600WPMPO wrote:
So, out of >100k users, about 5000 (maximum 10,000) use the scraper. Till a user is highly motivated to find a solution for automated scraping of metadata, he wouldn't come to know about the scraper.
Of course I'd always like to see more people using the scraper--but I should point out that the downloads from the Comic Vine Scraper site are a really big deal to me. They are the only way I have of knowing how many people are using the scraper, and seeing that number grow over the last few years is one of the main things that keeps me working on it!
The problem with shipping the scraper directly with ComicRack is that I'd lose that--now there's no reason for anyone to visit the scraper homepage or download the the scraper at all! And far as the average user is concerned, Comic Vine Scraper won't be its own special thing, it'll just be another great feature in ComicRack.
Now go to the Scripts menu from the main page, and you will find these scripts (dated 2010):
ComicVine Scraper
Find Missing Issues
Weekly Comic Releases
Write Missing Issues to Text File
Organize Library Files & Folders 2.2.1
I agree, this is not ideal at all. Personally, I would love to see the "Scripts and Plugins" section of the webpage completely replaced. That link should go directly to a special page (or even a whole separate website) that maintains an active list of all the working Comic Rack plugins...with links to the websites (if any) where those plugins can be downloaded. Maybe even a twitter account or some kind of newfeed to announce new scripts and new versions.
Something like
this is a great improvement over the current "Scripts and Plugins" section, but it could be even better if it was a full blown website (a wiki, maybe?) instead of just a forum thread.
Building and maintaining a website/page like that is not a small job, though, and it's not fair to expect cYo to do it. If someone else was interested in doing it, though, perhaps cYo would be willing to change the "Downloads->Scripts and Plugins" link to point to that new page? Maybe he could also link directly to that page from the main ComicRack download page? Making the scripts more noticeable and much easier to find would go a long way toward solving the problems you are bringing up here.
Try downloading the scraper, you will get a text file that will tell you to go to the google code page and download it from there. Is it so difficult and time-consuming to update it with at least the last stable version?

Again, this comes down to download statistics. I very much prefer people to download the scraper from the scraper website directly, so that I know the download happened. That said, I would
dearly like to see this text file redirect changed into a simple link to the Comic Vine Scraper webpage. It makes me cringe a little to see how many people have downloaded that text file.
Edit: I just noticed that cYo added a mention of the Comic Vine Scraper into the Comic Rack news feed, so that means pretty much every ComicRack user will see it sooner or later. I guess I can't really complain that the scraper isn't getting enough exposure!

(Thanks cYo!)