Suppress "special" authors from suggested combinations

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Suppress "special" authors from suggested combinations

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1lorax
Jun 4, 2013, 10:02 am

I've noticed lately that "Various" shows up as a suggested author combination fairly frequently, presumably due to anthologies. There are so few cases where this would be valid (misspellings of "Various" or the word in other languages) that it seems far more likely to cause harm due to an accidental or clueless combination than to help. I suggest suppressing this and a very few other "special" authors - Anonymous and N/A are the only ones I can think of - from display in "Suggested combinations". They could of course still be combined if necessary via searching.

2omargosh
Jun 4, 2013, 10:22 am

Good idea. Here are 60 some more "special" authors: http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/Ratty_Authors

3lorax
Sep 30, 2013, 10:06 am

Bump.

4r.orrison
Jan 23, 2017, 4:27 pm

Bump, with a vote for removing the suggested author combination feature completely - most of the suggestions are bogus.

Proof by quite a few examples: https://www.librarything.com/topic/244676#5855770 (yes, there will be some times when the suggestions are valid, but there are more bad suggestions than good ones).

5PhaedraB
Jan 23, 2017, 7:49 pm

>4 r.orrison: I believe there is another, more current RSI asking to have the feature removed altogether. Tim commented that it had a purpose in the early days but with so many users and books now entered, it has lost its value. So removal is on the radar.

6konallis
Edited: Jan 24, 2017, 8:22 am

There are a lot of junk suggestions generated by 'Other Authors', e.g. two authors being suggested as a combination because they contributed to the same work. There is an occasional valid suggestion but bad ones are more common. The manual author search tends to be more useful than the automated suggestions.