Well, I feel silly.

After posting Annie's Song I found the songs Annie-s Song and Annies Song.

I did look for Annie's Song before tabing this one, but I just didn't see these songs.

!@#$%^.

When I search for a posting, I use partial spelling to catch anyone else's poor spelling or alternate spelling. Lots of tabs I would have posted until finding an already posted tab under a different spelling. Before punctuation was allowed, song titles that used punctuation were reworded. I've gone back and changed a couple of my earlier tabs that didn't have punctuation in the titles.

I wonder if the board can be set up to find similar spellings to titles when you post and ask if the song you are posting is a duplicate to one it already has? A simple NO would then post the new tab.

I did the same thing when I posted "The Alphabet Song" only later to find out there is an almost identical "alphabet song" up already (posted long ago by our generous webmaster). I guess you can always go back and delete your own song if it's a duplicate. It's a killer with the bad spellings--I think there's some instances where somebody spelled the Beatles wrong, so not all Beatles songs show up when you do the search.

It would be nice if there was someway the board could be set up as BlueWest said above.

-Marc

Yes, I have posted tab for songs that were already there, this time it was an accident.

I should have looked closer.

I agree and there are quite a few duplicates because of this as well as the request page not picking up requests because of alternative spellings. We almost need a spell checker, but to add it would be a lot of work and a pain to maintain. Maybe with some javascripting I can add some type ahead or something like that but even that would take me some time to do.

A spell checker could be problematic when so many songs use slang and elision. Alternate spellings are correct in a lot of music.

Yea thats why I think a spell checker would be hard to maintain but I don't know how to really resolve this issue.

The other thing is the site isn't as easy to search when you have things like "The Beatles" and "Beatles" as different searches. This is something I just can't figure out a solution for, because everything submitted is done by users.

It all comes down to poster responsibility.

The only other thing which is possible is if we setup some site admins to go through the site and correct where we have these problems. I have in the past had the policy of just leaving what people put down alone. If that is what makes sense then maybe we should do it.

I think we need some people to just sift through the tabs and fix a lot of the spelling errors found in the titles and authors. Just a simple change of changing the band name from "Beatles" to "The Beatles" can really make searching for songs easier. I know that I've run into this problem too, where I've posted a song or two that had already been posted, but I couldn't find it when I searched for it.

Also, if you needed someone to help sift through the tabs and fix things like adding band names to unknown songs, fixing titles, etc., I'd be more than happy to volunteer to help out. I'm on almost everyday, and I do find things to fix probably about once a day.

Brad

People need to correct their stuff.

You never can tell when someone is intentionally misspelling for effect.

I would be willing to look at any suggestions people send me, but I would NOT like the spelling police to change my stuff.



Post Edited (10-24-06 01:06)

I don't know how far we should go with the changes if we go this route. We could fix artists and stuff but generally I am against that since you don't know what version the tab has been tabbed from. They could have tabbed another version of the song by a different author. I actually built in the ability to make people admins when I designed the site figuring if the site ever grew large enough where I needed help I could easily add people. All I would have to do is turn it on. It is setup to automatically make the people who contribute large amounts admins on the site. It also includes a special rank for those people. I would have to check though my coding quickly to make sure that if the switch is "thrown" everything will work properly.

chibluesteve wrote:

> People need to correct their stuff.
>
> You never can tell when someone is intentionally misspelling
> for effect.

Good Point.

chibluesteve wrote:

>
> I would be willing to look at any suggestions people send me,
> but I would NOT like the spelling police to change my stuff.
>

That is the main reason I setup the messaging system instead of doing a comment system.

well here is an idea that can help a little.
first of all you have to use fire fox (if you are not using it by now)
now in the new version firefox 2.0 there is a dictionary built in
so if you write a post it will spell check it automatically.
but it only works in multi line text boxes by default.
to change the settings that it will spell check any text box you have to follow
these instructions:
in the address bar write : about:config
then in the filter field type: Layout.spellcheckDefault
then change the entry to 2
this will change the spell check to multi and single line.

it will not solve all the problems since as mentioned above some
use unique spelling on purpose. but it can help a bit
and no work on spell checker is needed from Nick.

That is great I didn't realize that.