try and solve the issues for awards (and CK in general).

The big ask seems to be "display the data exactly as I put it in the system." I think that's rational.

There are some CK items that split this metadata into atomic "values" that are really meant to be considered data filters on their own. And at some point (even I can't remember right now) we were also parsing date years into a kind of pseudo-metadata that was generated at display time from any date-like metadata, so you could then click on an atomic year to see other edits that had that year. Honestly, that was one of my bright ideas and I don't think it was as useful as I thought it was going to be.

So I think we should probably do away with trying to be too creative with how we display CK data, at least when it comes to awards entries.

Follow up question: If you edit awards right now are you still seeing issues?

> 30 " If you edit awards right now are you still seeing issues?"

Yes. It looks no different.



(from CK for Finna)

ETA: In the History, the old/full data is still there. The second part (with square brackets around the year) shows how the data still looks, whether editing the field or not.

>31 karenb: No, I mean if you EDIT the data, is it now acting the way you want when saving?
Because it looks to me that it is, but I've been known to be wrong before.

We are not planning on fixing any existing data discrepancies in an automated way (that's just asking for disaster with all of these varied data values). Fixing the square brackets on existing values will have to be done manually.

OK, haven't read through the whole thread yet, but here's a case.

https://www.librarything.com/work/4864639

Showed up on list https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/The+White+Ravens in 1993 -- i.e. appeared in list correctly alpha sorted within the 1993 section as:
The White Ravens (Croatian / Bohemia (Czech Republic), 1993

CK, then, would have originally been entered as:
The White Ravens (Croatian / Bohemia (Czech Republic)|1993)

The language was apparently boneheadedly incorrect (will have to go back to originals to triple-check), but that's not the issue.
When I went to edit the CK, the contents of the field had been nonsensically and automatically truncated to appear as:
The White Ravens (Croatian / Bohemia |Czech Republic)

Which is rather odd. Thinking there might be something that changed with how parenthesis are handled (problematic, but probably manageable in the grand scheme of things), I just now edited the CK to:
The White Ravens (Czech / Bohemia--Czech Republic|1993)

And now, the work doesn't show up on the list https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/The+White+Ravens AT ALL anymore. That, I'm afraid, is NOT a manageable situation.
-----
As a control, here's a similar situation that I haven't touched in years:
https://www.librarything.com/work/19903564

At present, shows up in list at https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/The+White+Ravens correctly as:
Chinese / Republic of China (Taiwan), 1993

Original CK entry, then, would have been:
The White Ravens (Chinese / Republic of China (Taiwan)|1993)

But contents of CK field have now been nonsensically and automatically truncated to appear as:
The White Ravens (Chinese / Republic of China |Taiwan)

If you want to muck around with it to diagnose, have at it.

This is... a problem.

>32 conceptDawg: For a moment after editing (ETA: and saving), the data looks correct. Refresh the page, though, and the bug mucks it up again.

Does it make a difference that I'm working on Windows? This happens both in Opera (79.0.4143.72) and Firefox (92.0.1)

>30 conceptDawg: please could you write all this in English.
I have not done any work on Awards for a week. Ill start again only when you revert to how it was. Why do you constantly fix something that was not broken.

I simply dont like this
Globe and Mail Top 100 Book (International Fiction|2010)
why cant it just say Globe and Mail Top 100 Book (International Fiction, 2010).

or this what is it supposed to mean

Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award Nominee ( 2011| 2011)

Follow up question: If you edit awards right now are you still seeing issues? NO NO DEFINITELY NOT WORKING

>33 davidgn: ETA, as a correction, it appears that after my edit as described above, https://www.librarything.com/work/4864639 does indeed appear in
The White Ravens list at https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/The+White+Ravens , but now designated only as "1993". The language and country designators are simply not displayed.

Inconsistent, wrong, and broken. Any alteration to existing awards CK data results in apparent data loss.

I'm with bergs47 >35 bergs47: -- strongly recommend not touching any awards CK until this is addressed. And pretty sure bergs47 and I are the two biggest single contributors to awards CK (though I haven't done very much in the past few years).

>36 davidgn: Actually, you have your original text incorrect. The pipe has always acted as a non-display sort designator (that I remember) so where you have the country before the pipe, it won't show it. The one with the COMMA would allow the country and the year to display, but sort based on year first, then country.

>37 gilroy: It acted as a sort designator, yes, but as I remember, it did not use to be non-display (at least in the absence of alternative year information). And the proof is in the pudding: my original entries displayed correctly on the awards pages (and still do until edited, despite now appearing truncated in the CK field). If the behavior has been changed, am I expected to go back and edit tens of thousands of entries for consistency to the new regime, or risk information disappearing anytime anyone accidentally edits a field?)

