Databruce has reached version 1.20!
Despite the version numbers being largely superfluous, I do like using them as progress markers. Even if the bigger updates to tend to be smaller point updates, and vice versa.
Although, I think there is enough in this update to call it a “bigger” update. Largely thanks to three new major site features:
- Bruceyversion Performance ranking
- Article Library
- Show reviews/ratings
These come in addition to the usual suite of smaller updates, which I’ll cover below.
Bruceyversion
This is a new section of the site I added a little over a week ago. Basically my take on Headyversion and other similar sites, where users can vote on their favorite performances of songs.
Got a particular version of a song you really like? Maybe it means a lot to you, or you just think it’s flat out the best version of [INSERT SONG HERE] Bruce ever did. You can submit it and see what others think. Others can vote on it, and leave comments if they so desire.
Each performance can only be submitted once, so that is why I’ve also added the ability to vote and comment on others entries. You’ll need to be a registered user to do so.
One note: All entries will be marked pending until I get a chance to look them over. This was added solely as a precaution to avoid any spam issues. I’ll reevaluate this later if need be.
Article Library
I already discussed this in it’s own post last month, but I’ll briefly go over it here as well.
The Databruce Article Library is a collection of Bruce-related articles I’ve compiled from various corners of the web. Some are simply copies of still-live articles, others were deleted and have been inaccessible until being reproduced here. The articles are additionally fully text searchable as well.
The library is at nearly 1,500 articles as of writing, with plans for some more coming eventually (BTX, GL News Blog, Ken Rosen’s stuff, Backstreets, etc.)
A Big Thanks
In the aforementioned post announcing the library, I mentioned that several of the GreasyLake articles had completely busted formatting. This ranged from missing quotes/em-dashes, to completely missing accented characters. While the latter was easy enough for me to fix, the latter exclusively impacted articles written in other languages (none of which I can read).
Thankfully, two members of the community stepped up and fixed some of these. BIBOBerlin from SPL and MarySways over on GL reached out and provided help fixing some of the busted articles. BIBO helped with a half dozen German articles. Mary helped fix 3 French articles and one Dutch article. Thanks again to them for their help.
13 articles remain: 2 Swedish, 1 Spanish, 10 Norwegian. Again I ask if anyone is fluent in these and are able to fix the formatting, please get in touch.
The articles in other languages will remain in those languages. If I happen to stumble upon a translation, that will be included as a separate entry. Most browsers have a half-decent auto-translation for those that remain untranslated.
As a note, I will only accept proper translations into the database. Sure, I could shove all of them through a translation tool, but I wouldn’t have any way of verifying how good a job it did (on my own anyway).
An Update
As of this post, all concert reviews have been tagged with their corresponding events. Additionally, the event detail page will now show a tab in the header to link to these reviews. Making it much easier to jump from the event to how it was written about at the time.
Event Detail Changes
Moved “Attended” button
This was originally in the event header, but has since been moved to the sidebar. I could never get this to align quite right, when it would wrap it would run right into the badges. Moving this to the sidebar is much cleaner.
Setlist Table Changes
The setlist table has gotten a bit of a tweak.
On small screens, only the song column is shown. This table used to scroll horizontally, but cramming all that information on a small screen really didn’t work.
Badges have been added when they’d be present in one of the hidden columns. Marking things like: Debut, Premiere, Tour Only, Tour Final. In addition to the existing badges in the song column for: Instrumental, No Boss, and Sign Request.
Show Reviews/Ratings
A new feature I banged out over the last two days.
This is a simple addition which allows users to review and rate shows on the site. Note that this isn’t exclusive to shows you’ve seen, but any show.
Shows can be ranked from 1-5 stars, and an optional review field is provided for any extended thoughts. Updating your rating/review is as easy as clicking the “update review” button and making any changes in the popup.
Once enough ratings are submitted I might be able to do something fun like compile a list of the highest rated shows on the site (or lowest).
