Books On Track discussion

Welcome to the group about the book series tracking website Books On Track (aka https://booksontrack.net).

Please feel free to leave your comments, suggestions or questions below.

I have tried importing both my goodreads and fictfact csv files and neither one will import. Is there a size limit?

Kerry wrote: "I have tried importing both my goodreads and fictfact csv files and neither one will import. Is there a size limit?"

Does the process never finish or do you get an error message?

Thenia, do you have a Facebook post and/or Twitter post that I could share to my followers recommending your awesome new site? Or would you rather we wait a couple weeks to start plugging it so you have time to do more debugging and refining?

Thenia, is there a way to mark a book as currently reading? I haven't yet found a way to do that.

Bonita wrote: "Thenia, do you have a Facebook post and/or Twitter post that I could share to my followers recommending your awesome new site? Or would you rather we wait a couple weeks to start plugging it so you..."

The Facebook and/or Twitter pages are under construction, and when we've got them I'll share the links, but I've prepared a meta card so you can share the site's url in either platform and it should look alright (if not let me know!).

Feel free to share away!

Bonita wrote: "Thenia, is there a way to mark a book as currently reading? I haven't yet found a way to do that."

There is no way to mark currently reading books set up unfortunately. The only options are Read, To Read and Skipped, so a currently reading book would be marked as To Read after import.

Thenia wrote: "Kerry wrote: "I have tried importing both my goodreads and fictfact csv files and neither one will import. Is there a size limit?"

Does the process never finish or do you get an error message?"

When trying the fictfact list, I get 419 Page Expired

and then when I click the back button I get an error Csv file formatting not recognized.
 Please upload a Goodreads export csv file.

OK, tried that and now it said Import successful

Sorry to bother you.

Kerry wrote: "Thenia wrote: "Kerry wrote: "I have tried importing both my goodreads and fictfact csv files and neither one will import. Is there a size limit?"

Does the process never finish or do you get an err..."

No problem - glad it worked!

Could someone tell me the difference between dropped and removed? Does dropped still keep the series but just not show it in the series list?

Sheila wrote: "Could someone tell me the difference between dropped and removed? Does dropped still keep the series but just not show it in the series list?"

Yes, if you mark a series as Dropped, both the series and the books it includes will remain in your data, but the series will no longer appear in your Next Books list.

If you Remove a series, both the series data and the books it includes are removed from your data.

If a book belongs to more than one series, and one of them you had previously removed, the series will be re added to your list, since the database does not keep a record of removed series. In this case I would recommend dropping the series instead, so that it doesn't get re-added every time. Other than that, you can remove the series you are no longer interested in and don't want to see in your My Series table.

Thanks Thenia. When I uploaded my GR csv it showed I had over 500 series. I'm working on paring that down to a more manageable series list. So it sounds like I just need to drop about half those series and focus on the ones I care about then. Thanks for the quick reply.

I'm really missing a link to goodreads on the book pages, if there isn't one available from submission a 'search on goodreads' link would do with author & book name as search paramaters.

Hi Thenia,

When I look up some authors that I have on my reading list, they do not come up when I search for them. Examples are Miranda James, Margaret Truman, and Leslie Meier. I just started looking at the sight but those are 3 for right now that do not show up. Do you think they will in the future???

Thanks so much and the site is wonderful.. Thank you for all your hard work in getting this site for all of us..

Janice

Janice, When you do a search and find an author missing, click on the "Something Missing?" button and send a message with the missing authors. We are working on getting missing authors/series/books added to the database, but this tells us that it needs added.
Thanks!
Kelly

OHHH.. Got it... Thank you so much.... I will do that...

I also want to thank you for all your hard work. The site is excellent!

A question re future enhancements, will you be adding a "sort" function that does not revert back to the original sort every time I update a book or series? Also, something that would be nice is to be able to move the series I am currently reading to the top of the My Series list.

Yvonne wrote: "I also want to thank you for all your hard work. The site is excellent!

A question re future enhancements, will you be adding a "sort" function that does not revert back to the original sort every..."

I'm hoping for the same thing!

I second (third?) Yvonne's and Teri's suggestion.

A sort function is already on the list for a future version. ;)

I might be missing something. I uploaded my book export from goodreads. I changed my export shelf to "to-read", "read". The full export has 2207 books (1489 books apart of 257 different series).
When I import it to BoT, I end up with 65 series and only 225 books and many books I had read did not come in as read. For example the Jack Reacher series came in with only 2 of 35 (6%) read but I have read 37/37.

