Forums > MobyGames > The "s" bug
Havoc Crow (29906) on 5/2/2015 5:17 AM · Permalink · Report
This one? (quoting Indra)
First (mis?)identified as the Auto-Assign bug, where the system autofills a developer name with whatever name has an additional s in it (though perhaps unrelated). For whatever reason, it also appears to pop up in other places. In short, we have no idea what this is and I have no idea why I put this in the planned section. :p Example: http://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/s/211251-get-out-amiga-screenshot-smashing-some-brickss.jpg (brickss)
Nélio (1976) on 5/2/2015 1:07 PM · Permalink · Report
Special character substitution. For searching and generating URLs, characters such as "à" and "á" get translated into "a", and "ç" into "c". The problem was with character "$" that was set to be translated into, you guessed it, "s". The issue is that when doing the replacing in Perl using a regex, the "$" character means end of string. So basically, all strings were being forced to end with an "s".
This already fixed the URL generation (which is what I was working on), but I know the search engine was relying on the same function, as well as many other components. I haven't tested the credits wizard nor the search engine, but I believe there will be improvements. Won't say they will work perfect, though.
Daniel Saner (3503) on 5/3/2015 11:25 PM · Permalink · Report
[Q --start Alex Z wrote--]So that's why I sometimes have to remove the last letter when I search for something here!
Excellent work, Nélio! [/Q --end Alex Z wrote--]
First thing that came to my mind as well. I assume that this could fix a lot of the seemingly inexplicable search irregularities we've been seeing (not finding games when entering their exact title, etc.)
Freeman (65146) on 5/9/2015 9:09 PM · Permalink · Report
Some names that still have issues:
Entering 'Hiroyuki Ota' automatically links to Hiroyuki Otaka, not Hiroyuki Ōta (probably owing to the diacritical mark).
Entering Luis Mas automatically adds the credit to the Luis Mass entry.
When you enter Maria Antonia Rodriguez it automatically goes to the Antonia Rodriguez entry.
When you enter Jean-Francois Lavoie it automatically links the name to Jean-Francois Lajoie.
Patrick Bregger (303331) on 5/16/2015 1:43 PM · Permalink · Report
Eric Zala gets matched to Eric Zalas.
Patrick Bregger (303331) on 5/17/2015 7:46 AM · Permalink · Report
Guillaume Gagné-Gauthier --> Guillaume Gauthier
Sciere (930960) on 5/20/2015 9:33 AM · Permalink · Report
Something strange seems to have happened since the fix. I'm working on a large listing that for instance has the name 'Alan Hsu'. I entered him already last week and he was found fine. If I enter him today, no developer at all is found and I need to make a new one. A lot more similar errors are listed here.
Patrick Bregger (303331) on 5/20/2015 3:11 PM · Permalink · Report
It often does not even work when I give the developer a fake AKA.
Rola (8482) on 5/20/2015 3:41 PM · Permalink · Report
I do not know how the search script differs for each data set.
"Abram" now yelds all required game titles, but not the game group that has "Abrams"!
With people - searching "abrams" I get both "Abram" and "Abrams" surnames.
Searching for "abram" finds nothing!
Please analyze this.
Nélio (1976) on 5/29/2015 4:16 PM · Permalink · Report
This is all way too complicated. It seems that each section of the site uses a different way to search for things. Using the main site search to lookup a developer works fine (apparently) but not within a credits submission. I think I'll have to treat every single thing as a different issue and fix one at a time.
Yay, fun.
Rola (8482) on 5/29/2015 4:35 PM · Permalink · Report
Actually this division doesn't sound that bad.
It's OK to use "fuzzy search" for visitors, who often make typos or are quite clueless.
For approvers (maybe also when contributing?) it's good to assume they know what they're doing, so the results should be "exact match".
I hope that my findings were helpful.