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Issues with multiple entries in one fight by same artist

Posted: Fri Sep 14, 2018 10:14 pm
by Lunkhead
Background info: While we ask folks not to enter more than one song in a fight, we don't prevent it. It's happened a couple times. It turns out this situation causes a variety of issues.

The most egregious issue is that votes are only cast at the band level, not the mp3 URL level. So all votes for any of the multiple entries by a band get added together into one vote total for that band. This issue is difficult to resolve because of how the voting information is stored and parsed. It's already very complex and brittle and adding another dimension to it to track mp3 URL level information will take a lot of tricky work and will probably involve breaking things (badly) for a while.

Another issue is that the archive is counting every entry in the fight as a win, so, enter two songs and win, you get two wins, enter three songs and win, you get three wins, etc. It seems like folks think of "wins" as being "fights won" not "sum of the number of songs entered in fights won". This second problem is potentially simpler to deal with as it may just involve small tweaks to how wins are counted to switch the counts to be "fights won".

I'm going to dip my toes into addressing the second issue now. I've got it fixed on the individual artist page. It's going to take me a while though to track down everywhere where win counting is done and update every page.

You can see the effects here on the Glennny and BSS artist archive pages. At the bottom of the page, the number of wins shown is now the number of fights won. Two less for Glennny and one less for BSS than before, when Glennny's three songs for "My Last Nerve" were counted three times and BSS's two songs for "Young Blood" were counted twice.

http://www.songfight.org/artistpage.php ... rtkey=date
http://www.songfight.org/artistpage.php ... rtkey=date

The Jukebox also counts wins by number of songs in fights won, so, I'll have to do some tweaking over there too but due to a laptop transition I'm not set up to update that app very easily yet, and it's of secondary importance anyway.

Re: Issues with multiple entries in one fight by same artist

Posted: Fri Sep 14, 2018 10:16 pm
by Lunkhead
If anybody wants to point out other places where the win counting needs updating let me know.

I guess a third issue that I forgot about till now is that on the homepage and archive pages you can't tell the entries apart. I'm going to make that a lower priority to address than the win related stuff.

Re: Issues with multiple entries in one fight by same artist

Posted: Sun Sep 16, 2018 12:06 pm
by Chumpy
I feel like Prayer for Pancakes and Pray for Texas are both bogus fights. If you're already fixing win counts elsewhere, it seems like a good time to fix those as well.

Re: Issues with multiple entries in one fight by same artist

Posted: Sun Sep 16, 2018 1:35 pm
by Lunkhead
I don't think I understand where you're coming from with those suggestions. They seem completely unrelated to what I'm doing. I'm NOT trying to make subjective calls about which fights are "bogus". I'm just fixing a code bug so that in the archive wins = # of fights won, NOT wins = # of songs in fights won. (I can't for now "fix" the BSS and Glennny wins in terms of sorting out how many votes their separate songs got, because as I explained elsewhere that data doesn't get saved. I AM looking into ways to address that, but as I said elsewhere, it's going to take a significant amount of work.) That doesn't seem to have come into play in those fights, but maybe I'm missing something?

Re: Issues with multiple entries in one fight by same artist

Posted: Sun Sep 16, 2018 10:06 pm
by Lunkhead
I just updated the homepage so that the next time someone submits multiple entries for a fight, at least the entries will have different links so you can tell them apart. I'm going to name the files "-1.mp3", "-2.mp3", etc. and then display " (1)", " (2)", etc. after the band name in the link text. This does NOT resolve the issue of the votes still only getting recorded at the band (not song) level. It's mostly just a quick cosmetic change.

Re: Issues with multiple entries in one fight by same artist

Posted: Sun Sep 23, 2018 4:56 pm
by Lunkhead
I'm still working on this slowly. I think I've got the "front half" of the code changes done to record votes at a song level, instead of artist level. Next is the "back half" of counting the votes at the song level instead of artist level.

Re: Issues with multiple entries in one fight by same artist

Posted: Sun Sep 30, 2018 5:17 pm
by Chumpy
FYI: Wins are no longer showing up on artist pages, everyone now has a 0% win/loss ratio.

Re: Issues with multiple entries in one fight by same artist

Posted: Sun Sep 30, 2018 7:20 pm
by Lunkhead
Well shoot. That doesn't seem right, does it? But at least it's fair, everyone's a loser now. :P

Re: Issues with multiple entries in one fight by same artist

Posted: Sun Sep 30, 2018 7:32 pm
by Lunkhead
OK, I see what happened. I applied a change from the fixes I'm working on to a "production" file instead of a "sandboxed" file (using those terms painfully loosely). Unfortunately it won't be fixed till the next time I run the PHP page that updates the archive data files after I post the next fight. Thanks for the report.