Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

With the cover bug going around where the bot is corrupting book covers, is it okay for us to revert it? Have the staff given any guidance on how librarians can handle this issue? I've noticed many broken cover images on my shelves, for example, with The Mister here: https://www.goodreads.com/author/list...

As far as I can tell staff have not yet given any explanation of why this is happening or what should be done about it.
As editions are being merged I can see no reason why that should invalidate the cover of the edition into which they have been merged so I have been reverting the image edit to restore the cover.
I have not been reverting any other changes as I do not know why editions are being combined.

(Not a librarian, so if you want me to shut up and get the hell out of this thread, let me know and I'll do so.)

For what it's worth, staff has finally responded to my bug reports and said that they're working on the problem. The fact that it took them days to respond and the idea of "turn the bot off so it won't destroy the entire Goodreads database while we figure out how to fix this bug" doesn't seem to have crossed their minds even once means that their reply should probably be taken with an entire mine's worth of grains of salt, but at least they've taken the step of acknowledging that there is a bug.

"The check is in the mail."

Hi again, thanks for the replies. I thought I might have missed a staff ruling, but since that’s not the case, I decided to contact support to ask how librarians should handle cover images corrupted by the bot. They said we should select the 'undo' option in the librarian changelog. I hope that helps—feel free to contact support to confirm.

Tami wrote: "Hi again, thanks for the replies. I thought I might have missed a staff ruling, but since that’s not the case, I decided to contact support to ask how librarians should handle cover images corrupte..."

I don't even see that option listed

Just as a note, looking at the bot's librarian activity page it seems to have at the very least slowed down its invalid merges. It did a few on October 1, but (knock on wood, for the love of god knock on wood) as far as I can see it hasn't done any invalid merges since then.

The site's database already been completely demolished and these cover restorations are going to be a regular part of Goodreads librarian duties probably until the site closes down for good, but it seems like the rampage has slowed down for now.

Nicodemous55 wrote: "I don't even see that option listed"

Go to the logs, either the author page logs or the book page logs—both will work—and locate the last edit by the bot regarding the cover change. It will look something like this (just an example):

image_uploaded_at: 'Sun Dec 21 08:57:06 -0800 2014' to 'Tue Dec 02 12:12:58 -0800 2014' (undo)

Click (undo) and the cover will be restored.