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Although ComicBase is an amazing program and the defacto standard for cataloging a comic book/magazine/book collection, it suffers from a major defect and that is how titles are created, named, and maintained especially if a title ends and is restarted with a new number one adding it as part of a series. A classic simple example of this is DC Comics's Metal Men, e.g. Metal Men Metal Men (3rd Series) Metal Men (4th Series) Metal Men (Mini-Series) In the example above, Metal Men (Mini-Series) would ideally be Metal Men (2nd Series). However, there is an underlying decision that makes renaming Metal Men (Mini-Series) problematic, as described by Pete, and that is that the title name is used as the foreign key in, what I presume, is the Item table. This defect can make it difficult to locate a specific title, organize titles in order of their publication and often results in additional titles added for titles that already exist. Based on the comments of @Peter R. Bickford in the live stream of 4/13/2022, it seems that it is unlikely to change. I think that's a shame since organization is the major component of a database application. After giving this just a little bit of thought, I think this may be a starting point of a solution that could solve the problem. Caveat: I'm suggesting this without knowing the intricacies of the DB structure and would welcome input. I expect that moving forward with this will not only take time to mull over but to implement as well, but ultimately will make ComicBase an even greater product than it already is. Here's my take: Create a new field called DisplayTitle in the table that contains Title. Copy the values of the existing Title field into DisplayTitle. Use this DisplayTitle for searching and display. When a new title is created either by CB or a user, copy that value into the DisplayTitle field as well. If a DisplayTitle needs to be changed, CB verifies the new display title, changes it and voila, after the next update, the title can be found and sorted correctly. This would allow the implementation of a title naming standard perhaps using the indicia, year, and even the publisher of the title. Something like Metal Men (1993 Series) (DC) The benefit of this is if the standard changes, titles can be easily updated. This solution addresses some of the problems that @Peter R. Bickford brought up in the live stream. It doesn't violate the foreign key constraints between Title and Item. It easily allows for renaming the DisplayTitle if the indicia changes between solicitation and publication of the title. There is no requirement to shift data around in the tables and potentially mess up a user's data, since it's simply a DisplayTitle change. I'd love to see something like this implemented. --Walt

Thanks for the catch! We've revved the setup sheet for the scanner here to remove any extra spaces that get inserted: https://www.comicbase.com/Support/CB_Wireless_Scanner_Easy_Setup.pdf The latest build of ComicBase (build 1669) also handles the issue. -Pete

Mark, I just did the Friday update. It added 300MB to my dB for all the new Magazine entries. How many of your existing customers have a use for all 5,000 issues of The Daily Telegraph from Australia? This is just bloating the dB and making the updates take a lot longer. I would really, really encourage you to allow all of us existing users to CHOOSE whether we want all the Magazines in our local dB or not. And if you start bloating the dB with 'Books', then please add the same option there too. I subscribe to ComicBase to manage my Comics. Nothing else matters to me.

There's also an additional benefit to this approach... it allows a user to define his own display name. It a setting is added to not override DisplayName, a user could easily maintain their own names.

Good points, I'll mention your reply to the programming team for them to have in mind. At the moment, there are no plans to tweaking the Add by Barcode process.

I don't know what that means but I think we both want some way to better organize titles. The answer from CB shouldn't be "We're not going to do anything."

But, of course, that requires one to properly match your understanding of which type of item you are scanning with how it is currently entered in ComicBase...

I'm wondering if newspapers could be spun off to their own section, separate from the Magazines section. As I mentioned earlier, I don't want to exclude magazines entirely. I would, however, exclude newspapers if I could. I can see where tracking all of that stuff in Human Computing's master database might be worthwhile for them, but I doubt many of us want to house a mega-database on our own systems. As ComicBase grows and expands well beyond comics, there may be a need to devise more ways for users to select the portions that meet their needs and exclude those that don't. I've got plenty of magazines related to comics and entertainment, but I don't need a newspaper index. I've got plenty of books, but I don't need an index of romance paperbacks or theological volumes.

Yeah, that is normal. Shiny foil and scanners don't play well together and the result is usually a darker image.

I echo Joel's suggestion. The magazines and books in my collection are so few, I'd prefer to manually add those titles from the db and live without the thousands of other books and magazines. r/ Mike

I understand that. What I am looking for is that same ability to exclude Magazines.

Thank you for this. I'm not a computer guy so I get lost in the jargon. I believe what you are suggesting is exactly what I have in mind. That said, it concerns me a bit that I had the same thought because HC has people trained in this and that have actually built all of this. Wouldn't they have already hit on it?

quick reports aren't available to be uploaded to the mobile app. I'll mention it to our programming team for a feature suggestion.

There are several titles that work the same way and it makes me crazy too. Wait until you look at Star Wars. The first listing is Marvel from 1977 and makes perfect sense. The following title listing is Star Wars (2nd Series) from Marvel, 2015-present although it ended in 2020. The third series is also Marvel and started in 2020. Never mind those pesky Dark horse series with the same titles that ran 1998-2006 and 2013-2014. I know CB and how to find the series I'm looking for....most of the time. Imagine a newb looking for a book though. There are a total of 15 series titled just "Star Wars" (16 if you count Dark Horse's "The Star Wars") with 5 of them being published by Marvel when you throw in the Canadian Edition and the Newspaper Strip books. Granted, Metal Men is different in that they all came from DC but ultimately it's the same inconsistent cataloging. Personally, I would prefer the title followed by the year. My second choice is the title with the publisher in parentheses and then the year. More than once I have tried to enter what I sincerely believed to be a new title only to later learn that those books were already in CB just under a different publisher from the one actually listed in/on the book. I'm struggling to name any now other than "G.I. Joe, a Real American Hero" which was Marvel's baby from #1-155. IDW took the reins at #155.5 but it's still listed under the Marvel title. Then you have Fantastic Comics (Image) is was literally created with the intent of being the next issue of Fantastic Comics (Fox) but received its own listing even though it was #24. Crack Comics has two entries, one from the original Quality series and a second titled "Crack Comics (2nd Series)" even though it was the same thing that Fantastic Comics (Image) was, a part of what they called the "The Next Issue Project." They also did Silver Streak the same way as Crack calling the single issue from Image the 2nd series. I prefer the way CGD does it with each new publisher getting a new entry with a notation in the previous publisher's title to the effect of "numbering continues in Title X from Publisher Y."

Well, THAT only took almost a year instead of "a week or so". Unfortunately, there were some changes to the exported reports used as input data that requered some redesign, and it took waaaaaaaay longer than expected. Shows what shrinking free time will get you... @Fred Slota, I've uploaded the fixed version here: Thanks for your patience, and I hope it fits your needs. Adam