Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

Greetings,

Is there any way to restrict the changes made by "bot" uploads? I ask this because today alone, I have made several revisions / reverts caused by incorrect bot (Ingram) uploads.

C-Cose, I'm not an employee, but generally the best thing in these circumstances is to link to specific examples. This will help the developers fine-tune their filters for the automated imports.

Cait wrote: "C-Cose, I'm not an employee, but generally the best thing in these circumstances is to link to specific examples. This will help the developers fine-tune their filters for the automated imports."

Agreed Cait,

After I posted the question, I noticed comments from other librarians and supers on combine / merge / delete boards indicating that bot revisions were not to interfere with user generated entries.

In the end, I've decided to leave the question open in the hopes that an employee can give some input regarding those bots that have (continue to) violated this policy. Today's culprit in the majority of cases was Ingram: I had to revert pp., cover images, and other data that had been input directly from users or other librarians and then "revised" by Ingram updates / imports.

Things which you see sourced from ingram or publishers' names are automated imports which are supposed to be running, and some of the things which they are supposed to be doing are updating existing records based on a hierarchy of which source is most reliable. User-provided data is supposed to be at the top of the list, so if an automated import is updating overtop of user-provided data then it may be that there's an error in registering the source of that user-provided data -- if it doesn't say it came from a user even though it did, then it would be correct for a publisher to overwrite it -- or it may be that there's an error in how a certain type of import is checking the source -- if the check for the source isn't working, it probably looks like it wasn't coming from a user and again it would be correct for a publisher to overwrite it. That's why I said that examples are helpful: most of the time, user-provided data is correctly shown as such and isn't overwritten, so it may be that there's a bug which is only affected some records. The best way to find that is to look at the specific records which are known to have this problem.

I've only run into it the one time, but this book:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11...

had it's image changed by Ingram to an image that was only used as an in-house mock-up that leaked onto the internet.

It may very well be that this example was one where the original source was not listed as a user and the update was legit according to the criteria - but I submit it as an example, just in case.

❂ Jennifer wrote: "I've only run into it the one time, but this book:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11...

had it's image changed by Ingram to an image that was only used as an in-house mo..."

Thx Jennifer :)

That was one of the entries I was referring to. I'm going to have to start keeping track of the changes so that I have examples for the future.

Looking at the change log, I notice that the correct image is now where all the incorrect images had been before--in the right "icon" column accompanying each change entry. When I was editing it yesterday, the incorrect image was in all the entries prior to the ones that you and I had made. There was also a clear record that the correct image had been uploaded some time ago prior to the Ingram bot over-write.

Now there is no mention of the original upload at all ..... very confusing.