Comic Vine Scraper 1.0.25 is now available.

This release addresses issues 54, 83, 96, 106, 107, and 112.

Of particular interest:

- the two 'Volume' related scraping features that were introduced in 1.0.23 have been removed since Comic Vine no longer stores volume details in series names.

- the dialog that you see when you first run the script is now much simpler. If you want to change settings, there is now a proper "Settings" button.

- the "Settings" dialog has been completely revamped, including a new "check all" button and a "restore defaults" button.

- the plugin now uses the .crplugin extension. To install, just double-click on the .crplugin file once you've downloaded it (if you try to install it the old way, it won't work unless you rename the file to ".zip". This problem will likely be fixed in the next version of ComicRack.)


I'm kind of sad about the 'Volume' stuff, but what can you do? Those features haven't been working for the last few weeks anyway.

As I understand it, Comic Vine's new policy is that comic books should not have the words "vol." or "volume" in their series name except for the (rare) cases where those words really are part of the book's official, actual series name. You can find a comic's official series name by looking at the tiny indicia print on the inside of the front cover.

You might also notice that some of the configuration options are now worded in a slightly different way. This doesn't mean that they do anything different, I'm just trying to find ways to describe them more clearly.

As always, if you find any bugs please report them in the issue tracker (you can log into it with your google/gmail account). If you prefer, you can also post a description of your problem (or any other feedback) in this forum thread.

Enjoy!

cbanack wrote:

As I understand it, Comic Vine's new policy is that comic books should not have the words "vol." or "volume" in their titles except for the (rare) cases where those words really are part of the book's official, actual title. You can find a comic's official title by looking at the tiny indicia print on the inside of the front cover.

I was a little confused at first... you may want to edit this to say "Series" instead of "Title".

Nice new release...

Lot of GUI changes

All this going in the manual...







..but inside it is the same... (thank god!)



cbanack works hard.. +1 karma is on his way..!!

p.s. the ugly volume 1963 is back....

Edit: You got a nice logo there cbanack

600WPMPO wrote:
All this going in the manual...
...
..but inside it is the same... (thank god!)

For what it's worth, this was the last of the major planned GUI changes. That big, confusing-looking options panel just looked wrong!

Now I'll be focusing on improvements and expanding existing features. I'm pretty happy with the current version of the scraper in terms of its GUI, so you can rest assured that the features that are currently there are there to stay.

cbanack works hard.. +1 karma is on his way..!!

Wooo!

p.s. the ugly volume 1963 is back....

I feel your pain...do you know how many hours I put into getting that feature to work properly?! Bleh.

Edit: You got a nice logo there cbanack

Thanks! I stole it from some unsuspecting guy on a forum somewhere!

DouglasBubbletrousers wrote:
I was a little confused at first... you may want to edit this to say "Series" instead of "Title".
Good idea, done.

Is it a bad thing that the guy who writes the scraper plugin can't keep "title", "series", "issue" and "volume" straight in his head?

Just got around to installing the new version. I can't say I'm thrilled with the "Save setup" going away. I prefer to have Title and Notes unclicked by default, but when I scrape new books for the first time, I set them. With the new "always use the last scrape's settings" feature, these are set the next time I run it. And since the settings are now hidden, I think the chances I'll "mis-scrape" are pretty high.

Can we move the settings back to the "use saved settings on relaunch" method?

DouglasBubbletrousers wrote:
Just got around to installing the new version. I can't say I'm thrilled with the "Save setup" going away. I prefer to have Title and Notes unclicked by default, but when I scrape new books for the first time, I set them. With the new "always use the last scrape's settings" feature, these are set the next time I run it. And since the settings are now hidden, I think the chances I'll "mis-scrape" are pretty high.

Can we move the settings back to the "use saved settings on relaunch" method?
Sorry, no.

I can appreciate the problem you are describing, but there are a significant number of people (myself included) who have exactly the opposite problem--they make a settings change, then forget to click "save" and end up "miscraping" the next time they run the scraper. People were making this mistake because in most windows programs (including ComicRack!) you don't have to remember to save your new settings after you change them.

The fact that the settings are now hidden in a separate dialog is a little less convenient for (the minority of?) users who change their preferences frequently, but it also makes the scraper much less intimidating for first-time users.

Hi all!

I think I found a bug, but I am not sure, so I'd like to report it here before putting it up in google code. This has been happening since .22 or .23 but I did not have the time to share.

When I skip a comic because the series is not in Comicvine, the next comics of the same series are not skipped... ? and I have to skip them one by one... I think previous versions did not go like this, or am I wrong?

Thanks

cbanack wrote:

I can appreciate the problem you are describing, but there are a significant number of people (myself included) who have exactly the opposite problem--they make a settings change, then forget to click "save" and end up "miscraping" the next time they run the scraper. People were making this mistake because in most windows programs (including ComicRack!) you don't have to remember to save your new settings after you change them.


Yeah, I understand. Thought I'd ask anyway.

{quote]
The fact that the settings are now hidden in a separate dialog is a little less convenient for (the minority of?) users who change their preferences frequently, but it also makes the scraper much less intimidating for first-time users.[/quote]

What do you think of a "Always Show Settings" option? I'm always a fan of fewer clicks

the volume thing I found odd. I've yet to switch over to .25 for two reasons
In the past when switching over to newer versions I noticed the "cache" for prescraped series always disappeared for whatever reason, not wanting to recache large series I end up scraping often (2000AD! damn your nearly 2000 issues!).

And second would be the changes to the way .25 appears to handle volume.
It's back to putting in volume as v1995 and whatnot? No way to retain to current volume code? I'm reading here that ComicVine changed how volume is handled? I had no less than 4 series today with vol. # in their series title. If .25 would fail to scrap that off and plop the vol. # in the volume field, hesitant to upgrade.
cYo's volume fixing script would solve that I guess, just it's just one more step.

I'll get around to trying out .25 at some point, I just want to know what exactly happened with the change in volume handling.