Dev-Artist-Sorting

From The Unofficial Discogs Wiki

There are some issues regarding artist sorting on the site, as discussed at http://www.discogs.com/help/forums/topic/192630 and other threads.

The only current concession to sorting is the "The" rule, where The Artist" is entered as Artist, The". This rule is objected to by some, although others find it useful. However, in the course of the discussions, other sorting issues have become apparent:

• Physical and printed indexing would usually have the Surname moved to the front and sorted by that, for example "Sinatra, Frank".
• Artist names beginning with other common words, for example, "DJ", "MC"
• Names starting with other languages definite article, for example, "Die", "El", "Le / La / Les" etc
• Examples such as "ArtistX Presents ArtistY", where we assume ArtistY is the most relevant artist.
• The current "The" artist rule creates clumsy and problematic artist names, for example, "The Count Of Monte Cristal And Sinden" should be "Count Of Monte Cristal And Sinden, The" but has been entered as "Count Of Monte Cristal, The And Sinden"
• Artist names starting with punctuation are sorted to the top of any list.

Proposal 1 (nik)

I don't beleive we will be able to have a sort system that caters to all users physical sorting methods. Therefore, Discogs sorting methods should be as simple an as pragmatic as possible:

• The "The" rule should be dropped, and all artist names under this rule switched
• The sorting order for all aspects of the site (collections, browse artist pages, marketplace etc) should be automatically sorted with a few words or characters ignored: "The", "DJ", "MC", "'", and """