[eluser]ehicks727[/eluser]
[quote author="erik.brannstrom" date="1219602636"]I had almost forgotten about this thread.. Anyway, thanks for your input! It does feel comforting that I share this problem with Google
The app I'm building is basically a simple record organizer. Users input their records and can easily show the collection to others and sort on artist / title / year. Imposing restrictions on the user would in this case be something like "make sure you use the correct name and spelling" which probably will be pointless, as most users will assume they are right anyway. In all fairness, it's not always that easy to know if a band is called for example Arcade Fire or The Arcade Fire.
Reviewing every single record added is not a possibility either. Though there are only about 100 users, it is not uncommon with hundreds of records being added in a single day, which is quite a lot to review considering this is just something I do on the side of full-time studies and part-time work
I do realize that eilrahc is right that a solution can only be "good enough". Before I start digging in to this problem, I'm just curious to see if someone else has done something similar or have other suggestions?[/quote]
This is a common problem, actually. I run into this with State/County/City issues all the time.
The answer is to LOCK them into picking via a combo box (I guess it would be a select box.. whatever). Anyway, you'd need to obtain (scrape, use an API, whatever) a list of all bands, and albums, if you can get them. Then you can go about it two ways... you can have them pick from a list, or you can have them search and give them possible results. But in the end, they pick from a pre-formatted list, not enter into a text input box. Make sense??
Maybe there's an API you can tap into with the CDDB or somewhere. Or maybe you can scrape a list of bands and albums from somewhere.
This would be a great AJAX solution... you start typing "Meta" and it gives you 'suggestions', one of them being Metallica. Just like iTunes.