>37 gilroy: Actually, taking a step back, it looks as though I may have misremembered how I would have entered the data initially. Unfortunately, there is no good reference for this, apart from looking back into old Talk posts. But I do recall a lot of complicated sort functions for certain awards including both a sort designator (various non-display category clusters within a given year , YYYY.1 to YYYY.12 for instance, sometimes even subdivided to the level of YYYY.1a, YYYY.1b, etc), set off by the pipe, and then a text description of the given category cluster, and then finally a YYYY, which was intended to be displayed.

I'll have to go trawling through awards for some of the more complicated examples when I have time.

Take a look at https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/ALA+Rainbow+Book+List.
It's chock full of pipe characters that came out of nowhere ( >14 timspalding: might be relevant?)
cf. https://www.librarything.com/work/10033499/commonknowledge

I'm scared to touch anything. I also see series data on this work in the CK field, though it's possible that the award was granted to the series as a whole? (EDIT: Yes, that was the case).

Guessing these were originally entered in the

AWARDNAME (YYYY.n|blahblahblah, YYYY) format, which is now showing as AWARDNAME ([YYYY]blah|blah|blah, YYYY).

>35 bergs47: The last I checked I was speaking in English (albeit with a slight southern twang). Not sure where you lost the plot in my original message but I'll be happy to clarify. Just let me know where I went astray.

We aren't fixing what wasn't broken. It is broken. Things are quite tangled within hundreds of thousands (millions?) of lines of code on LibraryThing. Sometimes we change a feature and it affects another feature that even we didn't realize was connected. So we have bugs. That's software.

Now I'm trying to fix the bug but I would rather fix it the way YOU want it fixed vs. the way I'd presume would be the best way, because sometimes I just don't know how members want to actually use the UI. And, frankly, while I was the main designer and developer for CK, it has taken on a life of its own over the years and I don't always keep up with the current styles of entering data on various elements. So it's better to ask.

>37 gilroy:
>38 davidgn:
>40 davidgn:
And this is exactly why we are here. I honestly can't tell you the correct format that has been used to segregate each section of the CK data for awards. It has CERTAINLY been at least a pipe symbol, but I don't know if we were also separating on commas. I don't think we did because people want to use commas in sort text, negating their use as separators of the metadata chunks.

I'm about 80% positive that we've only used pipe characters to separate the chunks in the past (and that's how it is currently).

Right. I've got too much going on next day or two to do heavy forum digging. Anyone want to go back into Talk and find threads where we heavily discussed use of pipes and formatting of awards data? I'm sure there are some examples there.

It's unfortunate that the actual strings entered in the CK fields have been mutilated and/or truncated and there's no way to reference them directly.

>40 davidgn: Take a look at https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/ALA+Rainbow+Book+List.

Obviously there are no pipe characters showing on the actual series page but I know there are pipe characters (and square brackets and possibly other markup) in the individual work-level CK entries, so I'm assuming that's what you mean there.

The problem is that, as a developer, I can't presume that those characters weren't put there by a well-meaning user that WANTS the data like that. So we're trying to get to a consensus about what delineates the various pieces (we've ALWAYS assumed a pipe as the main separator, as far as I know).

>44 conceptDawg: Well, what I can tell you is that I put most of those strings in myself, and all of my lovely dotted-suffixes for sorting, commas, semicolons, and probably the odd square bracket or two have all been overwritten and replaced with those damn pipes (or, in the case of entries where I start off the parenthesis with a year-dot-suffix, then a pipe, to sort categories within a year, the suffix has been obliterated and the year placed in square brackets. So what, is the sorting alphabetical by the next letter that shows up? Will my hard work in manually specifying serial order of categories be lost?).

As of right now, the display on the awards pages still comes out as intended (so presumably the correct formatting is still recorded SOMEWHERE), but any edits to the CK fields risk those details disappearing permanently. I'm also horrified at the thought that the displayed data is merely cached and will at some point refresh from the values that presently show up in the CK fields, losing the formatting as I entered it forever.

>45 davidgn: See, someone edited and saved the CK field for this one: https://www.librarything.com/work/13478780
Notice how it no longer displays with the other items of the same category (which, given it was intended to appear as the fourth category for 2016, was presumably entered as something like (2016.4|...) , but after data loss is now merely ([2016]|...) and sorting on the "Y" in "Young Adult Fiction" instead (EDIT: Actually, I'm not sure WHAT it's sorting on now -- the square bracket itself? -- but it's not sorting on what I originally entered).

(NB: Obviously, I can't input the square brackets directly and have them come out in Talk, so you'll have to interpret the HTML).