I have cleared my data and tried a few times all with same result.

Note: have have a program that uses goodreads api to extract all my goodreads data into a database. so thats how I got the ful detail.

Shane wrote: "I might be missing something. I uploaded my book export from goodreads. I changed my export shelf to "to-read", "read". The full export has 2207 books (1489 books apart of 257 different series).
Wh..."

As I've mentioned in the instructions for the import, as well as different messages here and there, the import process isn't perfect and there might be books that are not matched despite being in the database for a number of reasons.

It serves as a springboard from where you can build your collection without having to input everything by hand, and you need to look through your series after the import and update the books that were not matched correctly.

I will look into updating it at some point in the future, but for now you still have to manually process your series too after the import when you first register. I know it's annoying, but after the first set up it should be easy enough to keep your series and books up to date.

Understand just wanted you aware

First of all I want to say that I love what you did. I feel like I finally have a good alternative for fictfact.

One suggestion I have is for series that have in-between books/short stories. Those are counted as a full number now, it would be great if they would get #0.5 or whatever number is right.

I'd second that (even though I've seen the faq) it is still very much confusing and distracting to see a book out of place because of some short story or novella.

Hi! I've got a quick question; does Books on Track utilize the goodreads API? I was developing using their API so recently found out they plan on retiring all the public tools. (BOOO.) I've also been looking for a FictFact replacement, and found this; will it continue to work after the API shuts down?
Thanks!

Karen wrote: "Hi! I've got a quick question; does Books on Track utilize the goodreads API? I was developing using their API so recently found out they plan on retiring all the public tools. (BOOO.) I've also be..."

Hi Karen, no need to worry! Books on Track does not utilize the Goodreads API so it will not be affected at all if the API shuts down.

Welcome to the group and enjoy the site!

As far as numbering is concerned, it represents the order of all books and short stories in a series.

I understand it can be confusing sometimes, but there are currently no plans to change it.

Hi, thank you for all your hard work in getting this up and running.
I wanted to make a small suggestion, would it be possible to add a "Follow Author" tab so that if they start a new series it will automatically be added to the "Next Books" list, "My Series" and the "Calendar"? This way we can see the new series as they are released and if we don't want to read that specific series we can drop it from the list.

Zelda Wendy wrote: "Hi, thank you for all your hard work in getting this up and running.
I wanted to make a small suggestion, would it be possible to add a "Follow Author" tab so that if they start a new series it wil..."

I have been considering adding a feature like that - I've added it to the list to look into for a future version of the site. Thanks for the suggestion Zelda!

Hi Thenia,

Thanks so much for all your hard work putting this together. It’s truly amazing!

How do Authors get added into the system? One of my favourite authors, with multiple series seems to be missing. :-(
His name is Drew Hayes: https://www.goodreads.com/series/list...

Stephen wrote: "How do Authors get added into the system? One of my favourite authors, with multiple series seems to be missing. :-(
His name is Drew Hayes: https://www.goodreads.com/series/list..."

On every page is a "something missing" box. Click that and put in the information for the author. It will send us an email and we'll get it added to the list for processing.

Hmmm, I did that a month ago, still waiting :(

Sandra wrote: "Hmmm, I did that a month ago, still waiting :("

I do see that you've sent in 2 messages, it took awhile for Thenia to get the process working efficiently, and with so many people sending in messages for missing authors/series/books we just aren't caught up yet. Please be patient with us as I get them added to the spreadsheet and Thenia processes them. We will get caught up! :)

could we get an email or notification on site when the author/series/book is finally added ? that would make a big difference and help avoid submitting the same information more than once.

H wrote: "could we get an email or notification on site when the author/series/book is finally added ? that would make a big difference and help avoid submitting the same information more than once."

Thenia and I are talking about it now, we should have something in place this weekend.

Pam wrote: "Hi Thenia,

Thanks so much for all your hard work putting this together. It’s truly amazing!"

Thank you Pam! Enjoy the site!

Happy 2021 everyone!

Since testing, before the site went live in November, there have been several hundred requests for missing information to be added to the site, with more coming in daily, and although I'd intended to send emails when a request was filled, the sheer volume of the requests prohibited this.

Thankfully, Kelly, who has been helping me keep track of incoming requests, has kindly agreed to take up this part of the process so you will soon start receiving emails when your requests have been filled.

