Creating an Overall Stats Page for Magazine Status?

[Phillyman]

I threw this together with Copilot and a data dump from the Magazine Database section. I kept it simple and just pulled out the USA stuff for this first round. Would having something like this that is dynamically generated here at Retromags be of any benefit?

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11wE6UuAGROH7onWOjb38ch9m6SIVQYVasy-HMa8PI7s/edit?usp=sharing

 

magazines-summary.csv

[kitsunebi]

I can't speak for anyone else, but I only scan what I have, and I only buy what I want.  And out of what I have, I already have a pretty good awareness of what's already been preserved either here or on other sites.  This kind of list seems like it would be mostly useful to the kind of person who is sitting there thinking: "I've got nothing to scan but want to fill some of Retromags' holes.  Lemme see what's needed before I head over to eBay and drop some cash." 

[dablais]

Yeah... I must admit I did that.  I purchased a lot of magazines to fill the missing hole on some of the collection.  They will appear slowly, and most of them are in the Team Member spreadsheet.  I also drop around 200 magazines  @E-Day because I had too many and hopefully get some help.

[Phillyman]

So my thought process is an easier way to see progress. Right now if you want to know which magazines Retromags has fully preserved, you will need to go into the Magazine Database, drop into the USA section and then go into each category one by one and look for this at the top.

 

Which is totally doable, but what if you just want to know what Retromags has completely preserved thus far? Well if all the information is dropped out then its simple to sort.....

Wow look at that, Retromags has completely preserved 51 publications so far. I didn't even know it was that many. What about publications that are on the cusp of being fully preserved?

 

Well from the above data, it looks like if we scan 29 more magazines that are "Missing" and 15 magazines that need a "Rescan Needed", that we could add another 23 completed publications to the Retromags Download Manager.

I am just coming at this from the point of, more information can probably excite users to helping us track down and complete out areas we need help on. 

[kitsunebi]

2 hours ago, Phillyman said:

I am just coming at this from the point of, more information can probably excite users to helping us track down and complete out areas we need help on. 

Yes, exactly.  This is a list that's useful for someone wanting to purchase magazines to fill holes and wants to see which titles HAVE holes before seeing which individual issues are needed -- potential donators and potential certified crazy people like Dablais who buy mags just to fill holes even though they've got so many mags already they have to send hundreds of them to E-Day to scan to lighten their load.

It's probably not necessary for anyone who wants to scan or donate mags they already own, since they're either already aware of what's needed, and are probably going to have to go into each mag's DB/download section to see which individual issues are needed anyway.

But it sounds like it's more or less already scripted and will update automatically, so is there any reason NOT to use it?

[Argus]

One flaw with something like this is, while at a glance it looks like we've completely preserved 51 publications, the true number is actually lower since a lot of publications aren't fully represented in the database (PC World, GameRoom and The Gamer, to name a few, and that's just from the completed list). For those publications one would still have to check the individual database entry to see that, "Oh, this site only has GameRoom issues from Volume 20."

[kitsunebi]

Yeah, there are some publications (offhand I don't know what) where someone has scanned a single issue, and created a DB entry for that issue and that issue only.  So it would look 100% preserved when in fact only a single issue has been preserved.

This is why we usually want to ascertain how many issues total a mag has before creating its database, but it hasn't been done that way with 100% consistency, especially on mags where we're unsure of the number of issues.

[mvangord]

Pocket Gamer (the Future US publication) actually has at least 2 issues, the second one being one I have in my basement somewhere. I'd send it in to be scanned but it's in pretty terrible condition.