The locking situation is a pain

General discussions about the technical aspects of the site -- generating reports, reading reports, uploading information, forum techniques, etc.

Moderators: Roguelet, WaveMaster, Lucy

User avatar
Heidilady
Eclipse Champion
Posts: 2435
Joined: Sun Sep 19, 2004 1:29 pm

The locking situation is a pain

Postby Heidilady » Wed Jul 04, 2012 4:35 pm

Forgive me, but a bit of a rant. There are probably legitimate reasons these decisions are made, but they annoy me, and I need to vent. I get the need to prevent tampering, but surely it's a hassle for mods to constantly get messages to 'fix this' 'fix that' etc. It's happened so much to me lately that something's locked so I gotta wonder if the site's getting lock-happy. How are records supposed to be accurate if it's this much hassle to update many of them? If they're not accurate, doesn't that thwart the very thing locking them is trying to ensure?

Today, after I made sure a misspelled mare didn't exist and deleted her name, then put that offspring under the proper mare with the rest of her siblings, I couldn't then go add info like the fact that the first entry was a bay mare vs a no color filly. Sure she's got more than 3 progeny, but you're hardly gonna have people going through making mares geldings or dark bays into chestnuts. That's the kind of info that people don't go pester mods about, even if they're happy to be spammed with correct information. It costs me time and effort too to contact them, and sometimes you just go 'screw it, it'll just have to go on as it is'. I don't exactly remember to go back and see if the changes were made.

Sometimes you can't update a race record and need to--it's not like they're retired and changes won't happen every few weeks. I get why that's the case with well known horses that are constant targets for hypomating crap and adding things that shouldn't be added. Shouldn't locked horses currently racing have someone monitor their records for updating? If nobody's gonna pay attention to that, why bother having them locked because, again, it makes them more inaccurate?

PS. Oh the irony that I grumble about the time it takes to contact people to fix the records and then I go and take this much time to post. ;) It's been getting on my nerves lately. Figured I better get it off my chest. Then be told, politely, that I am wrong, which I'm sure I am, as the good folks of PQ work very hard and surely are more aware of why they do what they do than I am.
"Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana"
Image

User avatar
the Ol'Line Rebel
Maiden Special Weight
Posts: 172
Joined: Wed Jul 27, 2005 12:47 pm
Location: MD
Contact:

Postby the Ol'Line Rebel » Thu Jul 12, 2012 8:46 am

LOL Heidi, I agree. I get so tired of all the locked horses. Dealing with ancient nobodies is easier to avoid that annoyance - but still sometimes 1 runs across an inexplicably locked horse.

I think once I discovered Longfellow locked (of course), after some big meltdown of the DB - he had virtually no info on his legendary career; just another boring horse, no black type or anything. Ridiculous. Not sure what you ask to have updated then - he had a ton of info way back. Are the mods supposed to write it all up again, or am I supposed to write up a bunch only to have it all pending? I only do tidbits here and there, not whole profiles.

I agree, it's annoying, especially when everyone knows this is NOT a serious reference DB. It's about on par with Wikipedia - can be good for a quick check, but needs verification.

I still love it, though - and it's the best pedigree-entry set-up anywhere. So easy (I just wish we could string-search instead of exact search!).

Tappiano
Grade II Winner
Posts: 1349
Joined: Sat Jan 20, 2007 5:28 pm

Postby Tappiano » Mon Aug 06, 2012 7:50 am

I think some of those locks are leftover from when there was some kind of database "accident" and most, if not all race records and statistics disappeared. They could have tried to do a restore and to prevent further data corruption locked the records.