"Newman" should be "New Man"

[Andrew d’Entremont]

I was just making some room in my long boxes, and looking at "Newman" it occurred to me that it really should be listed as "New Man". I think the confusion may have come from the "Newmen" title, which eventually switched over to "New Men" with issue #21.

[Mark J. Castaneda]

Can't change it at this point, the title has been in the master database for nearly 2 decades as Newman, a change could alter users collections who own the title 😞

[Andrew d’Entremont]

Fair enough. I had a feeling that might be the case. Thanks for the info. 

[Fred Slota]

From my June 2023 "Thoughts for Post Archangel" post...

 

1) Making the hard changes to finally remove the deprecated features and non-standard Titling and Issue assignments.  

 

Deprecated Issue Variations.

Non-standard Titles ((Walt  Disney's...), Limited Series vs. Series 2, "Moon Knight Annual", etc.)

Issues that should be in separate/different titles.

 

"Yeah, it's wrong, but it's been that way for years."

"There are too many of these items on sale in Atomic Avenue."

 

Take the time to plan a path to clean up all these legacy issues.  Maybe create a new, second set of Title and Issue fields, Title2 and Issue2.  Search by both, list with both.  Allow the user to choose which set to use for viewing and reports, while officially using the original form on Atomic Avenue for a year or two.  Then, after a period of supporting both old and new designations, rename Title/Issue to Title (old)/Issue (old) and rename Title2/Issue2 to Title/Issue.

[Gregory Hecht]

18 hours ago, Fred Slota said:

"There are too many of these items on sale in Atomic Avenue."

To the best of my knowledge, that has never been a rationale for not correcting a title in the database.  (It is possible, however, that an Atomic Avenue seller has discovered that something in their inventory is suddenly not recognized on AA and they send in a correction that undoes a previous correction... and thus re-establishing an incorrect title.)

18 hours ago, Fred Slota said:

Take the time to plan a path to clean up all these legacy issues.  Maybe create a new, second set of Title and Issue fields, Title2 and Issue2.  Search by both, list with both.  Allow the user to choose which set to use for viewing and reports, while officially using the original form on Atomic Avenue for a year or two.  Then, after a period of supporting both old and new designations, rename Title/Issue to Title (old)/Issue (old) and rename Title2/Issue2 to Title/Issue.

What I have suggested in the past is to have the content update process take care of moving a user's inventory from an outgoing incorrect title to a newly created corrected title.  The response from @Peter Bickford was "we don't want to mess with any of our users' data."  But it should be easy enough to set up a request of the user to make these changes.  What I envision is something along these lines:

1.  Existing title Capt. Coprolite has been in the database for years.  It is discovered that the indicia actually reads as Captain Coprolite.  

2.  The next content update includes code to add the new, correct Captain Coprolite title to the database and delete the old title (assuming the user's content update preferences are set to allow deletion of old titles that contain no inventory).  

3.  During the update process, if the user has inventory in the old title, they receive the following dialog box:  
This content update has added the comic book [or whatever media type] title Captain Coprolite to your database.  This title is intended to replace the incorrectly named Capt. Coprolite.  Would you like to move all of the issue information (including your inventory) from the old Capt. Coprolite title to the new Captain Coprolite title?  
     [_] Yes, please move my issue and inventory information from the old title to the new title.  
     [_] No, please leave my issue and inventory information in the old title.  

4.  If the user selects "yes" then the update proceeds to carry out the task.  At the end of the update, the user gets a pop-up that reminds them to update their AA inventory if they had any issues under the old title for sale on AA.  
If the user selects "no" then the update leaves their data under the old title unchanged, the new title is created, and the user gets a pop-up at the end of the update reminding them that any issues from the old title that they had for sale on AA won't be recognized by the system but that this can be fixed by moving their inventory to the new title and updating their AA inventory.  

 

Something similar could also be set up to handle titles that move from one media category to another.  

The main upshot of this suggestion is that users will spend less time curating their databases and thus have more time to curate their collections.  As it should be.  IMO the biggest shortcoming of ComicBase is that it essentially places the onus of moving inventory from old, outgoing titles to new, correct titles on the user.  This creates work for the user through no fault of their own.  This is something that could be handled by the program during content updates on an opt-in basis as described above.