I highly doubt the NWN forum was nuked out of fear for his label's future. Quite the contrary, the popularity of that board ensured that his releases got attention. It's far more likely he took it down due to trying to lessen the chance of his actual, professional career being impacted by it.

Yeah, that's my guess as well.

Let's face it, a lot of people into extreme metal are misanthropes and traffic in hateful speech anyway (if not Hate Speech(tm)).

I don't like it already. The color scheme makes it look like the life metal version of that board or even this board and they're adding too many sub-forums. The best thing about the previous board was the simplicity and anything not related directly to music was deleted(even if it turned into a dumb political debate it always at least started out on topic...).

Yeah that is a horrible design. Possible that they are just setting it up and haven't picked the actual final version, I suppose.

NWN did have a lot of topics for music discussion I just couldn't stand all of the trolls and assholes there. Any place could easily become just as valuable for that purpose; but my main suspicion is that a lot of users who want to participate in that kind of discussion also want to be allowed to have free reign to be pricks. I don't know how else you can explain that kind of behavior that was so rampant there.

M-A is quite big enough for the more tolerable and civil members of that community to join, but unfortunately I think there was a large sentiment on NWN that M-A is full of elitist or something to that effect. Shame.

I don't think that is it, but rather than speculate it would be better to ask them.

Seems to me that NWN is a much more elite crowd than this one. Tons of flower metal fans here it seems and the NWN crowd seem to be into much heavier/kult stuff generally.

I was a member of NWN community for almost as long as this. It's quite literally firsthand experience and not speculation, but go on. It is absolutely a strong sentiment that has persisted about M-A from several prominent members of that forum. Also, having an elitist attitude has zero to do with what kind of music you prefer, so I don't know why the flower metal comment even came up. (and who the hell uses 'flower metal' unironically in 2019? lmfao)

Understood, but what do they mean by "elitist"? It just doesn't seem to be elitist here by looking only at musical taste. Look at the NP thread here for example.

I'm not sure you know what "elitist" means.


-edit- Got your post in before mine. The word says nothing about musical taste, it refers to people who consider themselves (or are considered by others) to be superior to others.

I've heard it mostly referred to as musical taste, what do you take it to mean in this context?

Now reduced to just two subforums. Dude's been reading this thread it seems.

Yes he is, already feels much better!

Was there any official statement regarding the NWN forum shutdown? If their finance processor or webhost or any DDOS-protection service threatened to pull the plug if the forums weren't removed, I'm sure that would create an impetus. Seems weird that a guy that didn't care about offensive content for over a decade to suddenly have a change of heart, but whatevs. Never used that forum anyways.

Anyways, Facebook is obviously the biggest forum killer overall. Far more connected, far more content, much easier to moderate. The only thing forums have to offer these days in a technical sense (as far as the end-user is concerned) is pseudonymity/anonymity, but Reddit, 4chan, and Discord have sucked up that niche pretty well.

r/metal is so bad though. The front page is always just a spam of songs everyone has heard of already and there isn't good discussion either.

Sputnikmusic is pretty decent, not metal only but there is an inclination for it there.

/r/metal sucks indeed


anyways, registered on that new forum, unfortunately I guess my thumb-fat-fingers entered a different password than I intended.
Password reset button doesn't work (no email received after 4 tries)

Oh well.

I'm a friend of the guy that's trying to start that up, just thought I'd mention it's inevitably going to take a little time to settle into a format that works for the majority of the userbase, and get the kinks ironed out. Everyone's input thus far has been extremely helpful.

came on here to post that I’ve heard from sources close to Yosuke that a new forum will be made. Just wondering if that Revelationofdoom one mentioned above is the “new” one.
Going beyond the politics of the forum, I loved the centralization of information on releases and updates. Using facebook/insta etc for updates on every record label or artist you like is time consuming and inconvenient. NWN Now was a goldmine.

I’ve got no problem with this forum (except for the amount of posts before a new page starts is a little long), but I’m surprised that for how broad it is there are not many posts
devoted to things like there used to be on NWN.
For example, trying to find a thread on Ancient Records, but there is none. And I tried to start one, but it has never been approved by the admin. seems a little odd...

Those are benign search engine crawlers. The ones flooding the forum are spambots and naturally they aren't exactly marked as such. They're part of the reason we instated the first-two-posts-need-approval thing (luckily the bots almost always just "deliver their payload" and then go inactive). Without it the forum would be a gigantic mess of Vietnamese escort service ads, faux-IT support and stuff just straight-up Frankenstein'd from posts by actual people with slyly hidden links to -I assume- malware inserted. A sizeable portion of all 500,000+ registered accounts are spambots at this point. We even get occasional spam via the band submission system on the main site. Usually easy to spot, though I could see there actually being a power electronics band called Getarnte Spionage Kamera....

The stuff I see the most on another forum is fake IDs, fake IELTS certificates, and the recurring favourite, a hindu buddhist love marriage specialist working with tarot or yoga or whatever, I find that very convincing and trustworthy in case I ever get into marriage trouble.

We get a ton of escort ads. For some reason they think people on this forum want them...

I never used NWN except sometimes to laugh at the incels, but I assume you have used the wayback machine here? I have no clue how up-to-date this is but https://web.archive.org/web/20190510121 ... com/forum/

My apologies if someone has posted this already, I did not read the whole thread. Yes yes, it is people like me who are killing BBs, apologies!

