Tagmirror down

I've taken the tagmirror down for a while. It's just too damn slow, and it's taking up much too much of the site's resources. I'm not even convinced it's making anyone happy since it so often takes longer than most people will wait.

I've got to take a look at it and see if I can make it faster. It's already using some optimized summary tables, so I don't know. It's a hard thing to compare your books agains the tags used by others for the same books.

Still, I can probably come up with something.

I'm not even convinced it's making anyone happy since it so often takes longer than most people will wait.

I've got to take a look at it and see if I can make it faster.

How fast is it supposed to be? I complained when I waited more than half an hour and it hadn't gotten anywhere, but I think it was just broken, or already taken down.

Also, how often is it generated? Again, shouldn't storing it after you've made it once be easy?

And when it does come back, it would be really nice if there were a quick link on the profile, with the tag cloud and author cloud links, so that we didn't have to go through multiple pages to get there.

It's making me happy! Though it had me waiting a long time the last few times I used it. But I just let it do its thing, while I did other LT stuff and came back to it later. Wish it was faster, yes. But I'd rather have it slow than not have it at all.

I hear you. I need to reengineer it again. We've got a universe of more than 60 million tags. It gets tricky :)

Those tag combiners better get busy then.

60.... million.... tags... *faints*

Wow.

I know. It's awesome.

Would it be possible to leave the cloud up without links? Or would that not help any?

No, its the making of it. Basically, we have a table that has a cached version of work numbertag number. And we take every work you have and run it through that. But a work can have a lot of tags. It's grown too large, I think, for database selects on the work.

I'm thinking it over.

i just want to say i love the tag mirror and was rather dismayed to find it gone just now. glad i found this thread to explain why. i don't particularly recall it ever taking a long time to generate myself, but i do hope it returns!

Tagmirror was making me happy, as well :-) - as was TagWatch, btw :-))

any word on when the Tagmirror feature will return????

cheers

"Two weeks".

(That is, sometime between two weeks and three years from now.)

I'm used to that. I live in a country town so "Ten O'clock" means anything from half past nine to next Thursday!

Oh, I am so glad I found this thread, I thought I might have just forgotten how to find the thing.

I love the tag mirror; I hope you can make it work in a way that doesn't hurt the site!

I use the Tag Mirror for my school library media courses. I really miss it! It's such a great tool for teaching about tag consistency. It would be wonderful to see it activated again, if possible!

I love the TagMirror also. I'm kind of sad that since the site improvements last week, two of my very favorite features have gone away - the Tag Mirror, and the connections to Librarything authors' profiles who happen to be authors of books you have read on your profile sidebar.

I also wanted to state my love for the tag mirror. It was a really wonderful feature that let me see my own library at a glance, and it never worked slowly for me. I hope to see it back, especially since features like that made me open a paying account on this site.

It seems quite a few features has been taken down for performance/capacity reasons lately. I know work is going on, but a short progress report would have been nice?

Recently a friend demanded that I tell him what the three main themes of my reading were (I don't remember how this came up), so I thought surely my tag mirror would know better than me. Anyway, I found this thread when I went poking around to see where it went, and I thought I'd say that the tag mirror was indeed making me happy, and I wasn't finding it too much to wait for.

I *heart* tag mirror. It may be useless, but it's fun, and I miss it. If it's a drain, so be it, but if and when it is fixed to work to better fit the Thingieu, then it will be loved once again.

We miss you, Tag Mirror. Get well soon!

I was disappointed to see that the link for the Tag Mirror has been removed entirely. I still hope it comes back soon.

I miss Tag Mirror. *pouts*

#21 - Thingieu! Love it!

I love Tag Mirror. Come back, Tag Mirror!

Also, I love "Thingieu". You win.

Any updates on when Tagmirror will return???

Not today. But it's on my list. Pick a thing: Tag mirror or group searching.

Whichever you feel best fits into the Thingieu.

#27 Tagmirror.
Group searching has never worked, so I don't miss it. Tagmirror has at least sometimes worked, and hence is missed. In general I'd prefer LT to have fewer features all of which consistently worked bug free as intended all of the time, to more features of which few work completely, and most are never finished.

*pony* both */pony*

>27 timspalding:
Tagmirror please - same reasons as #29 :)

Tagmirror. Never had the slightest desire to search for a group.

27: Shoot. I want both Things!

eta: Wait. If 'group searching' is searching FOR a group, then that would be quite necessary to Newbies. But I would personally prefer TagMirror.

If 'group searching' is searching for specific books WITHIN a group, then, yeah, I want both Things!

Pony? Did I hear PONY requests?

I've let this slide for a couple of years, but I'd STILL love to see contextifying information for the data that's now appearing in the "Your Zeitgeist" section ... i.e. where one's particular numbers fall within the data curve of all L.T. members (charts like those on the "stats" page would be nice), and what "ranking" one has (i.e. "you have ### reviews, which is 275th out of ##### L.T. users") in the various "user activity" categories! If that data is, indeed, updated for every account "every 30 minutes" it should be easy enough to have the user info run against site-wide data to create those reports.

 

Tag mirror, definitely.

