Adding an option to flag ‘bad’ tunes/variations

I’ve come across this many times here and I think I’ve brought this up a few times. There should be an option to flag tunes that don’t belong, have horrible notation and/or mistakes or that are incomplete.

These are good examples here -

https://thesession.org/tunes/310
The 2 tune of Home Ruler. Is that even a tune? Apart from the obvious mistake of the time signature, there’s beats/notes missing. A nice little flag option would help clean up this site from some of shite that’s on here.

https://thesession.org/tunes/424
Tune 5 of The Fairy Dance.
Need I say anything about this setting?

Also, coincidentally these were posted by the same user (gian marco) and after having a quick look at tunes he/she posted I see there’s quite a few that really should be deleted.

Repeat offenders should just be barred from posting.

Any thoughts?

The settings you mentioned were just auto-generated ones, as the comments-section has been parsed for additional settings when the cool setting feature was introduced (so that we don’t have to re-post them all). gian marco is usually known for his accurate transcriptions! If you stumble upon such a parsing-failure-setting however, let Jeremy know and he’ll delete it (IIRC he explicitly encouraged us to do so!).

Apart from that, I generally agree… I’d not go so far to bar users from posting settings, but a like/dislike function would be nice! There’s quite a lot of really obscure and quirky settings out there, and with such a feature you could see at one glance which setting is the most favoured - like, probably the most common setting or the most cool variation…

Like/dislike would be awesome, and in my opinion improve the tunes database massively so that (a) “favourite” settings, or more importantly, (b) “accurate” settings, perhaps posted to clean up the original submitter’s attempts and never replaced, would float to the top and help lots of people.

In gmp’s case on the Fairy Dance - all he did was post some chords once!

@malik - as metapop says, just email Jeremy.

I too spotted a couple of gash abc settings just recently. So I sent an email to Jeremy and they were very quickly zapped.

the two examples you have posted are clearly guides for chords not versions of the tune…

Here are some “thoughts” for you. “gian marco” has been one of the most consistent posters of some of the best tunes on this website since it began. If you’d look closely at the 2 “examples” you quoted above, and read the comments headings he made at the same time as he posted his “settings”, you’ll see that he plainly states that they are suggested chords to accompany the tune, not tune settings in themselves. I think you owe him an apology for your ignorance. Come to that, you don’t seem to have been very prolific with posting tunes here yourself. I know whom I think has made the greater contribution to this website over the years.

well said Kenny

mmm, nice chords for the Fairy dance there…

What Kenny said, and of course what metapop said regarding the auto-generation of settings - this point was brought up when the site overhaul took place.

Here, here, Kenny. Gian Marco is one of my go-to posters on this site as far as clean, accurate transcriptions are concerned. He is really good at listing the provenance of the tune as well, so if you want to track down an actual audio recording of the setting, you have that option.

That said, all the transcriptions on this site need to be taken with a grain of salt. If this site is your primary source for tunes, you are seriously under-resourced.

That last sentence of yours sounds vaguely familiar, “fidkid” 🙂 - and very true.

Sounds like a lligism

Agree with Kenny - gian marco’s tune ABCs are invariably good.

Here’s my suggestion:

1) Someone (preferably gian marco) submit “new” versions of these tunes, but with the chord settings included within the ABC transcriptions. Or - failing that - post gian marco’s “chord ABCs” in the tune comments.

2) Then send an email to Jeremy and ask him to delete the “chord only” ABC settings.

How about an option to flag ‘bad’ comments, and bar repeat offenders from posting……er, is that worth a flag?

Although the examples were bad, it is true there are bad transcriptions that would best serve us at the bottom of the page when we pull up that particular tune. A rating system would help us find the good settings.

You could always criticize or praise settings in the comments. If Jeremy wants to go to the trouble of implementing an up/down system, great, but I’d ignore it myself; when looking for a quality settings the good ones are flagged already for me, with the author’s name: i.e., good ones say “Dr. Dow” or “gian marco” or “#” (=Will Harmon) or “ceolachan,” etc. I check those first before trying more dubious sources.