>41 conceptDawg: Ok lets start.. Please translate this in something a 70 year old can understand

There are some CK items that split this metadata into atomic "values" that are really meant to be considered data filters on their own. And at some point (even I can't remember right now) we were also parsing date years into a kind of pseudo-metadata that was generated at display time from any date-like metadata, so you could then click on an atomic year to see other edits that had that year. Honestly, that was one of my bright ideas and I don't think it was as useful as I thought it was going to be.

metadata into atomic "values"???
kind of pseudo-metadata that was generated at display time from any date-like metadata, etc etc

I think as i said before its very simple and I'm only talking awards and honours

Award name (yyyy) Sorted by year . No problem
Award Name (sub -Category, YYYY) sorted by the year in title alphabetical order
Award Name... with all the pipes (what ever a pipe is, I think you mean | or !) sorted in number order for a particular year eg Time magazine book of the year 1 to 10

Its now over 3 weeks.. Im still seeing this

https://www.librarything.com/work/23711280

Read with Jenna ( 2020| 2020)
Goodreads Choice Award Nominee (Fiction|2020)
Book of the Month Club Selection ( 2020| 2020)

Must I just accept this and move on?

>49 bergs47:
No, you do not need to accept it. But you must see that we've been having an active discussion above on how to best fix it. And this past weekend was a holiday weekend with very little work going on (I was away for Thursday-Monday). We are people.

This feels a bit pedantic, but since this issue was fixed, the system now creates a double space between, e.g. "Oxford University (Oriel College)", in many if not most CK lines when new content is added or pre-change content is re-saved (or "Recalculate author name"?)

This would be purely cosmetic if it did not seem to affect sorting in the "ChangeLog". "Double space + (" seems to be sorted before "space + (" . Something is certainly going on.

This does not affect the CK "Relationships" line, where the content within brackets is left as it is and not processed.

I have now left this for 2 months and I am getting very frustrated. Can someone please help me fix up Time Magazine's Best Books of the Year its a total mess. I an trying to sort out The Mirror & the Light, and get it into the right place on the list, 3rd from the bottom. I been try for 30 minutes and it won't change, no matter what I do. The same applies to Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar, the #5 in 2020. I want to enter the 2021 top 10 but I have no idea how to even start.

HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

>52 bergs47: The issue still isn't fixed. Why do you expect it to behave as it did before?

>52 bergs47: Maybe enter it as a list temporarily, to be ported over to the awards section once it is fixed.
This is obviously a low level bug in their eyes, or seen as to be repaired with LT2.0 (though never openly stated).

See my lists in awards

>52 bergs47: This is really weird. I was just able to get The Mirror and The Light to sort correctly. But when I entered it the same way the other awards in that series are formatted:

Time Magazine's Best Books of the Year (2020.27 | Fiction | 3)

it went to the right place, and only displayed the "3".

So I went back and formatted it as

Time Magazine's Best Books of the Year (2020.27 | Fiction, 3, 2020)

and while the formatting doesn't precisely match the other books, at least it's in the right place with the right information.

To be honest, this is kind of how I expect it to work. I'm more confused as to how the other awardees are being formatted!

Oh dear dear what have you done to books awards?

Where are all the sub categories? Novel, Juvenile etc etc
I want to see this

Colorado Book Awards Finalist (Science Fiction/Fantasy, 2022) not just 2022.

Take the Pulitzer prizes https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Pulitzer+Prize
Some have categories others don't.. Its a total mess

>57 bergs47: Looks like a coding thing. Any award that has a pipe ( | ), so has a sorting character included, is showing the category. If it is just category and year, the category is removed.

ETA: However, adding a pipe with no sort character in front of it does NOT get the category to appear. Nor does having just the category listed make it appear if there is no year, like days of old. conceptdawg had been talking about redoing this whole thing...

>58 gilroy: Awards are very likely to get a complete overhaul in the near future (much like we did with Series when we broke them out of CK).

If it changed, we need to look at it. I'm asking Lucy to look.

>57 bergs47: Fixed; sorry about that!

>61 knerd.knitter: looking much better

Lines on Awards pages on the English (www.com) site are generally coloured white and pale grey alternately. Books on white lines without content in the English Common Knowledge are then coloured a pale yellow, as per the bright yellow of the old system. But grey lines remain coloured grey. Only the English (www.com) site seems to have (i) "not in (language name) Common Knowledge" and (ii) yellow lines. Is this intentional?

See e.g. the Welsh national eisteddfod prose medal, where most but not all of the books were entered from LT's .cym site, as displayed on the English, Italian and Welsh LT sites:
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Medal+Ryddiaith+Eisteddfod+Genedlaethol+C...
https://www.librarything.it/bookaward/Medal+Ryddiaith+Eisteddfod+Genedlaethol+Cy...
https://cym.librarything.com/bookaward/Medal+Ryddiaith+Eisteddfod+Genedlaethol+C...

For a German award with practically no English CK, see:
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Prix+Goncourt
https://www.librarything.de/bookaward/Deutscher+Buchpreis+-+Longlist
https://www.librarything.fr/bookaward/Deutscher+Buchpreis+-+Longlist

And for a French award, where only the book for 1922 has no English CK, see:
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Prix+Goncourt (see 1922)
https://www.librarything.fr/bookaward/Prix+Goncourt
https://www.librarything.es/bookaward/Prix+Goncourt

Fixed the coloring of the stripes on .com.