A report on a few bugs, important missing features, and odd new features

I have a number of comments regarding the functionality of the new website, some of which I really hope will be responded to quickly.

Events

I had extremely high hopes for the new version of the event system, but apart from the more powerful listing and search features, I see no improvements. Adding events is still, in my opinion, the weakest point of the whole site. And two seemingly small features have been removed, making it much more difficult to maintain quality in the event calendar, something I have invested a significant amount of time in.

First, I can no longer see who created an event. If the event information is correct, creating it helped the Last.fm community, and a lot of people are understandably curious about the creator. As a subscriber, I know that events I've created have led many users to visit my profile, some of whom I have even befriended.

On the other hand, those who create bad events (duplicates, with duplicate/incorrect venues, with fake artists etc.) tend to create more than one, so knowing who they are not only makes it easier to locate other bad events, but also enables us to set repeat offenders straight.

Furthermore, I can no longer edit venue details. I'm assuming this is temporary though, but the sooner it is enabled, the better.

Streaming

The new player definitely looks good, but I don't want to use it, for the same reason I never used the old one: I wan't to be able to leave the page on which I started playing music. Not being able to direct streams from the website to the desktop client means streaming loses most of its appeal.

I said "looks", since the new player only plays one song at a time (I vaguely recall the old one not having that restriction). This is useless. If it's meant to increase ad exposure, at least enable continuous play for us subscribers.

Miscellaneous

I discovered that recent tracks aren't recent at all anymore, which I find to be a major privacy concern. I'm not paranoid about having my recent tracks shown, but I don't see how you could possibly justify making what I listened to on New Year's Eve publically available. That data should be restricted to each user.

I've noticed a bug with artist aliases that causes an incorrect alias to be used when looking up certain albums and songs, e.g. View of a Burning City by The Appleseed Cast. I came across it when trying to show my love for that track, upon which the mistagged artist without the definite article was added to my library.

You have also added wikis for tracks, which I don't really understand. I don't see more than a small subset of tracks having any meaningful information added to them, while many other wikis will be abused. That is unless, of course, you intend for us to use track wikis for adding lyrics...

Finally, I won't be joining the reactionaries although I understand them: the layout still looks half-finished and the functionality of the new site is hardly production quality yet, so it should've stayed in beta a while longer. The Library and the real-time updates make up for a lot though.

I'd like to add that the "Vote on the correct name for this artist" is gone. Is this coming back?

What is the library for?

leoJP said:
What is the library for?

I hope you noticed that you can DELETE any SONG you've played from whatever artists. you can also delete all your plays from the artist if you'd like.

Next week, you'll be able to delete tags, just like with the songs.

and also, you can choose what playlist you want to have on your profile

As an artist I pay a lot of attention to how many listens I'm getting on each song.
I can see my friends have been downloading and streaming a tune, but the site is not updating how many plays it is receiving. This is with scrobbling on.
This is very frustrating as I have asked a lot of people to check it out and it looks like no one is listening, but I know they have.

Thanks,
I'll stay optimistic

Kerensky97 said:
Alot of songs have histories more interesting than the artist.

Is that what they're for? I like it! So can we all contribute? Can we c+p from Wikipedia itself, as that has a lot of this sort of information. eg song was covered by X, it was used in film called Y, etc.

Babs_05 said:
Kerensky97 said:
Alot of songs have histories more interesting than the artist.

Is that what they're for? I like it! So can we all contribute? Can we c+p from Wikipedia itself, as that has a lot of this sort of information. eg song was covered by X, it was used in film called Y, etc.
Since there are no real guidelines to track wikis as yet I'd say thats exactly what they are useful for. Detailing things like if its a cover whose song they are covering or if the're are multiple versions of the same song by that artist those could be detailed too. It could be anything barring the lyrics really as long its presented in the usual unbiased wiki way.

Now not all tracks will have any detail that comes to mind either but thats fine for the section to left blank .

esc4p1st said:
I discovered that recent tracks aren't recent at all anymore, which I find to be a major privacy concern. I'm not paranoid about having my recent tracks shown, but I don't see how you could possibly justify making what I listened to on New Year's Eve publically available. That data should be restricted to each user.
I like that new feature, but I'm a stats freak who like as much data of my listening habits as I can get my hands on. Be even better if it was date searchable though.