Help complete the community database from your own server

Server 2.6.0 adds Help complete the community database, a setting that’s off until you turn it on. Once a day, it sends the community metadata service the Audible ASINs of your books that the catalogue at meta.audiosilo.app doesn’t know, and nothing else. Those books can then be added for everyone.

What it needs

• Server 2.6.0 or later. No app update is needed.
• Look up community metadata on. The new switch is greyed out otherwise.

Find it in the admin console under Server > Settings > Community metadata.

What it does once a day

1. Collects your books’ Audible ASINs. Each book’s own ASIN, and an ASIN from a book’s tags only when the book has no ASIN or ISBN of its own (nor one you edited or cleared) and no other book’s tags carry the same ASIN.
2. Keeps the unknown ones. It looks each up in the community database, as the ordinary lookup does: up to 500 lookups a day, and an ASIN is looked up again after 30 days.
3. Sends them to the metadata service, and nothing else: no titles, file paths, server name, or anything about who listens. An ASIN already sent isn’t sent again for a month, and one the database later adds stops being sent.

It sends only over HTTPS. With a Service address starting http:// (other than one on the same machine, for testing), nothing is sent. A server in demo mode never sends a report.

With a local copy of the database (metadata.mode: mirror), the lookups stay on your server. Only the report goes out, and not until the copy is ready.

What the service keeps

The service sees your server’s IP address while it receives a report, like any web service. After that, per the meta.audiosilo.app privacy page (“Reports of unknown books”):

• It stores each ASIN with a count and the first and last day it was reported, with no IP address.
• An address is held in memory for about a day after its last request, for a rate limit.
• Reports over HTTPS aren’t written to meta.audiosilo.app’s access log.
• The error log can still record the address of a request that goes wrong, such as a report sent while the service is restarting.

What happens to a report

A report is a suggestion of where to look, never a record. Nothing in it goes into the database as it is.

The database’s sync bot looks each reported ASIN up as a real Audible listing. It can add only:

• A standalone book, as a new work in no series.
• A new volume of a series the database already holds. It never starts a new series.
• Another edition of a book the database already holds.

Each change is a pull request on the community database, with at most 25 records and at most one every 48 hours, checked by an AI review before it’s merged. The first such import, on 2026-11-05, added 5 works.

Once a book is in, later lookups find it on any server that has it (with a local copy, once the copy next updates). A book whose ASIN is only in its tags isn’t looked up by that ASIN: match it, by hand or with Match automatically, to find the new record.

Telling how it’s going

A line under the switch says how the last report went:

Message	Meaning
”Not sent yet”	The first report goes out as soon as you switch it on, or about an hour after the server starts.
”Last report when: N unknown ASINs sent”	It worked.
”Last checked when: nothing new to send”	Every ASIN it looked up is known or was sent recently.
”Last tried when: the metadata service doesn’t take reports …”	With an http:// Service address, it’s tried daily and sends nothing until the address is fixed. An older service, or one with reports off, is left alone for a week.
”Last report failed when; it’s tried again tomorrow.” (in red)	Any ASIN the service didn’t accept is sent again next time.

Turning it off

Switch it off and the reports stop. Turning Look up community metadata off stops them too, with every other lookup.

The full rules are in Helping complete the community database, and the FAQ covers what your server sends. For another 2.6.0 change, see Match automatically gets more of your library right.