These emails will go out roughly once a week for requests that were filled during the previous week, and you will receive multiple emails if you made multiple requests. We will not backtrack to send emails for the numerous requests that have been filled so far, but be aware that if your request was sent before November 5th then it has been processed (if it has not then it did not reach us!).

Please keep in mind that it takes time for the emails to be processed and the information to be entered into the database, and we currently have a long backlog to work through, but we are both working as quickly as we can.

Hope that helps!

It might be even more helpful if the list was visible on the site. This way users might be able to review the list before submitting a possible duplicate request.

Of course if users could be allowed to add entries themselves that were then reviewed it might even work better. It seems to somewhat make duplicate work to send in a request that has all the necessary info for someone else to add later. I swear at one point fictfact allowed almost instant additions by using the asin number, but maybe I am misremembering.

Are goodread imports automatically being added to a list if not on file or do those need to be manually suggested for addition?

Brennock- I too remember being able to do some 'instant' additions on fictfact, I never did figure why some worked and others had to be handled by the moderators.

If you added the kindle edition using the asin number it went straight through, using an isbn had to be moderated.

I added hundreds using the asin.

Ahhh that makes sense hahaha
I was too thrilled by not having to wait to look at the differences in my 'information source' at the time.

Brennok wrote: "It might be even more helpful if the list was visible on the site. This way users might be able to review the list before submitting a possible duplicate request.

Of course if users could be allo..."

Unfortunately not everyone sends us all the information needed. We have to look some of it up before adding to the list for processing. Perhaps in the future we can look into this though!

Kelly wrote: "Brennok wrote: "It might be even more helpful if the list was visible on the site. This way users might be able to review the list before submitting a possible duplicate request.

Of course if use..."

Oh I get that, but I was thinking about this today as I submitted a bunch of requests. The something missing form is just a text box. If the form was formatted with the required fields to speed up the process for you that might be helpful.

I don't know what info you truly need versus what you might be able to easily scrape like using the ASIN as mentioned above.

Brennok wrote: "I don't know what info you truly need versus what you might be able to easily scrape like using the ASIN as mentioned above"

Updating the "something missing" form is something I'm considering for a future version of the site, but for now I updated the prompt to clarify things a bit, namely: "Link to Goodreads/Amazon/author page and other relevant information".

If you want to make Kelly's task of processing the requests a little easier, add a Goodreads link to your request, or at least enough information for us to easily identify the author/series/book you are requesting (for example a link to the author's website in case of authors/series/books with the same name).

The site does not have any external dependencies and I intend to keep it that way, so unfortunately auto-filling request forms by ASIN alone is not something that will happen.

I am constantly refining my scripts and have sped up the upload process considerably, but I am still working through a long backlog of requests (even longer if you include the data from the imports), so please be patient with me while I get caught up.

It will take time, but once the database grows sufficiently, adding new requests will be quite quick.

For now, please be patient and keep in mind that apart from Kelly who has been invaluable in helping me process the many emails of requests submitted daily, I am a one person team...

Hey everyone, just a quick update:

I've just added a "Print" button in the mySeries page that you can use to export your lists. By default it exports the whole table, but you can filter and order it if you'd only like a specific subset of data (e.g. only series you have already started aka "Following").

Just make sure that the browser you are using isn't blocking pop ups at least while you are trying to download your data, since it will just close the page down before you can download/print it otherwise.

I just found out about this and wanted to say thanks! I've been missing FictFact big time, its so unfortunate GoodReads doesn't have any viable series tracking feature

My import didn't go so well though. A lot of books got marked as to read instead of read, and seems to be missing a lot of books in the database still

Jesse Norris wrote: "I just found out about this and wanted to say thanks! I've been missing FictFact big time, its so unfortunate GoodReads doesn't have any viable series tracking feature

My import didn't go so well ..."

Glad you found the site Jesse!

I'm aware that the import doesn't match all books correctly for a number of reasons - it's just a way to get you started, since it's easier to update the books that were not matched correctly than adding all of them from scratch.

I'm also aware that there are a lot of missing books at the moment, but that is to be expected since there are thousands of authors with series out there and this is a relatively new project that I am handling alone apart from Kelly who's helping me sort through the many many requests we're receiving.

Please feel free to submit "Something missing" forms for authors/series/books you'd like to be added to the database, but be aware that we are currently working through a huge backlog and it might take a while before new requests are filled.

Enjoy the site!

Can that not be automated? Use an api to lookup a book if its not in the database type thing and add a default entry.