Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

Hello, I made a list with 100 books. I put a lot of work into it for months, adding titles, original editions, covers and descriptions. I just wanted to look something up and 75 books have completely disappeared.

https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/2...

What happened?

Edit: This must have happened within the last 2 days and likely within the last few hours.

I don't think there is any way we can tell. You could try support.

Thank you, I contacted support and they told me "once data has been removed, it's completely deleted from our system and we no longer have access to it". So that's it? A librarian can just trash a list, there's no help and no consequences?

Ska Ⓥ wrote: "Thank you, I contacted support and they told me "once data has been removed, it's completely deleted from our system and we no longer have access to it". So that's it? A librarian can just trash a ..."

Sounds like it - sorry.

I don't work with Listopias - at all. But under certain conditions you can make a list static. (this is if you want to recreate your original list) There is nothing in the Librarians Manual about this, but I did find this question over at Help.

https://help.goodreads.com/s/global-s... (you'll have to scroll down a bit.)

Hopefully a librarian will come along who knows more about this than I do.

Thank you, I really appreciate your kind reply, but this was literally months of work (just finding the titles, verifying the contents and date of publication can be very time-consuming), and I don't feel like doing it all again. I'm also in the middle of exams; instead of studying, I just spend two hours unsuccessfully searching for a book that I remember the contents of, but not the title or author's name.

I'd rather have an unlocked list because I want other users to be able to add books of interest.

I just set up a backup shelf so I at least have a backup in case the librarian who deleted the first 75 titles decides to delete the other 25. (It's not like they have to worry about facing any consequences for this kind of behaviour...) I would have made a backup earlier if I even remotely suspected that support would be unable and/or unwilling to help in a case like this. (I know GR has change logs of everything.) It's too late now.

It's strange because if we (legitimately) remove a book a warning appears telling us that there are severe consequences for removing a book inappropriately. Guess that's not so.

Interesting. I just checked and there is a note over on the right:

"Only delete books from the list that are totally miscategorized. Deleting books that aren't will result in a loss of librarian privileges, and possible deletion of account. We're super serious!"

Lol. Clearly not.

You can only remove one book at a time. Each time a pop-up window appears and you must acknowledge it by hitting 'OK':

Delete - title of the book - from this list, are you sure? Improper deleting of books from lists will have serious repercussions!

That means someone clicked 'OK' 75(!) times. Maybe they just stopped out of sheer boredom, lol. I'm going to complain to support again because I frankly don't believe they can't do anything about this.

Carol She's So Novel꧁꧂ wrote: "I don't work with Listopias - at all. But under certain conditions you can make a list static. (this is if you want to recreate your original list) There is nothing in the Librarians Manual about this, but I did find this question over at Help."

Static lists can still be edited by librarians. And removing books requires a librarian, so it is not a protection against book removal.

Static lists are intended for situations were you can define if a list is complete, such as a list published by another source, books by an imprint, an annual publication. It is to prevent users adding a different book to a '20 best books of 2024 according to this other source' list.

Is it possible that items have been marked as invalid on the database? This could happen if there were leaflets or non-literary journals included. There are probably other items there that are not valid Goodreads listing such as 'The Herald of the Golden Age'.

Martin wrote: "Is it possible that items have been marked as invalid on the database?"

It is possible for some but not all 75.

I added back about 40 titles that I can still remember (none of them marked as invalid), as well as some new ones. I recall removing individual chapters the first time around, but I really don't have the time or energy right now to review everything again. (Maybe after my exams.)

Edit: I also found the book I was desperately searching for, My Walk from New York to Chicago. That's something, at least. :)

So there is a Librarian change log. I just deleted two books from a list as asked by a list maintainer. When I look at the librarian change log I see

Mitchell Friedman updated a list:
44045958: book deleted
7 minutes ago (#942846295)

Mitchell Friedman updated a list:
12512680: book deleted
7 minutes ago (#942846280)

I see no sign of anyone updating this list except for ska.

I'm going to go check on another list - one that has lots of deletions. I see 24 pages of librarian changes. The oldest book deleted entry is from July 29, 2013. So I don't think the deletions themselves get deleted.

Thanks for looking into it but what does it mean? 75 books just disappeared by themselves?

Edit: If you are trying to imply that they where never there in the first place, please do a Google search for "Animal Advocacy Pre-1950 (Non-Fiction)". Google Cache shows "(99 books)". Here is a screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/ZiV1sGL
I added the 100th book a day or two before the 75 books disappeared, so the last book was never cached by Google. (I was working on this list almost every day, so I know I caught the change almost immediately.)

To retrieve more of the 75 lost titles, I downloaded all my data from Goodreads. It's a long and tedious process of going through every single search I did on that list, but I managed to find more of the missing titles.

We don't really know what happened. If staff made the change, they may be able to hide their action from the log. You could contact support and maybe they can determine if a glitch occured.

Scott wrote: "We don't really know what happened. If staff made the change, they may be able to hide their action from the log. You could contact support and maybe they can determine if a glitch occured."

I agree. The deletions not showing up on the log just mean that it wasn't a "normal" deletion by a librarian. Which means it was something else including a glitch.

Thank you. I asked support for help several times. Every response I have received boils down to: 'We have no access to deleted data. There is nothing we can do. Just add the books back.'

My final exam is at the end of September. After that, I'll take a long break and then either rebuild the list or delete it.