What a kick-off to the new year: total contributions to Discogs were up 14% on December 2018. Perhaps that’s not such a surprise given that January is always one of the busiest months for the Contributor Community, but it still represents a lot of hard work.

Big, big shout out to Diognes_The_Fox, who made his 50,000th Submission to Discogs on February 6th (a Gospel 7″, The Fantastic Golden Voices Of Washington, D. C. – I Sure Do Love The Lord). He’s been a very active contributor since he joined the Discogs Database project in 2005: from his first to his 50,000th Submission he made an average of 9.8 submissions every single day for 5,123 days. For context, the second and third largest Submitters of all time are degm (34,569) and Oedipus_Recs (18,920), and only 25 people have ever submitted more than 10,000 Releases.

To top it all off we also passed another crazy Community milestone: there are now over 300 million Releases across all Users’ collections! Check out our analysis of the first and last million Releases added to Collections. Vinyl still makes up two thirds of all Collections, but the Genres and Release Countries have shifted a lot.

Overview

For the full breakdown of what happened last year, check out our How Did The Discogs database Grow in 2018 blog post.

Daily Submissions

Top Contributors In January

From The Database Forum

• Does the episode number belong to the title in series? Cataloguing metadata correctly makes the Database searchable and therefore usable. But sometimes it’s hard to tell which way is more useful.
• How to improve searchability? Discogs isn’t a Database. How to reference it? Originally started as a thread about what to call Discogs if not a ‘Database’, this thread turned into a solid discussion about how to improve searchability on the site.
• Conflicting guidelines (RSG §3.4.6 – RSG §3.2.2.a): How do you catalogue a single without a sleeve? Discogs is all about community input and community review. Sometimes it’s hard and it can slow things down a bit but we believe it makes the Database a lot better in the long run, and that’s what we’re here for. The data must live forever!
• Guideline update: 5.2.c – Change ‘can’ to ‘should’: Another community driven update to the Submission Guidelines!
• Undiscussed mass-edit based on assumption regarding Dick Reynolds: There’s a solid consensus on Discogs that if you want to edit more than four related things at once, you need to start a forum thread about it. It’s always nice to see people come together to disambiguate an Artist page!

Updates To The Submission Guidelines

There has been a small but important and well received update to the first paragraph of RSG §5.2.c ‘Matrix / Run-Out’. The word ‘can’ has been replaced by ‘should’, with the intention of indicating that all information from the run-outs on any one Release should be entered in a single ‘Matrix / Run-Out’ field, which makes it easier to read & sort multiple run-outs:

• FROM: “…This information can all be added to one ‘Matrix number’ field.”
• TO: “…This information should all be added to one ‘Matrix number’ field”

Thanks andygrayrecords for asking the right questions and kicking off the Community review process.