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Unofficial Discogs rankhunting guide

After a friend who helps a lot on Discogs got accused of making minor edits just to get more votes I felt that something really important was missing, namely an unofficial "rankhunting guide" for Discogs.

So here it is! In this article you will find some best practices for increasing your rank on Discogs, without pissing off everyone. With the advise here and too much free time on your hands it should be easy to get into the top 1000 in no time.

Use scripts to discover problematic entries

First you need to have a list of entries you want to fix, as it is much more efficient and you can very easily click your way through entries. The easiest way to do this is to download a monthly dump of the releases in Discogs and then run scripts that will output a list of smells that need to be fixed. 

Spread your "risk"

These scripts output a list of smells in the same order as in which the releases were added to Discogs. Because every ten seconds or so a new release is added to Discogs and no one is that fast, it means that when you work through the list in top to bottom (or bottom to top) you will fix releases that have been added by different people, likely in different genres, so the chances that you are upsetting a single person is a lot lower, as most people will only see one change, instead of the hundreds you actually did.

Read edit history to avoid flamewars

The edit history is a good place to see if a release is a good one to change or not. If in the history you can see that there have been reverts and heated discussions, and the conflict has not been properly resolved, then it is best to avoid it, as an edit (even a trivial one) might reignite the whole debate.

Change entries with few submitters and owners

If there are releases that few people own, then there is a much lower chance that people will be offended by edits, unless the release is something that should have been merged.

Use clear submission notes

By using clear submission notes of what was changed it is easier to justify your change and won't upset too many people (you can't please them all).

A final note

As a final note: in case you didn't already guess it: this article is tongue in cheek, but of course there is a background story. As said in the intro one of my friends got accused of being a rankhunter, even though he is only interested in correctness of data, so we can do better and more interesting things with it. This article was born out of frustration with the abuse that he got from some people, as it was not justified at all.

Luckily he has a thick skin, and it was offset by the nice reactions he also got from other people. But, we do think that the "Discogs janitors" who work really hard to make entries better deserve some more thanks.
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