Upcoming changes to musescore.org

• Feb 13, 2017 - 09:28

In January we released an upgraded musescore.com site. While it looked as if it was just a cosmetic change, the site codebase was in fact completely rewritten from the ground up. We are now doing the same rewrite for the musescore.org site and aim to put the new site in place in the coming months. A more precise timing will be given once we get into the testing phase.

Performing a complete overhaul of the MuseScore sites is necessary for several reasons. New consumption patterns (mobile and touch first) and new security standards are just two of them. But also renewed caching and anti spam strategies are required to sustain further growth of the sites for the coming years. Finally, for musescore.org specifically, we want to drastically improve the first time experience (landing, download, install, getting started, extend with plugins, soundfonts, styles, ...), the navigation and search system to find your way around the available resources (forum, handbook, howto's, tutorials, ...), as well as the content revisioning and translation system.

To make all of this happen, we will be using version 8.3 of the Drupal content management system which is due for April this year. We need to be on this cutting edge version as it comes with the translation features we need for translating the handbook. Unfortunately aiming on state of the art software sometimes means there are casualties, which is in this particular case the issue tracker.

Although Drupal 8 was already released 1.5 years ago, a port of the issue tracker module for version 8 is not available yet. What's more, it hasn't even been started. And with Drupal 6 coming to end of life by the end of this month, we can't wait any longer and a decision needs to be made. So the issue tracker on musescore.org will be closed and will move to the one on github. This is not happening today, as we are still figuring out the modalities. We'll post a follow up in this thread once things are in place.

If you have questions or remarks, don't hesitate to post them in a comment.

Comments

• Feb 13, 2017 - 17:06

Change is tough, but I was never in love with the old issue tracker, and I do agree that musescore.org could stand some major improvement particularly for the first time user. So consider me cautiously optimistic.

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• Feb 14, 2017 - 19:54

Thanks for sharing your thoughts Marc.

One thing I'm going to improve but which I didn't elaborate on is to make the notifications about updates more efficient.

Currently by default, you are getting email notifications when comments are posted on your content or on content you have commented on before, or when content is updated which applies to a menu page, a handbook page, a tutorial, a how to, ...

The problem with the current mail notifications is that they give no context:
* new comments: you only get a comment, without the content or the parent comment the comment was posted on
* updated content: you get a snippet of the content instead of a diff of the updated content

You may not care and simply unsubscribe from the mail notifications all together, and resort to https://musescore.org/en/tracker > tab 'My recent posts'. Still, also there you don't get context and you need to click on the content and either click further to revisions and select your diff, or get to find the 'new' comments.

The solution I'm working on should fix all of this. That said, the tracker or recent changes listing will not be retired. Instead it will be a complementary solution which is basically a personalised dashboard, very much as the one on https://musescore.com/dashboard

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• Mar 26, 2017 - 11:28

If the issue tracker moves to github, I think the following will need to be done:

1. Allow musescore to export .mscx.zip file, because github only has a few permitted file formats . Having to manually save as and then add it to a zip is going to be tedious after a while, I predict.

2. Also I figure that musescore's Help menu should just merge "Ask for Help" and "Report a Bug" into one: "Ask for Help or Report a Bug" and just have open a browser window to post to the musescore forums. Then I think devs can promote the genuine issues from the forums into github issues. That will keep the issue tracker clean of non-issues such as support requests, not using latest version, not an actual bug, lack of reproduction steps/score, or having to lower priority from all the time :).

3. Figure out a good github issue template , and I say that template should make (but not require) the user post an offending score, because so often they don't and there is no way to reproduce the bug.

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• Mar 26, 2017 - 13:30

I agree, but

1. I'd say just rename files to name.mscx.txt and name.mscz.zip (if GitHub doesn't recognise that .mscz files are valid text files and .mscz files are valid .zip files automatically).

2. The MuseScore site could allow .mscx and .mscz (as it currently does) and when a dev clicks the "promote to GitHub" button the files would automatically be renamed as above. (Or links inserted that point back to the files on MuseScore.org.)

3. When the user clicks the "Ask for Help or Report a Bug" button, a dialog could pop up asking "Would you like to attach the currently open score?".

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• Mar 26, 2017 - 14:20

1. I've tested uploading and found:

  • GitHub doesn't recognize that .mscx are valid text files
  • GitHub doesn't recognize that .mscz are valid zip files
  • GitHub doesn't recognize that name.mscx renamed to name.xml is valid
  • GitHub does recognize name.mscz renamed to name.zip or name.mscx.zip

GitHub say "We don’t support that file type. Choose Files Try again with a PNG, GIF, JPG, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, TXT, PDF, or ZIP." if doesn't end with one of those endings.

But the problem with renaming name.mscz to name.zip or name.mscx.zip or from name.mscx to name.txt, is that not only do I have to manually rename before uploading, but then after downloading, I have to manually rename back from name.txt into name.mscx (or whatever) in order for musescore to read it. I know I'm going to get tired of this.

2. That might be fine for promoting user's posts to issues. But sometimes it's useful upload minimal cases found to exhibit the issue to share with other devs...and I feel two extra steps is going to slow that down.

