Topic: All the recent changes - your opinion?

As you have noticed, I’ve been making lots of changes. What do you think? Aside from the ridiculous pace, what do you like, what do you hate, and what are you missing?

Looks very clean - I'll take a while to get used to it but that's pretty normal for me. I was going to say some of the changes in the last few days seemed to make things a bit less intuitive but guessing they were interim steps while you were getting to this point!

Have just noticed that on the 'everything you record about a release' tab, there's no change of colour (or other indicator) for the non-prog/prog-adjacent/progressive boxes when you pick one. The way things are laid out do mean the more detailed tagging beyond genre and progressiveness is a bit hidden away as well.

^ yes, will improve these areas tomorrow.

You certainly are busy!

It may also be good to be able to input ratings etc. directly from the bookmarks or recommendations page too?

Not sure if i'm doing things wrong too but searching for a release and going to its page (or in my case adding it as new) and inputting a rating etc. then seems to add it to my bookmarks which is possibly a little back to front.

Yes, I like the button ribbon for releases that I built a few days ago. Will put that in all the list templates so that there is a consistent interface everywhere. Still ironing out flaws and redundancies …

Yeah I like the ribbon, just need a little time before I don't need to think about what each icon means :-)

I agree about the frenetic pace, but it’s fun to come across something different every time! It took me a while to get used to the icons at first, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I like the color-coded categories, as they make things clearer. However, I do miss having the codes for each entry—like the ones available a few days ago—that allowed me to transfer the activity details to Progarchives (to log what I’d listened to, for example).

^ Which codes are you referring to? I don't think I removed any exports. Do you mean the forum code (text) based code? That should still be available on the snippets page:
https://awesomeprog.com/profile/snippets

The new image based exports for your plays are available from your play history:
https://awesomeprog.com/profile/play-history

There it is, thanks!

One thing that I don't like is the "liked" and "noticed" answers for part of the collection. I have over 2,000 albums that I had marked as items that I listened to but aren't in my collection. They now all say that I noticed them. In my opinion, these are just albums that I listened to, but I don't own them. Whether I just "noticed" them or I "liked" them would be reflected in my ratings and they shouldn't all be lumped in "noticed", which you are basically saying that they "are not for me". To me, there is "my collection" which are the albums that I own, and the albums that I listed to that are not in my collection. In this day in age, with pretty much having the ability to listen to just about anything through free or paid streaming services pretty much every album would be in "my collection" but to me this should really only be what I own. Maybe this is just a different point of view since I am still buying many albums versus just streaming.

These statuses have changed a bit over the years. Only recently I realised that what started as the "release status" is actually a "collection status". By "collection" I really mean that you own the release. Like you say, these days most (younger) users use streaming services, and within each of them there is usually a way to say that you consider a release part of your "library". That's not what I mean by collection.

So what I meant by these statuses is a sort of ladder leading towards you actually buying the release:

• "Noticed": You have listened to the release, but it doesn't appeal to you. You might not even want to rate it. "Considered" was also an alternative name I considered (pun intended).
• "Liked": This is a release which you listened to and liked. You might have rated it, or not ... some users are not into rating releases. In any case, another way to describe this would be a sort of "extended" collection. You have access to the release, you like it, but you are not considering buying it.
• "wishlist": The most obvious state - you would like to purchase the release, but do not have the budget.
• "collection": You have purchased the release, or it is - by some other means - permanently yours. You have it on a shelf, in a box or on a hard drive.
  
  So to me these represent steps on a sort of "ladder" leading towards purchasing/owning a release.

My short-term issue is that I now have over 2,000 albums that were categorized correctly that I now have to change. I guess that is a me problem and not a you problem since this is your site to do as you please and I respect that.

That just means that I will have to adjust my use of your site from my way of thinking to your way of thinking. I used the wishlist to mark new releases that I would like to buy or at least to listen to (I believe that you previously had both of those as options). This acted as both a friendly reminder when I was going on shopping sprees and at year-end PA time when I am trying to listen to as many albums as I can for the year-end PA and MMA top 10 lists. I don't necessarily want to move albums that I don't own but have listened to into my wishlist. I would hazard to guess that most of what are now called "noticed" could be moved to "liked". Of course, there will probably end up being some lowly rated albums in the "liked" category but I guess that is what it is until I run across them and move them to "noticed".

I guess that I see where you are going with this, but I preferred having a list of albums that were in my collection, albums that I listened to that were not in my collection, and albums that were on my wishlist that I would like to either buy or listen to. My feeling is that within the not in my collection category, whether I "liked" it or just "noticed" it would be reflected by my ratings.

^ I can definitely help you with reassigning "noticed" releases to "liked" based on your rating. Let me know if you're interested (and what the rating threshold should be).

There was the old "explore" status which a few weeks ago became the "queue" (which it had been called in a few places before) and which now is simply called "bookmarks". So releases that you would like to listen to and did mark as "explore" should now simply be bookmarked. The wishlist is intended as a waiting list for releases you want to purchase, which is why I also changed the icon to a shopping cart.

If you can do that, that would be great! I would say that anything "C" and above should be moved to Liked and "D" and below can be kept in "Noticed". Any without a rating can remain in "Noticed". I suspect that most of the albums will be moved to "Liked" and then I will have a lot smaller list to go through to see if they can be moved to "Liked" or "Wishlist".

Added a feature for this, so you can do it yourself, on the "noticed" page:

https://awesomeprog.com/library/acknowledged/releases

Just select the tier to move the releases to "liked".

Thank you! That is way more manageable. I now only have 93 albums to go through, and it looks like many of them might be ones I hadn't previously rated, so it will give me an excuse to listen to them again.