Tag mirror.

Tag mirror is awesome, collectorator. It shows the most popular tags for books in your library as used by people other than you. Maybe including your tags - it's been a while, so I've forgotten.

It's like the tag clouds on a book page, but for your entire library.

I didn't use it much when we had it because it was slow and I wasn't really concerned with tagging until recently, but it was a Shiny that made LT look pretty dang cool when I was poking around a couple years ago. It'd be nice to have back, and I imagine I'd use it more often than I had been doing now that I'm more involved with tagging. Mostly. I'm really far behind in tagging my books like I've wanted to do.

Pony time, is it? I want Affinity back, but with reverse affinity displayed as well.

(Don't care about either of the options, but I'm in agreement with Reading_Fox, in 29.

Re.#38: "I want Affinity back, but with reverse affinity displayed as well."

Oooh, yeah, affinity was fun!

 

Keristars, I'm not a tagger (I use collections) so that's why it doesn't interest me personally.

I don't quite understand how the one implies the other. Do you ever look at the tag clouds on the work pages?

>39 Collectorator: Ah, I thought you meant that you didn't know what it was, not that it didn't interest you, so I was attempting to explain both what it did and why it's a fun/useful feature.

But I understand not being a tagger - I didn't really care about them until relatively recently, when collections made me more aware of the ability to use tags in a less utilitarian fashion.

definitely Tagmirror!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

41: Even if you don't use tags yourself, tagmirror will show you how other people tag their copies of your books. :)

Tagmirror, then Group Searching!

I surprised. I think of group searching as a core feature, tagmirror as frosting. And I'm the data geek here!

It's actually quite a compliment since tagmirror was my invention, and LT is the only site to ever have anything like it :)

Group searching has been broken for so long that I think most people have given up on it and either posted a new thread or searched on Google for LibraryThing stuff.

Tag Mirror doesn't exactly have a Google option. ;)

Plus it's fun, where Group searching is functional.

I think there's might be some skew since the title of this thread is called "Tag mirror", hence I don't know if it's going to attract die-hard folks who intensely use groups.

As far as the group functionality goes, I have to wonder if group search is something that's rather infrequent. Someone might use it when they first come to the site. Then I suspect they start adding groups in a more organic fashion such as noticing a group that they hadn't heard of when looking at another person's profile, etc. I know that's my case. I don't do a lot of the "book competition" type things where one is supposed to read x books in the next month or something, so it might be more useful for those folks.

I've been trying to think a lot on why I liked the tag mirror so much. I think it boils down to a few things. I'm a bit lazy and just haven't bothered tagging much. Even if I did tag all my books, it would be a rather small subset of all the possible tags. The nice thing about Tag mirror was two-fold:

1) No matter how much or little I tagged books, i could still get a good feel for large areas of my collections based off the Tagmirror cloud.

2) In some cases, I saw tags that I wouldn't have thought of that look interesting and I can explore it. I mean, I saw something recently on swordplay and I realized that I might be more interested in swords and sword battles. It was just a common thread in some of my manga that I read that I didn't consciously realize.

3) It was just kinda cool. It's that sugar/spice that makes a really, really good dish although you can't say why.

I've taken to grabbing random books and following the tag clouds present on them, but it's not quite the same.

I've tried to figure out other features that might help supplement some of the desires that were met with tag cloud. I know some probably won't be popular, but I'll go ahead anyhow...

* Suggested tags based of of existing tag frequency, similar to how delicious works. You can just click on those tags to add that tag to the book. While I agree it's important to tag things in your own terms, it's slightly annoying to have to type them when you can see the word you would use right on the page.

* Taking random samples of books and doing the mirrored tag cloud just on them. It matches that serendipitous browsing craving and still should give you an idea of what your collection is like.

I still think there has to be other ways to scratch the itch. I mean, I don't mind waiting for the Tag Mirror, but I can understand concern if it was computationally expensive. I mean, it might not just be an issue of the Tag Mirror being slow, but it actually negatively affect the rest of the site, right?

Shhh, if you like the tag mirror you weren't supposed to point out that this is a sort of biased place to ask about it! ;)

Seriously, though, I don't understand why the tag mirror can't just be stored and regenerated very infrequently (say, every six months, or sooner the number of books catalogued has changed by more than 10%).

Source criticism, who needs it!

_Zoe_ if I did that, people would holler about it not being updated. A slowly-cached feature is often more of an irritation than no feature. You can't complain about a car you don't have.

The real thing I need to do is to look at it again ab novo, and think through the basic memory and access bottleneck. Lots of features work well at one number of books, but go bad at a higher one. Tag mirror is basically a people who do X also do Y feature, like the recommendations features. Those have a very bad habit of scaling in time and resouces by the square of X. I've rewritten the recommendations algorithms a dozen times for this very reason.

I think I might have a solution in a very "cut down" table of tags-to-books I now maintain for the tag-based recommendations. But I'm not sure it'll be good enough, and I'm not sure the dynamics of querying it—it's elsewhere used only for admin scripts—will not be painful.

#27: Tagmirror

#47: No need to be surprised. It's the features that are found nowhere else that keeps us on LT.

