Nectarine

Can we please have a private info field on artists? (i.e. only visible in the back-end)
This would just be a simple text box.

Currently there isn't anywhere in an artist record that we can put private information. Things like (for example):

* Quarlek doesn't want his songs on Nectarine. Do not unlock this artist!
* Shog's e-mail address for any questions is darkshoggothlord@example.com. (We might want to know this, but it's not nice to show people's e-mail addresses publicly, because of spambots.)
* Bytewhipper is secretly the same artist as Bitflogger but has specifically requested that we do not merge those artists because XYZ reasons.

Okay I'm being a bit "creative", but I think the main important thing is that currently it isn't clear who's locked and why. We could just put in the box, "artist locked by mirrorbird in March 2020 because..." and then anyone could easily check this before making changes.

Sure, can do.

We recently changed the behaviour of "Removed by Request" as well (some months back) so that such tunes are not listed in the artist's catalogue but do persist in the database, visible only to staff, to avoid re-upload, and also so that staff can re-enable them if requested. However, what should we do if an artist requests their entire self be removed from Necta? Do we need to respect that? If someone releases music under a certain name, it's no crime to say "So-and-so is a chiptune artist, with website <url>" on our site, for example, and we can even list their tunes if we want, though it would be strange to list a bunch of tunes we have no intention of actually hosting. (I'm a musician myself and I can't go around demanding other sites remove mentions of my name, even if I wanted to.) If we do want to remove such records, do we just do "locked for upload" with a blank profile, or what?

Locking for upload also occurs (I think) when we have a non-scene-related artist that people keep trying to upload tunes from. The comment field would be useful to make sure staff are aware of this.

Generally speaking, unlike with tunes, I think we should never unlock a locked artist without staff consensus. We don't have a FAQ/rules for that situation, so locking and unlocking has to be considered on a case-by-case basis, right? Whereas there's no need for us to deliberate before locking a non-scener's one-star Doom level remix.

> We recently changed the behaviour of "Removed by Request" as well (some months back) so that such tunes are not listed in the artist's catalogue but do persist in the database, visible only to staff, to avoid re-upload, and also so that staff can re-enable them if requested.

I remember this change. However, does it really "avoid reupload"? If we hide them, then a user might think the song was never uploaded at all, and decide it should be added -- whereas if they could see it there then they would know not to upload it again.

> what should we do if an artist requests their entire self be removed from Necta? Do we need to respect that? If someone releases music under a certain name, it's no crime to say "So-and-so is a chiptune artist, with website <url>"

There was some semi-heated chat about this on the oneliner recently, regarding real names shown on Demozoo. From a purely legalistic standpoint I don't think we can be made to remove these. They are published works. The poet W H Auden wrote a bunch of juvenilia and then his politics changed and he condemned his former writings as "trash". That doesn't mean that they disappeared; it just means that responsible editors will prepend that note to the anthology.

Sceners aren't really as famous as litterateurs but I think the same thing applies, especially because -- even if we delete all records of them -- the stuff will still float around and somebody else will be documenting it. However, we aren't a full historical archive that tries to collect everything (and our FAQ actually says that you should only upload the best tracks) so I think if we are asked to remove somebody's stuff we should just do it. It's not destroying the history; someone else will have it; we are just a radio that maintains sub-selections. And why would we want to piss off sceners, who are our lifeblood as both composers and listeners?

> If we do want to remove such records, do we just do "locked for upload" with a blank profile, or what?

I don't know how we would present this to users. If Quarlek wants to be totally erased and forgotten, but users keep wanting to upload their fave Quarlek who is somehow missing from Necta, how do we handle that? It's the paradox of GDPR (data protection): since there are conditions where you are allowed to learn a new person's details and start contacting them, *you have to know which people have asked not to be contacted*, or else you'd see them as brand new every time. You have to store something about the people who don't want to be stored.

> Generally speaking, unlike with tunes, I think we should never unlock a locked artist without staff consensus. We don't have a FAQ/rules for that situation, so locking and unlocking has to be considered on a case-by-case basis, right? Whereas there's no need for us to deliberate before locking a non-scener's one-star Doom level remix.

That sounds reasonable but as I commented on the oneliner earlier, I have several times seen artists who were locked for apparently no reason. (Cat-Man, I think, was one of them: it may even have been me who had created the artist years before and forgotten to upload anything. When I finally wanted to, I had to ask staff to unlock him, but I can't imagine any real reason -- except general lack of use -- why he would have been locked.)

It's that "locked for apparently no reason" which made me start this thread and ask for an extra info box.

The new RbR status behaviour does not automatically prevent re-upload, no. If an uploader searches for the tune to see if it's already in, they will find it, with RbR status, but will not see old votes, comments, etc. Staff should be checking out artist catalogue when approving uploads (I do, at least) by clicking the artist's name to see the list of tunes. We would see that the tune exists but was removed by request. Finally, if staff inadvertently approved such a tune, then the error would quickly be noticed and rectified.

Perhaps a DB constraint should be added that prevents two entries with the same title and author. It still wouldn't completely prevent duplicate uploads though.

As for the GDPR "paradox" you mentioned, I don't think we have that problem. We're not legally obligated to pretend we have no information about artists who have asked to be excluded from our database. If there's a scener who hates our site for some reason, I think it's perfectly fine to have a blank artist profile for them that says "locked for uploading". If you guys think that's truly unacceptable, we could perhaps maintain some sort of non-user-visible blacklist and give an error message if someone tries to create that artist. "Sorry, but this artist has asked not to be associated with Nectarine." But again, I really don't think we need to bend over backward to vaporise artist records.

> If an uploader searches for the tune to see if it's already in, they will find it, with RbR status, but will not see old votes, comments, etc. [...] Staff should be checking out artist catalogue when approving uploads (I do, at least) by clicking the artist's name to see the list of tunes.

All good. Searching before uploading is hopefully common sense; and I do also double-check the artist list before approving anything.

> Perhaps a DB constraint should be added that prevents two entries with the same title and author.

This sounds good but I actually wouldn't because in theory some annoying artist might choose to write two songs with the same name. There is no real-world rule saying you can't do that.
Anyway good to hear we can have a notes box. Thanks