Like many other websites Discogs allows you to use certain formatting codes that is then automatically expanded. For example, to link to a release you can use [r000000] (where of course "000000" should be a real release number) which is then expanded to a link to the release. There are also other formatting codes. The benefit is that if necessary Discogs can rearrange their infrastructure and then the links will (or at least should) still be working. Unfortunately they don't have it implemented correctly everywhere (yet), as on the iOS app it doesn't seem to be working (bug report has been sent):
These codes are not automatically updated when releases are merged, or removed and then the links basically become useless. So I was wondering: how many releases are there with formatting codes to releases that no longer exist: how many dangling pointers are still there?
I grabbed the latest data dump and first looked at all the existing releases that were not drafts and stored them, then checked all the notes for any formatting codes for releases and extracted them, and then checked whether or not they could be found in the list of existing releases.
I looked at notes of 11,232,020 releases and found that 250,679 releases are referencing one or more other releases using the formatting tags. That is actually a lot less than expected, namely a bit over 2.23%. There are quite a few (old) releases that are still using direct URLs (before there were formatting tags), but how many is something for another day.
Of these releases I found 963 releases that potentially have out of date references. Some of these pointed to draft releases that have now been promoted to full releases, but these are really just a handful. Most of the dangling pointers point to either draft releases (the result of a merge of other releases) or point to releases that no longer exist. This is actually not too bad, but the releases should still be fixed.
There were also 8 releases where someone typed in a few too many digits, referencing a release that likely won't be added in the next few years, because it has a release number that won't be handed out anytime soon: release numbers are assigned incrementally in Discogs. Currently almost 14 million release numbers have been assigned. One of the invalid pointers references a release with release number larger than 133 million. As said before: data entry is hard and people don't check.
These codes are not automatically updated when releases are merged, or removed and then the links basically become useless. So I was wondering: how many releases are there with formatting codes to releases that no longer exist: how many dangling pointers are still there?
I grabbed the latest data dump and first looked at all the existing releases that were not drafts and stored them, then checked all the notes for any formatting codes for releases and extracted them, and then checked whether or not they could be found in the list of existing releases.
I looked at notes of 11,232,020 releases and found that 250,679 releases are referencing one or more other releases using the formatting tags. That is actually a lot less than expected, namely a bit over 2.23%. There are quite a few (old) releases that are still using direct URLs (before there were formatting tags), but how many is something for another day.
Of these releases I found 963 releases that potentially have out of date references. Some of these pointed to draft releases that have now been promoted to full releases, but these are really just a handful. Most of the dangling pointers point to either draft releases (the result of a merge of other releases) or point to releases that no longer exist. This is actually not too bad, but the releases should still be fixed.
There were also 8 releases where someone typed in a few too many digits, referencing a release that likely won't be added in the next few years, because it has a release number that won't be handed out anytime soon: release numbers are assigned incrementally in Discogs. Currently almost 14 million release numbers have been assigned. One of the invalid pointers references a release with release number larger than 133 million. As said before: data entry is hard and people don't check.
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