User talk:Bobnotts

What is happening at CPDL?

Hi Rob, I noted that you commented out the donation page from the main CPDL page. This seems consistent with my experience: I sent a donation cheque to the address specified in the donation page, and the cheque was returned as undeliverable, as if Raf Ornes were not receiving donations for CPDL.

A number of CPDL issues, described in the "ChoralWiki:Operation and implementation issues" of the Forum, and requiring Raf Ornes' intervention, are pending since some time. I also offered to CPDL a new phpBB3 forum so as to replace, at least temporarily, the old phpBB2 forum that is out of order since many weeks, but nothing happened.

I'm under the impression that CPDL is loosing the energy that Raf provided since its foundation. Am I wrong? What's happening? Can we help?

Max a.k.a. --Choralia 05:24, 12 May 2008 (PDT)

Hi Max. Thanks for your message. I'm fully aware that you tried to donate some money to help CPDL and that you found it impossible to do so. Allow me to thank you for your goodwill in doing this and also in offering a new Bulletin Board for CPDL's use. The offer was very generous. Unfortunately, there are certain parts of CPDL that no-one except Raf can change, and he is not active on the project at the moment and he has not been forthcoming with his reasons for this, nor has he suggested when (or if) he will be active on the project again. One of the parts that only Raf can change is the navigation menu on the left of every page. At the moment, the link for the forums is to the old forums and we can't change that. So, that's the main reason why your kind offer wasn't accepted - we figured it would confuse users even more if CPDL apparently had 2 forums... Other things that only Raf can do is - ensure the site is backed up regularly and completely, update the Media Wiki installation and add new add ons for it, and fix & update the forum.

You're right that a lot of the impetus of CPDL has been lost and a figurehead (like Jimmy Wales on Wikipedia) tends to encourage people to work together in one direction. At the moment, there are not nearly enough active users who are not just contributing new editions and texts and translations. Of course, I don't mean to belittle the efforts of contributors - CPDL would be nothing without its content, but there need to be more people doing admin related jobs such as moving pages, updating pages with the new templates that have recently been introduced, writing new help pages and formaliseing policy. At the present, there are 3 active users doing this stuff - me, Chuck and a very welcome addition to the team, Carlos. And whilst we would love to have the same level of framework in terms of policy as, say, Wikipedia, we just don't have the time to commit to it. Basically at the moment we're doing a little better than treading water. One of the ways we are moving forward is the new Add Works form which, when complete, will make people's lives considerably easier. I'd like to increase participation in CPDL by enhancing the community portal and improving documentation. I'll be able to start doing this in a couple of weeks. Hopefully, it will then become obvious as to how you can help :-) Thanks for your concern and support. --Bobnotts talk 01:08, 15 May 2008 (PDT)

Hi Rob, I definitely have a professional bias. My motto is "no single point of failure", i.e., there must be a back-up for everything, including people. From my professional perspective, having no back-up for Raf is a big risk for CPDL. One year ago CPDL had a major failure. At that time, the forum acted as a back-up resource: even though the scores were temporarily unavailable, the community remained in touch, and this somewhat mitigated the effects of the failure. If the same problem occurs today on the wiki platform, all the communicatons are lost, and it would be worse. So, I appreciate your effort creating better templates, improving documentation, and so on, but I'm more worried about loosing all the work made so far by so many people.

Anyway, let's wait that Raf is back on the project, hopefully before a major problem occurs. If you have any tasks for me, I'll be happy to help. A small suggestion about the phpBB2 forum: perhaps somebody (you? Chuck?) have forum credentials allowing to add a link on the top of the forum page, or even to re-direct the forum to another URL. If so, you may add a link or re-direct the phpBB2 forum to my phpBB3 forum. As the phpBB2 forum remains the "gateway" to the back-up phpBB3 forum, the relationship between the twos (phpBB2 as "primary", phpBB3 as "back-up") should be reasonably clear for everybody. The benefit, of course, is that there will be a back-up forum available in the case of problems on this wiki platform. --Choralia 05:33, 15 May 2008 (PDT)

Can you say more about the transition now that Rafael is withdrawing? In particular, I (and possibly others) would be interested in how this affects the back-up situation--any way we can help with remote back-up even if it isn't 100% comprehensive? Are there higher priority ways people can help than with translations or fixing broken links (maybe even something that can be added to the volunteer page). I'd like to hear more about the some of the tasks you mentioned above (updating pages with recently created templates, writing new help pages, formaliseing policy).

By the way, would Rafael be cool with some update to his user page that tells people where support or feedback should be sent now? Also, his page has an box encouraging people to report broken links or errors. That should be redirected to others. I will understand if you folks have your hands busy and can't get to my more gnat-like questions. --Vaarky 00:04, 27 July 2008 (PDT)

Hi Vaarky. The best way you can help at the moment is to update score pages with templates. I reckon the best way to proceed is to familiarise yourself with all the templates listed here and here. It would also be a good idea to review the following edits that I've made recently which incorporate the new templates: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] Those are the sort of "template update" edits that would be most useful, so that scores are categorised as a cappella, or as having piano accompaniment, or in English, or by William Byrd, for example. One of my bug bears is incorrect score icons when it comes to external links - should be when not pointing directly to a file. These pages contain editions which are hosted externally (often the icons haven't been updated) so if you fancy getting your teeth stuck into something, have a go at that. I'll let you know if you mess something up! Once you've learned the ropes, it would be great if you could add something to the volunteers page.

The submit error box on Raf's page simply invites the user to create a new page with the title that they enter in the box, so I don't see a problem with leaving it as it is at the moment. In terms of backups, I reckon this is probably best continued in the same manner as it has been before. It is one of the procedures that I and others will be looking to review over the next couple of months. Thanks for your enthusiasm! --Bobnotts talk 06:23, 29 July 2008 (PDT)

Thanks for the feedback and excellent ideas. It so happens that I have previously corrected icons (based on my own peeve) when I've noticed that should have been or . This sort of thing is right up my alley. --Vaarky 08:52, 29 July 2008 (PDT)

External tool for editing score pages

Hi Rob, you've been editing and adding templates to a lot of score pages lately! Would you like to experiment a bit with the macros I was talking about at the forum? I uploaded the necessary files here (program) and here (CPDL macros). The macros aren't still totally developed, so you may want to customize them to fit your needs (or ask me to if you don't know how). Some step-by-step instructions:

1. Unzip ue32v90.zip to a folder
2. Save CPDL.MAC in the same folder
3. Execute uedit32.exe
4. On menu Macro -> Load, select file CPDL.MAC
5. On menu Macro -> Set Auto Load..., select the same file
6. Now open a new empy document: menu File -> New
7. Edit a score page on CPDL and select all text (Ctrl-C)
8. Paste the text (Ctrl-V) to UltraEdit's new doc
9. Now (Ctrl-L), select macro CPDL__Score and OK
10. Select all text (Ctrl-A), go back to CPDL page and paste (Ctrl-V)

That's it! Now just compare changes and see if there's something missing. It may sound a bit difficult at first, but with some training you'll do all steps very quickly.

This is just a temporary solution. I'm working on a way to implement a bot that would accurately do most of these edits for us. Regards, —Carlos  06:26, 31 July 2008 (PDT)