Flagging Book Covers and Voting

I know that not much is happening to remove flagged book covers but when you flag a cover, you have to return to the cover to vote on it. I have noticed many members have flagged covers but their vote is not automatic. A solution may be for flagging covers to be like picture flagging for author and venues. When flagged your vote is automatically "yes". If you change your mind, you can always go back and change it to "no" or "undecided".

I am wondering why flagged covers have not been removed. Why bother if nothing happens? It seems to be a futile exercise for those suffering from “That Is So Wrong Syndrome”.

I stopped flagging covers long ago. It seems, first of all, a waste of time, because, as you say, nothing happens.

The other problem is that, unlike flagging tag combinations, the ones you flag don't drop off your page. There are currently 247 pages of covers suggested for flagging. It's too onerous to go through and find the ones I haven't flagged.

To find covers you haven't flagged you can use omargosh's script Make flagged cover voting page bearable: http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/Hacking_LibraryThing#Make_flagged_cov...

>1 MsMaryAnn: Thanks for the heads-up. I hadn't noticed that the initial flagger could/should vote as well as flag.

Neat idea, but I agree that if flagging does zilch I'm not going to be zealous about doing it.

> 3

Not bloody likely.

Wow, I actually had no idea that flagging a cover didn't automatically give it my vote. And frankly, I don't feel like going back and voting on my flagged covers. I flag and vote whenever something comes up (it's been a lot recently!), but my enthusiasm has faltered a lot since it doesn't really do anything.
It would be better to get rid of this feature as a whole if there are no plans on doing something with it! That would be one less time sink for us poor addicted LT'ers who suffer from perfectionism ;)

There are _plans_ for doing something with it, they just haven't been implemented yet. Tim has lots of plans for the new cover system (spines! title pages!), but they're either still just plans or being worked on but not ready for release yet.

Personally, I think people are sometimes too overzealous in flagging covers. If a given novel or play is contained in a one volume collection, then I certainly intend to use the book cover in which it appears. What is the harm in having such a cover available for others to draw upon as well? Commonly, a one- volume collection is the most common place a given work can be found. For example, many plays are only to be found in collections, as is also true of novellas and short novels.

It certainly makes sense to flag "cover photos" that are spam, cat pictures, or other irrelevant images. But to flag a book cover that is fully appropriate for the work in question simply because the cover does not bear the same title as the work it contains is another thing entirely. The intentions are no doubt good, but the consequences are negative for other LibraryThing users and the site in general. Let's stick to flagging items that actually harm the site.

Bump.

>9 danielx:
I think most "overzealous" cover flaggers (I guess you can count me as one) are primarily combiners who often pull their hair out over things like omnibuses or multi-volume works.

Of course there's nothing wrong with having an omnibus cover etc., but for combiners, that work just doesn't belong and might make regular users think that it's okay to combine different volumes et. al.

Cover flagging, among other things, prevents that cover to become the main cover for that work, so the main cover for Stevenson's "Jekyll and Hyde" can't be "Jekyll and Hyde and Other Stories". Important, I think!

My 2 cents :)

It would also be nice if voting automatically closed the voting panel and returned you to the covers page. (Another pony, I know.)

Bump