You can't complain about a car you don't have.

What do you mean? Look at this thread. Tagmirror may be gone for now, but it's not forgotten.

So maybe six months was an extreme example. But how often does it really need to be generated? I can't say I remember seeing changes in my tagmirror over time. And I'd rather have instant loading than up-to-the-minute currency.

For a compromise solution, couldn't you update it only periodically, but add a manual update button for those who really cared (with restrictions that it can't be manually updated more than once every X period of time)?

I'd rather have up to the minute currency #53. Who is really in such a rush to see their tags? I'd rather wait ten minutes, if necessary, and have it be accurate. If you get tired of waiting, you can always open up a new tab and go somewhere else, clicking back periodically to see if it's done yet. But really either option sounds good to me. And I like the compromise solution.

Group searching. I have a project in mind that I have had on hold since group searching went down. I'm not going to even suggest that the others join LT until this works again.

I almost missed this discussion because I have been skipping the tag mirror topic. Tag mirrors don't interest me.

Group Searching.

Like >55 MarthaJeanne: I have a project on mind (I study at a theological college and if we can group all faculty and student personal libraries together we'll have an amazing resource!)

Group searching would seem to me to be an obvious core feature of LT.

Thanks to those who pointed me here to allow me to 'vote' after my comment yesterday at http://www.librarything.com/topic/12877#1909536

That's how I found it, too.

Oh, is *that* what Tim means by group searching? I thought it had to do with better searching through Talk threads or possibly group descriptions.

I really think that any voting in this thread should be considered invalid until Tim defines the choices better.

Agree with 58. I never got an answer when I asked about that back @32.

Yeah, it would be good to have a whole separate thread about this.

As for group searching in the sense of #56, I think that's as much of a niche feature as tag mirror: it's only relevant for specific kinds of groups (small ones where you know all the members and know what you expect to find--which I don't think reflects the most common use of groups on this site). Group browsing, on the other hand, would be fantastic for all groups.

>61 _Zoe_:

That's a helpful distinction.

Group searching, as I'd like to see and use it, is of use only where a group community is connected outside of LT (e.g. geographically, or through some sort of club/society)

Group browsing, as I understand it, would be of use where a group community has formed on LT but doesn't really exist outside of LT.

At the end of the day though, I imagine both needs are met by the pretty much the same underlying structure?

At the end of the day though, I imagine both needs are met by the pretty much the same underlying structure?

I'm not sure; even when search worked in the past, there was no browse option. The best you could do was a wildcard search, which was limited to 1000 results.

No, search and browse are not equivalent.

Group brouse could be fun - but the practicallities would be problematic. A 2000 memeber group = 2000 copies of HP? and maybe 40000 books+ to brouse through! Although a certain amount of not displaying duplicate works would help immensely. Also see my #29 regarding totally new features.

>65 reading_fox: Well, what I really want could actually be accomplished by a fully functional search. When I'm looking at (some set of) a group library, the single thing I most want to see is what books people in that group have read recently. But I know there's no way in hell Tim will be implementing search based on a range of finished dates, because of his inexplicable hatred of all date-related functionality, so I'd like to be able to sort the whole catalogue to get at that information.

I have been away from LT for nearly a year. (It takes a loonnnngggg time to physically move 5,000 books.)

I've just returned for a bit and find that Tag Mirror is gone! :( it's one of my favorite things. I don't tag myself, but I did truly enjoy seeing how close, or often how very far others' tags were from what I would use myself if I used them.

So while this is a very late "vote," I'd like to see them come back, and I don't care at all how long it takes for them to load.

You can still see how other people tagged individual works on the works page.

>68 jjwilson61:
These haven't been updated recently (as of a day ago, anyway).

Group searching PLEASE!!

I don't use or even know what Tag Mirror is, but I gather Tagwatch is somehow related because its gone. I did use Tagwatch and the 'Back Soon' sign is getting kind of old.

Any word on when it might return ?

"Any word on when it might return ?"

Two Weeks.

>70 rad:
Group searching is a different issue. If you have not done so already, why not start a thread about it?

73>

That's not really fair; Tim asked in message 27 for people to "pick one" between group searching and tag mirror. Asking proponents of one answer to not answer the question is going to skew things a bit. ;)

>74 lorax:
Neither is that, really, since why would I read the entire thread each time I read the new messages. And that poster didn't post a reference.

75>

Sorry, tone failure on my part. I just assumed you had missed or forgotten that post, rather than that you were being malicious. Obviously the wink was insufficient to convey that. My apologies.

(I don't read the entire thread each time I read new messages, either! I just happened to remember Tim's call for a vote.)

Messages 55-66 are all concerning group searching.

61 suggested starting a whole new thread on group searching, which I guess would make sense if the discussion were about group searching itself, however the point of this thread from message 27 onwards has been to vote on either group searching or tag mirror as one thing for LT to sort out.

Having said that, a thread with a title of "tagmirror down" isn't necessarily an even playing field for such a vote in the first place!

>77 j.c.taylor: I started another thread with a poll.

>78 _Zoe_: Many thanks. I've voted there!