The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Erik has a good idea, but I know you would want it to be automatic, so perhaps it would go to everyone and be a warning for next week. An e-mail with the new titles and abbreviations.

Ken

It it highly unlikely that we are going to start emailing songfight participants explaining how to make an acronym, when the deadlines are, what are the titles, when the fights are posted, information on who is more dreamy, marcus or mo, or anything else, for that matter.

In fact, it has occurred to me to suspend updates altogether for a month or so, just to separate the men from the boys.

I only suggested it because jb made a post to the messageboard saying the exact same thing, and lots of newbs don't read the messageboards, and a one-time email might be a way to reach them. I don't think anything's broken or anything, and I'm not trying to make more work for you, I was just kind of riffing off of what jb said.

I mostly just put stuff in this thread thinking that you will ignore it if it's dumb, and use it if it's not.

Indeed. And I am just being realistic.

I understand about not emailing participants. Hopefully the suggestion to include the to-be-used-for-this-fight acronyms in the first post of the prefight thread is still on the table. Fer instance, if people knew that the "acronym" for the "Ancient" fight was going to be "*_ancient.mp3," poor overworked fightmaster wouldn't have to rename all those "*_a.mp3" files that come in...

Charles

good point, Charles.

erikb wrote:I only suggested it because jb made a post to the messageboard saying the exact same thing, and lots of newbs don't read the messageboards, and a one-time email might be a way to reach them. I don't think anything's broken or anything, and I'm not trying to make more work for you, I was just kind of riffing off of what jb said.

I mostly just put stuff in this thread thinking that you will ignore it if it's dumb, and use it if it's not.

The most irksome are the ones that are like Some Veteran's Super Long Band Name-This-Is-Deep-Throat's-Fucking-Longass-Title.mp3

That's a lot of backspacing on my little Pine screen.

King Arthur has recently been a good citizen.
And you know who else is on my good side? Andre Was Here At Midnight. I LOVE HIM for submitting as andrewashereatmidnight_titlename.mp3. It totally makes me less annoyed by his awful music because I didn't have to backspace and then re-type his longass band name (it's easier to just erase and retype than fix caps and delete spaces).

A couple others are good about it. But some veterans are irksome. Blank fucking email subject lines fucking drive me up the fucking wall. I do the titles one at a time, so if the subject is blank i have to open the message and figure out what title it's for. If the band name isn't in the message body, I have to look at the attachment name (which isn't listed in Pine often) to find out the band name.

It's just a hassle and a timesuck. Thus the post.

If we ever get fancy enough to do what Erik suggested, then we'll be fancy enough to have transformed the submission process into a form-based web application using MySQL etc. But that's way off.

jb wrote:

erikb wrote:I only suggested it because jb made a post to the messageboard saying the exact same thing, and lots of newbs don't read the messageboards, and a one-time email might be a way to reach them. I don't think anything's broken or anything, and I'm not trying to make more work for you, I was just kind of riffing off of what jb said.

I mostly just put stuff in this thread thinking that you will ignore it if it's dumb, and use it if it's not.

The most irksome are the ones that are like Some Veteran's Super Long Band Name-This-Is-Deep-Throat's-Fucking-Longass-Title.mp3

That's a lot of backspacing on my little Pine screen.

andrewashereatmidnight_titlename.mp3. I didn't have to backspace and then re-type his longass band name (it's easier to just erase and retype than fix caps and delete spaces).

It's just a hassle and a timesuck. Thus the post.

Cool, see I didn't even know to make the file names all lowercase or to ever abreviate. The announcement has informed me and I will make an effort to do these things. I'm guessing that I'm not the only one who didn't realize this as well. I went back and looked in the archive and only now do I realize that the file names were changed from my original filenames. I hadn't realized you did that. Perhaps this can also be mentioned in the FAQ on the site. That will help get the newbies attention.

i'm old enough to remember the old "got it" bounce backs. ah, those were the days.......

which fight was that, jack?

it was so long ago i can't remember. definitely the one title days. but i do remember getting a very nice bounceback after the shreds fight (my first) from one of you guys, welcoming us to songfight and saying how there were a few others songfighters from san francisco (where i was living at the time), mentioning duboce triangle, ranch on suede, and MC frontalot.

it was a nice gesture.

Wow. Don't tell anyone, ok?

Is this the right place? The TIPS link off the front page is a gerat addition. In fact this a great site, well managed and generally getting just the right balance in filtering the suggestions malestroms for useful additions to implement.

Yay for fightmasters!

So it'll be _obs, _mc and _tt this week? I only ask, because as KA pointed out occasionally with the shorter titles there has been some variation in the naming process ... (_ancient is a good example) - perhaps at some point there can be a rationalisation of this? (i understand it may just be for one-word titles - I haven't been through the entire archive to confirm this)

j$

j$ wrote:So it'll be _obs, _mc and _tt this week? I only ask, because as KA pointed out occasionally with the shorter titles there has been some variation in the naming process

Plus we already had "_tt". Could that mess things up?

only if you try downloading the entire archive to a single folder.
in the past we've had two TMs, 'troublemaker' and 'twelve monkeys'.

I've discovered though an anomoly - Hands Up was _handsup not _hu... so my one word for one word titles otherwise initials interpretation is wrong - well, we shall see ... I have entered Mad City as _mc ...

j$

No one is saying that this is the way it has always been in the past. In fact, if you go back far enough, you end up at the mercy of narbotic and all hell breaks loose. We are just suggesting that it would be a good way to move forward...

And we're agreeing, totally, and trying to help, make things smoother and easier for ya'all, is all ... tell us how you want it and we'll do it, in a 'if you build it, they will come' kind of way ... I personally thought KA's idea for the prefight thread was a cracking idea ...

j$

erikb wrote:I think that perhaps a better feature would be the ability to let every artist put a star next to one of their songs (with the default being their song which has achieved the highest percentage of the total votes), to mark it as the song of theirs that they feel is the best. That might get more people to dig through the archives, and it places the burden of deciding excellence on the artist, not on the voting population.

A decent suggestion for sure. I do challenge, however, that an artist is capable of choosing their best work. That's what producers and focus groups are for. I am being facetious and also serious. Anything the artist releases on SongFight has their seal of approval, but woudl they really pick the one that will be most people's favorite, or make people want to listen?

erik wrote:WHERE THE HELL IS MY FLYING CAR

Several years overdue, I'm afraid, but here you go.

http://www.yahoo.com/s/1045376

Add skype to contact options.

Don't care, but fyi the Romantic Cheapskate and Robot Candidate fights have the same acronym, causing people who entered both fights 4 years apart to have duplicate conflicts when dropping into the same folder. I realize this affects only me, and requires 2 keystrokes for me to fix. Just sayin, it's kind of neat.

Oh, and the phpBB logo at the top (which used to be a SF logo) used to redirect to songfight.org, but now redirects to the forum index. I think Spud made it do that at my request, but it got broken by an update. So, I'm re-requesting.

Apparently the logo is only broken for certain themes, and the admins don't use those themes, so it's apparently not going to be fixed. Sadly the one theme that I like is broken.