Major Changes: Rules, Submissions, etc.

There are a number of significant changes that are coming to B2B and I'd like to break down each of them so please bear with me.

First off Mark and I have discussed and agreed that despite what we believe is significant development of BandToBand.com since its arrival on the web back in January we feel that the current system of development has been maximized. As it stands we're averaging 5-10 new bands a day with a new site feature every month or so. While this has been successful to date we feel that the site needs to progress to the next level and here is what we'd like to do to move in that direction.

In terms of Rule changes, we believe it is in the site's interest to not focus merely on adding as many bands as possible but rather in terms of adding as many albums as possible. To accomplish this we must first address a major point of contention: Rule 8. To condense as long conversation as much as possible, here's the summation:

Rule 8 will be changed so that (almost) all Solo Artists & Supporting Bands will be allowed.

Of course there are going to be a few stipulations to avoid scenarios of true conflicts with Rule 5 (the collaboration rule) but in effect bands like Frank Zappa & The Mothers Of Invention, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, and Lou Reed & The Velvet Underground are hereby legal. I am going to have to take some time in re-writing the Rules to accommodate the change but it is coming.

Secondly despite our best efforts we're constantly falling behind on adding new submissions in an orderly, timely fashion. We only have so much time in the day to work on B2B and it is clear that a better system need to be put in place. To that end, as has been suggested and talked about for some time, we are going to slowly start moving to a "wiki" style user editing format for band submissions, corrections, and updates. Needless to say there are going to be very large security and data integrity issues that will have to be resolved, not to mention the development and integration of the new tools, but it is the only logical solution to our dilemma of progressing the site as much as possible. Once again, do not look for it in the next couple of days or weeks (I've got to go out of town for a little while again), but look for it nonetheless. It will happen.

There are going to be a number of other slight quirks and changes here and there but nothing to get to hyped up about at this moment, just be aware that change is in the air. We certainly appreciate all the help thus far from everyone and hopefully the new changes coming in will result in improvements that everyone can appreciate. Thanks.


Kevin

I fully support everything in this post.

To be clear, the rule changes you're mentioning will be allowing "Artist & Band" type bands, but not "Solo Artist" type bands, correct? Obviously I'd like those to be legal too, but I'll take what I can get, and I see this as a very positive step forward for the rules :D

I would like to reiterate my months-ago proposal of having a web-based submission form and/or band/album queue. Even without any user-editing privileges, I think this lets us comment on stuff in the pipeline earlier. From there the queue could be tweaked by adding user-editing features, so bands could be "examined" and "approved" publicly before getting in to the database. I think you two should retain control over the final step itself, but I think if the tools can be made to automate the entire submission processing/data entry process as much as possible, it reduces the workload for you to a "final approval" sense (and possibly additional comments along the way), which should increase throughput without damaging quality.

Is it your intention to let other people change the data? Because if so, I'm all against it.
A web-based submission form would be a big step forward though. You could have mandatory fields for us to fill in like real names, stage names, links to cover artwork, an indication whether or not a band member is in the database already, links to back up that a band member is indeed the same person as a someone in another band... that kind of stuff :)

I've already made this suggestion to Mark / Kevin but to maintain the quality of the data while giving them a leg up with speed of building this, my suggestion was:
1. An interface so that other people can add data
2. This to be by 'invitation only' so that the usual rogue elements don't creep in.
3. These additions to go straight into the dB but have an 'unverified' flag against them until Mark/Kevin gets a chance to review them.
4. All search tree / link functionality to have a 'Include unverified data y/n' feature.

That 'verified' flag idea is pretty good. If we would be able to enter data straight into the database it would save Mark and Kevin a lot of time. They still would have to verify everything but since everything is already there there's no need to type in all those names.

What about album covers? They still would need to resize and convert album covers. Unless someone knows how this can be automated through a web interface...

The album cover portion of the administrative interface is actually very simple--you simply save the cover image to your computer and then upload it through the interface. On the B2B side, the cover is automatically renamed, saved in its original form, and saved in the three different sizes that you see on the site. I still end up cropping, rotating, or otherwise fixing about 10% of the images, but that is something Kevin and I would take care of later, in the interest of moving things along. I'm really looking forward to having something that lets submitters do more of the work. We appreciate that all of you have been pushing us in this direction.

As far as changes to rules go, it will be just "Artist & Band" entities. No purely solo artists yet, but no longer will it take dozens of steps to go from CSNY to Crazy Horse.