On Mon, 8 Jul 2002, Jack Campin wrote: > > Could we directly insert a little code at the beginning of an abc > > file to exclude it from your tune finder, like for the robot > > exclusion header in html files ? I hope people won't use it to > > fool your tune finder, but to prevent it from indexing useless > > tunes (for example I've made a 'favorite' for my own purposes and > > it's a replication of other abc files, > > In which case it's a partial mirror of some other site, and that other > site might go down. Better to have it available. A keyword in the > header that said the tune was a mirror would be more use than hiding it. > The user might want to eliminate mirrors from retrieval requests, only > asking for them if the first request failed, but could only do that if > the tune were indexed. > > Mirroring is a major headache when using the Tune Finder - the way the > ABC corpus is now, you can get up to twenty copies of the same thing. > Something needs to be done to stop this getting any worse. Google's > "do you want to see similar results?" is sensible.
This is a problem, I agree. For John's TuneFinder, there would be the additional problem of identifying the primary version, rather than displaying an n-th generation copy and offering the primary as "similar" to it. This *could* be done, given universal agreement on a sensible use of headers. Umm, right ... A case in point ... I've just managed to put a big update to my "Tunebook" in place (less than ideal, because I'm going away tomorrow so won't be able to deal with the inevitable glitches and bugreports for a couple of weeks. Oh well, at least I've finally got the bulk of it done). Among the changes, it fixes a series of *horrible* typos to Skinner's "the Spey In Spate". These have been there since the thing started (?1994?), and will continue to be perpetuated by every site that's holding copies, unless they individually do something about it. I wonder how many of those people have thought of using mirroring software ? ... in my case, there are now headers that identify my version as mine, which TuneFinders could use, but they'd have to know about all the sites that do that, on an individual basis; and then there are copies that were taken before I put those headers in ... bleaargh. -- Richard Robinson "The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes" - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
