I’ve posted the first draft of my thoughts about Editing Guidelines. You can read them here.
It isn’t reasonable to hold people to guidelines that only exist inside my head, or through observation of what I’ve done in the past. I would like this to evolve into something that we can get general agreement on, so I can feel better about delegating some of the editing responsibilities to others. If you’ve read carefully, you know I want this web site to be self-sustaining, even if at some point I’m unable to be involved.
Now is the time to express your opinions – even if you aren’t currently an editor, but might want to help in the future. Once this is a reasonably complete document (the shorter the better), then things should work smoother and the expectation is you’ll edit within the guidelines.
So you understand, I’m a principle person, not a “make a rule for every possible situation”. If you have a reference point of what the objectives and principles are, how to handle any specific situation should usually be fairly obvious. No set of principles or guidelines though will ever cover every situation – that’s why there is always someone in charge who makes the ultimate decisions.
That’s me, at least for now :)
Fred
SRG works very well right now. You have enough “fail safes” to make choices obvious.
My only suggestion would be a spell check for the comments section!
Perhaps an explanation of the “dayframes” (M-F, Sat and Sun) vs day exclusions (XXXXXSX, etc.) As you may notice in my edit of KNST for Sat, it took me several tries before I understood the concept :)
The editor is usual hostile as I wrote it for me :)
The days format is a legacy from the format of Replay Radio product, which I originally integrated the directory with.
The hardest/ugliest part has to deal with a show that breaks a day boundary, especially if the station is not on East Coast time. The “rule” is that if a show crosses midnight LOCAL time, then you need to break it into two schedule items at midnight… so Coast to Coast is 1-5 AM Eastern, but that is 10 PM to 3AM Pacific. So while you don’t have to “break” the show for East Coast, you need to break it into 10PM-Mid, and Mid-3AM for a west coast station (assuming it is live – west coast stations often carry the repeat…. also “overnight delayed programs are often a problem… a M-F program like Jerry Doyle becomes T-Sat – maybe. And you can’t ever trust the station schedule for how they hand Saturday Mid-5AM or Monday Mid-5AM.
The unfortunate consequence I see in “breaking” programs is that testers will test the first half and then not stick around, go to bed, etc. before the second half, leading to the second half expiring. Also, the casual site user will only see a 1 or 2 hour program and think WTF? :)
There is no reasonable away around it without making the sql statements to fetch “what’s on now” even uglier than it aleady is. When it is Tuesday 1AM in New York, it is still Monday in California :) If I had it all to do over again, and I wasn’t making it compatible with Replay Radio, I might have done it a different way – but alas that isn’t an option at this point. That’s the way it works, so them is the rules. Even so, some things don’t work right – that’s why you won’t find any stations in Arizona with schedules.
KNST is in Arizona, which is why it had no schedule :)
One more thing to know/check…. before you add things to a schedule that are “missing”, click the “dead” checkbox. More than likely you’ll find the things you are trying to add were already in the schedule, but expired due to lack of interest. Give a long hard thought before reintroducing things that expired (or that I deleted on purpose). Is it one of only a few stations carrying the show at that time? Is it a show than anyone wants to listen to (and if so, why did it expire?)
Should expired/dead shows be deleted (when editing is not feasible)? Or do you have a more efficient means of pruning?
“Deleted” schedule items never go away, ever. :) They just get better hidden. The reason is they are needed for historical statistics. Generally, don’t usethe schedule editor was a way to circumvent the program_check programs “rules”, at least without a reason. The number one factor in answering that judgement is – did anyone listen to it while it was listed? (not whether it is of interest to you)…. There is a listen count that shows you how many times people tried to listen to the program on that station.
Think of the web site as a juggler with a bunch of balls trying to keep the air…. the hard part is to not drop the ones you already have. Adding in more balls to juggle just increases the chances the existing ones hit the ground. If we got a few dozen more active testers, then we would add all of the “stuff” back in, but my recruiting efforts have not been terribly fruitful.
In keeping with having code where necessary to enforce my “unwritten rules” to avoid conflict and confusion, stations that don’t follow Daylight Saving Time can now no longer have a program schedule.