The following titles have TPBs and HCs listed in them that trigger the Missing Comics report and should be broken into their own titles or flagged in a manner not to do that anymore.
Thanks!
@fletchergary small (mini) series have the HC and TP listed in them. That’s how we list them in Core.
I had opened a ticket for some others like this earlier due to the way they listed triggering gaps on the missing comics report. They were corrected and I was asked to post any further ones I found here so I did.
For large series, with MULTIPLE TPs and HCs, we like to split them off to a separate series.
But for small mini series, with just 1 TP or HC, we prefer to keep the TP/HC inside the main series, just to prevent “polluting” the Core search results with too many series entries.
And yes, we are aware of the fact that TPs and HCs inside a series are skewing the Missing Comics reports, but that is something that we do not have a solution for at the moment.
We are working a database restructure of our Core database that may offer some new opportunities in this area, so that we can correctly ignore TPc and HCs in Missing Comics. Not sure yet.
I understand the problem it presents quite well and I think I better understand your rationale for how you are doing it as well. I agree that you do not want to have to junk up the database with more titles but I could offer some possible solutions should you be interested.
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Without making any schema changes to your database at all you could redo the way you code the numbering of hardcovers and trades to consistently use a pattern such as HC-### or TPB-### and then exclude those patterns from the missing comics report. For titles that are specifically designed for those types of books you could number them as ###-HC or ###-TPB and then that numbering could still trigger your reports. So then a collection of a limited series could be added as TPB-1 or HC-1. A series dedicated to hardcovers such as Invincible Ultimate Collection could number the books in the pattern #1-HC, #2-HC, #3-HC and account for variants such as #4-HC-A or #4-HC-B, etc.
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With a schema change you could give users the options of suppressing individual issues of series instead of using the “Hide from Missing Comics” option on the series itself which can be kind of heavy handed. This would have the added benefit of allowing end users to then exclude any type of book from their missing comics reports. Personally, I see users employing a feature like this to exclude ranges of a title they do not want to collect and still being alerted to new issues as they appear.
I personally can see how both of these could be useful simultaneously. The issue number coding style could be used to allow collectors to distinguish at a glance content type.
I imagine that there are a lot of collectors that do not want to see collections like HCs and TPBs at all, some that want them specifically, and others that only want to collect those that contain original content. The combination of these two options would enable all scenarios.
I can think of several other ways to go about doing this as well that would involve schema changes but #1 would be the simplest (and no schema change) and #2 the most flexible (but this would require adding one small to track the issue PK/user ID in the online version and just the issue PK on the desktop).
What do you think?
Don’t worry, we already have some ideas to resolve this problem, using our upcoming database structure change.