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I think I screwed up!

I was in an author that needed some disambiguation (was at least four authors), Brenda Jackson, she has a lot of books, so I used the combine tool to pull a whole huge list of not-her-books to one place. Then I worked my way down the list, opening each one up and making changes/corrections. (Found some kind of bug where the names Brenda Jackson and Ronald L. McDonald got added as authors to a pile of books, looks like erroneously, but it happened outside GR, so not a GR issue. Here's an example: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30... )

So, as I thought, as I change them all, the system takes them off this authors list, since I am changing the author - that's good.

I didn't realize that they would stay combined - including the 13 ratings, once the author was different. ACK!

So, then I figure this out, and try to go in to uncombine them or something and can't - do I need to reverse all the edits I've made today in order to uncombine them?

Here's an example of one that is on the correct author's page now, but still is combined with the old group: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18...

If you go into the other editions section, you'll see all the ones I edited...the vast majority of them have no ratings, but should probably still be uncombined...I'll do it the hard way if needed.

Sorry for making such a mess! = (

Often to separate books in these circumstances, you need to use the Separate Tool rather than trying to separate directly from the Combine editions page. However, you can only access the tool from the page of the "primary" author, that is the first author of the most popular edition. If you try to use it from the first author of a less-popular edition, the book won't even show up on their combine editions page, so the separate tool is unavailable.

The issue here is that the author has been changed for all of them, so I don't know what to do next...

What Michael said. I worked on the specific example you linked, but there's lots more to do.

I moved this from the Otis/Jessica folder -- this does not need them, as far as I can see.

This does reinforce an important issue: if items are combined and you plan to change the author on only one or some of them, PLEASE separate first.

So, what I was asking was, do I need to go back in and manually change them all back to the original author, un-combine them, and then make the author changes again? I was wondering if there was a programming 'fix' for this situation as a whole, not just mine...

I didn't realize the combining would 'stick' and create this problem - your post on the topic about separating first made me think that the NAB label was being pushed through the 'combination'.

Oh well, my mistake, I'll start making corrections.
Sorry!

There was a programming fix, but some librarians specifically requested that it be possible to not have books with different authors automatically uncombine. And thus we have this situation.

Argh - Figures!
Oh well, back to the workpile...

rivka wrote: "There was a programming fix, but some librarians specifically requested that it be possible to not have books with different authors automatically uncombine. And thus we have this situation."

~shakes head in confusion~

Ummmm...why would a person not want them to uncombine? When would a situation come up where you would want to change the author(s), but leave them combined? Especially since if you leave them together either (a) a different librarian will come along and separate them, or (b) a different librarian will come along and change it back.

[Rhetorical question BTW:]

IIRC, to combine books published first under an author's pen name and then later under their real name.

I would think anthologies would be another example. Some books list every contributer, while others just list the editor.

But those can be shuffled so the editor is the common primary author.