What I’d really like would be for all the settings to display as sheet music from the start. Maybe there’s a script that would do that. Mmm…

It would be a great pity if unusual but perfectly authentic settings of tunes were labelled “bad” because people whose knowledge doesn’t go any further than, say, whatever gets played at their session or whatever they have heard on CDs by high-profile commercial recording artists.

that should read “by” not “because”, sorry.

I agree with giving everyone a way to “like” good settings, but no “dislike” option, please. There is enough negativity around here as it is, lets not encourage more…

Well Jeeves there could be a certain level of security on ratings. It could be only registered users, only registered users who have contributed tunes (or a certain number of tunes, have contributed tunes that also have high ratings). Only allowing users to rate tunes who have submitted tunes with high ratings works very well for a lot of computer programming forums like stackoverflow.com. Intitially some users like ceolachan and gian marco would have to be given rating rights to get the ball rolling. I think it’s a great idea, it wouldn’t hide the “bad” settings it would just put higher rated settings at the top.

A bit of thread drift here but, as a matter of interest, is it still the case that correcting your original “ABC” won’t affect the sheet music transcription which will remain inaccurate unless Jeremy changes it?

Or has this changed?

Out of town for the weekend, sorry to start a thread and not partake. An Apology for commenting on the two settings I mentioned? I don’t think so. Regardless if they were tune variations, chord settings, etc. If you have chord settings to add to a tune why not post the entire tune with the chords inserted?

I know that a lot of these incomplete variations were automatically added from the comments section with the conversion to the new site. So a lot of these should have probably stayed in the comments section and not be transcribed and added automatically. So in some cases it may not be the poster’s fault but nonetheless, there is quite a bit of clutter now as a result and considering both the examples I mentioned have been deleted I imagine that I wasn’t too out of line. I think it’s in most people’s interest to have a neat and clean board.

As a few people mentioned, just a like button to bump up the most ‘liked’ or favored setting would be helpful to newbies but Jeeves Tones makes a good point that a ‘like’ option may just make the most ‘in’ tunes the only ones some people play while disregarding the other settings. The option to email Jeremy with incomplete or inaccurate submissions seems to be the best option at the moment.

On a side note -
It’s amazing that people can’t just write a simple reply here sometimes without huffing and puffing when they disagree with something. Quite amusing and predictable in this day and age. Good manners and civility go a long way to making this a good online community and if you can’t have a civil discussion about something I suggest you refrain from posting anything at all.

To DJF - thanks for the private message "Are you trolling? if so, poor effort.
why not submit some tunes yourself and watch me pick apart your shoddy ABC? "

There’s definitely some trolling going on but not entirely sure it’s coming from me, DJf.

Civility starts with the OP.

I just want to submit my humble opinion of Gian Marco’s contributions on thesession.org. For as long as I can remember I’ve thought his contributions to the Tunes section have been some of the best & most consistent. He seems to me as someone who would be willing to look over his previous posting of abcs if it were deemed necessary & brought directly to his attention.

Johnny Jay asked:

“is it still the case that correcting your original ”ABC“ won’t affect the sheet music transcription which will remain inaccurate unless Jeremy changes it?”

No, updates are instantaneous now. When the ABC is edited, the sheetmusic will correspond to that.

malik wrote:
“It’s amazing that people can’t just write a simple reply here sometimes without huffing and puffing when they disagree with something.”

I agree that we should aim to be civil here, but please note that your original post was very unkind towards Gian Marco. That was particularly unfair because those settings weren’t submitted by him: they were in comments. In the redesign of the site my attempt to automatically extract settings from comments *mostly* worked, but there were a few false positives like the ones you found. The blame lies with me, not with Gian Marco.

“Good manners and civility go a long way to making this a good online community and if you can’t have a civil discussion about something I suggest you refrain from posting anything at all. ”

I agree completely. However, that filter should also have been applied to your original post, I believe.

“The option to email Jeremy with incomplete or inaccurate submissions seems to be the best option at the moment.”

Yes, please!

If anyone finds any more false positives (so-called settings that were automatically extracted from comments, that turn out not to be proper settings), please, please, please drop me a line with a link to specific setting:

https://thesession.org/members/1/contact

Thanks.