This comes with the added change of the user count and “attended” button being moved down next to the ratings. Originally this was in the event header, however it always had issues when wrapping and padding was never right.
Search Improvements
Event Search
The navbar event search is now capable of searching events based on title as well as day of week.
Search Hotkey
The event search modal can now be opened by pressing CTRL/CMD + K, much like how it works on sites like the Bootstrap documentation page and any site with Algolia search.
Advanced Search
The advanced search form has been cleaned up and now looks a bit better on mobile. Additionally, all of the fields now load results much faster due to changing over to a restricted serializer.
Continents Are Now Searchable
Was anyone asking for this? Probably not. Might be useful for finding the last European Rosalita.
Setlist Search
Followed By change
This change took a bit to nail down quite right, and I still don’t fully understand how it works.
Part of the setlist search is the ability to search for songs in sequence. Incident > Rosie, Meeting > Jungleland, etc. Also part of this is the ability to do the opposite: Incident NOT followed by Rosie, Meeting NOT followed by Jungleland, and so on.
However, what I added way back in the first version of the search was an additional catch which basically did the following:
On a “NOT followed by” search, return event results where Song A is NOT immediately followed by Song B, but where Song B can be present.
This was based on observing how Jerrybase’s advanced search worked. Which does something similar. For example, searching for Scarlet Begonias NOT followed by Fire on the Mountain (the Dead’s Incident/Rosie for the non-Deadheads out there) would return events both with and without Fire, just as long as Scarlet wasn’t immediately followed by Fire. This would return events before Fire on the Mountain even existed. As well as the few times they did Scarlet either followed by something else (Hell in a Bucket, Estimated, etc.) Or the times where they played something in-between Scarlet and Fire like Touch of Gray or (for the sickos, of which I am a proud member) Victim or the Crime.
While this feature was present originally, a few months back I moved the advanced search handling to the API backend, and it’s been technically broken ever since.
The advanced search is something I only mostly understand and I wrote the damn thing. It’s an absolute mess of filters and querysets and half-working hacks. In other words, a proper piece of software.
This month, following some back and forth with Bruce discord member Chimes, I dug in and finally figured out how to get the search to work like I wanted it to. Or rather how it did before it broke.
Now the search is set to work like the quoted portion above. Searching for “Song A NOT followed by Song B” will return events where that is true, but additionally further filter those results to where Song B is present as well.
Setlist Note Search
This search form was originally a form that would redirect to a separate table page on submission. I found this to be clunky, and the redirect served no real purpose.
This has been changed to a single page, with a DataTable loading all of the setlist notes and a search bar to filter the results like most other pages.
Other Changes
This section is for other big changes I don’t have a ton to say about but feel like mentioning.
- Added “Full Album Performance” tag. This is on top of the individual album tags, makes searching easier.
- Setlist Breakdown now shows for all events
- All buttons/badges have a dark mode specific style which looks nicer
- Removed duplicate songs from Setlist Breakdown
- Removed “official” and “nugs” columns from Events. While many events point to only one release, this isn’t always true. Simply joining releases/nugs_releases on
event_idis the replacement for this - Fixed mobile view looking off due to missing column div
- Added opengraph description to signup page
- Fixed relation_detail not loading if musician has no bands
- Fixes advanced search failing if start_date set
- Show Length card now displays the time in a badge if it is one of the longest shows. Before this was a separate badge which overflowed on small screens.
Conclusion
Another month, another one of these hastily written hours before posting. With this being the 1.20 release, I wanted to have enough big new stuff to mark the occasion. Show ratings/reviews was done in the last 2 days. Bruceyversion went from idea to actual in about a week. The library took the longest but the bulk of that time was fixing odd formatting and categorizing articles.
This update marks the 10th since I started keeping track. Also slowly reaching the end of the mental list of hairbrained feature ideas. If you are reading this and have one, feel free to reach out. This site can only get better from here. Suggestions, Error Reports, and comments from you all contribute to that in some way.
Thanks for reading and for using the site!
Brian (September 9, 2026)