(Now there is one thing I'm sortof considering is that could use musescore.com upload to share examples, although that of course will tend to clutter my musescore.com account, but I'm fine with that. Then I can just post secret link to GitHub. Of course I would have to share a file in the latest stable version that the server supports, so couldn't upload files generated on nightlies. But most cases this is not a problem because most time the problem examples can be saved in the earlier version of musescore.)

3. I like this, and I was also going to suggest that. Maybe include sometime along the lines of "...so that MuseScore devs can better help fix the bug." I say that because I think people generally have some hesitancy to share their unfinished work, so they will need some encouragement with a good reason for sharing. (I'm also wondering again if using the musescore.com server to host bug uploads would be useful - again only if the musescore.com supports that version, and maybe on a seperate issue upload account...maybe even limit visibility from public to just musescore deverlopers, that way composers who are hesitant to share their work will be more likely to if there is some limited degree of privacy. Nice thing about putting problem scores on musescore.com is that debuggers can see what the score looks like without booting up that stable version of musescore...and even helps when assisting when just on a mobile device.)

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• Feb 15, 2017 - 12:18

Re: Upcoming changes to musescore.org

The formatting of forum posts allows for 4 levels of indentation from the original post, for example:

Original
-----Reply
----------Reply
---------------Reply
--------------------Reply

I think one more level should be available - especially useful for hot topics that reach the indent limit and people get confused about who is replying to whom (when everything becomes indented to the max).

Also, with one more level of indentation...
-------------------------I don't think the
-------------------------replies will look
-------------------------all squished like
-------------------------this, either.

Best regards, and good work on maintaining the website(s).

P.S. I am aware that posting a new comment re-sets the indentation (as it did with this very post, so all replies are cordially welcomed).

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• Feb 15, 2017 - 17:51

Perhaps that area should always be visible - i.e. scroll with you down the page?

One way to fit more levels of reply would be to have less indentation and then use lines/boxes/colours to group comments and replies.

Article
========
|---------
| Comment
||---------
|| L1 Reply
|||---------
||| L2 Reply
|||---------
||---------
|| L1 Reply
||---------
|---------
| Comment
||---------
|| L1 Reply
||---------
|---------

Perhaps replies past a certain level should be collapsed and hidden until the user clicks and "expand" button?

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• Feb 15, 2017 - 19:55

Perhaps that area should always be visible - i.e. scroll with you down the page?

@shoogle
That's an excellent idea... as when answering forum questions, I often access the handbook to copy/paste the URL of the relevant handbook topic into my answer.
Also, sometimes I need to open another instance of the forum to get the correct spelling of other contributors' names to whom I may refer.
So, having that area always visible would facilitate access, especially with lengthy posts.

Regards.

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• Feb 16, 2017 - 03:27

The question in my previous post is basically, "Who am I replying to?" I told you that in my post, but if I didn't, it would not have made sense.

Honestly I don't care about that formatting of these posts. I'm just trying to show the folly of what you are trying to "fix."

Unless the response to a specific post is somehow defined as applying to that specific post, any indentation method becomes obscured. Since there can be multiple levels of response as has been shown on this thread, I don't see an easy way to fix this short of everyone posting @poster to show who they are responding to.

The example of the dashed lines from an above post are atrocious and and as confusing as mayhem. I really hope MS does not adopt them. The responders on these forums are pretty good at directing responses to the poster (such as @ xavierjazz), so I don't thing anything beyond what they currently do would add any clarity to the current system.

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• Feb 15, 2017 - 21:06

@mike320
Hmmmm... not to confuse things further, but does the time of my post:
Indeed!
...and it's perfectly clear that I am now responding to your post.
Regards.
display to you as 12:37pm?
Because I see the time of that post (i.e. those words) as 8:37pm.

Another of my posts which begins:
Very good...
I'm at the final indentation.
shows THAT one being posted at 12:37.

(Could be a local time zone thing.)

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• Feb 15, 2017 - 13:59

It's unfortunate if it can't be done, but I think it would have been better if the issue tracker was closed post-2.1, with the manual transfer (including reviewing/updating) taking place after.

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• Mar 26, 2017 - 12:40

I love Musescore - it rocks.

However, I really think the search for sheet music really needs a change.
I find it incredibly tedious looking through the list of scores available and I am sure I am missing a ton of stuff.

I believe it needs to have options to list files (do you really need to see a thumbnail of the score?
- it doesn't really add anything to the search), with options for sorting by name, date added, genre, etc. That would make the interface so much better.

Thank you for this app, greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
Steve

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• Aug 1, 2017 - 13:34

Hi everyone, I'm inviting you to check out the new musescore.org site which is currently under development at https://new.musescore.org

To enter the site, use these credentials
* username: musescore
* password: testing
And once entered, you can log in with your normal MuseScore credentials.

The focus for this testing phase would be all posting/editing functionality (posting in the forum, tracker, ...), but you may also report design issues. Please do so in the current issue tracker at https://musescore.org/en/project/issues/musescore and add a screenshot if possible.

Eventually we found a good solution to keep the issue tracker in place, by replacing the current code with a more light weight solution which does nearly exactly the same as before.

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