Wayback Machine is cool, but it only has some of the pages. Still might be useful to pull it up occasionally just for nostalgia I guess.

Yeah, as was echoed above, YK pulling the forum down definitely wasn't because of NWN-related activities. It was that HeresyLabs was calling out his name, real profession and all of his details so he had to get rid of the 'evidence' of what was on NWN in order to protect himself professionally. I'm sure it would be much better for NWN if the forum was still up. You'll also never an official statement because any statement would have to address WHY it went down and that's what YK won't be able to speak on without causing himself more trouble.

That said, I joined NWN a long time ago because I like a lot of underground black metal and doom so I would find a lot of cool stuff there that I would never have found otherwise. However, it was completely overrun with nazis and that really kept me from being very active there. It was actually quite shocking to me at first to see such open racists and hateful music being promoted (and that it was totally accepted). That's why I've always spent most of my time on MA, honestly. I'd check in on NWN and see if there are any new bands or albums but it was really lame to me that it was so accepted and welcomed.

I wouldn't be surprised if YK does bring the forum back at some point or starts a new one and, frankly, this Revelation of Doom forum does look like most of the threads were copy/pasted from NWN so maybe that's it...

Also, I don't think it's fair to say that most people in the underground scene traffic in hate speech... As I have discussed a lot on MA, I'm very opposed to that and know a lot of others who feel the same way. Unfortunately, there are a lot of those people too but I don't think we should just give up our scene to them so that's why I've always been outspoken about it here.

Would be great to see MA getting more traffic and activity though. I love coming here and it would be great to see it more active. Just not with nazis.

I get that Ultimate Metal's not for everyone. Any time a music forum had minimal moderator interference it usually turned into some kind of schoolboy humour club. The Roadrunner forum was a bit like that. The local metal and punk forums here were both notorious and today would be branded as cesspools of online bullying. New Zealand's PunkAs forum once made the late night TV news because of something said on there.

I've been posting in Ultimate Metal's general sections for only 3 years despite hanging around the band forums much longer. I've found it great, but then I don't care to discuss metal much so the inactivity doesn't bother me. I like the threads for ranking albums and films from particular years, and there's plenty of chat about movies and whatever else. There's still a few random crazies to laugh at, just like the good old days of music forums.

I miss the Opeth forum on Ultimate-Metal tbh, especially my spirit animal, TOP_OPTH_FAN.

...but yeah that place got pretty damn toxic at times.

completely overrun by nazis?
i have never seen any posts on that forum promoting nazism

The only thing I'm going to miss was how useful it was to stay updated on new releases and such. The place was packed with huge collecting nerds who would post infos about anything getting released anywhere in a matter of minutes, and I mean literally - refresh the first page after 10 minutes and there'd be a whole bunch of new/resurrected threads.
For folks like me who can't spend their life online to stay in touch this was a great tool (especially considering how ridiculously fast releases can sell out these days), a whole lot faster and easier than checking for updates on every label/distro/band page I've got saved in my favorites browser tab.

The downside was that you'd often have to wade through pages of crap to get to the useful bits; aside from unsavory attitudes and moronic local lingo (autism this, autism that), you were guaranteed to find threads flooded by regulars shooting the shit, insulting each other or patting each other on the back, with either little to no moderation or sudden crackdowns resulting in entire threads wiped out and several accounts banned. There's a reason why I've been lurking there for a while but never once felt the need to register and engage in active conversation.

You didn’t see loads of racists posting their NSBM all over the board? Including Hendrik Mobus? You must not have ever been to the forum...

No, but seriously. That’s why the forum is gone. Heresy Labs and a couple other activist groups did big stories on YK, NWN and criticized him for giving nazis a big platform to distribute their music and message. The target was actually Never Surrender festival, which was happening that weekend and had some bands with NS associations on it. However, the full focus was on the abundance of nazis on the NWN forum and YK allowing them and commenting on what NS bands he likes, etc. You can look up the whole situation online and see what the issue was.

It's almost as if this entire thread hasn't been predicated on that very topic, yet here we are trying to explain to someone that yes, in fact, NWN forum was overrun with Nazis, trolls and other unsavory types. It is also the very reason I mostly lurked there for 10 years instead of actively participating.

This forum reminds me of another forum, without having it followed very closely, electronic music, once very budy, chaotic, offensive (to some extend, nothing too bad), too many trolls, they cleaned it up, it died, now it's hightly regulated, only a certain type of poster allowed, any mildly not middle of the forum road opion/poster gets/shouted down/banned, they seem to be extremely paranoid about some of the old trolls....it's still ok to get some info on music but all the fun, good and bad, has been pretty much killed off and it has become a super correct place where offence is taking much more easily than 10 years ago.

Actually, it's still much more relaxed than here. Here, even the most liberal person, can get into hassle straight away as there seems to be a lot of posters just looking to sit in judgment and to man/womansplain how wrong others are, without much humour.

Just an honest opinion. It's still a good source for metal but personally I think if you want to avoid dodgy opinions it's better to simply ban politics/religion instead of creating a site that only allows one world view (even if it's one I mostly agree with) as it will attract the kind of humourless activist who see everything via ideology ever. That said, these sites get plagued by arseholes as well, so it's probably hard to find a middle ground, esp since things seem to become more and more partisan online and perhaps particularly the USA.

I think you're mistaken about all of that. I've been here since 2004 and this forum doesn't really operate that way at all. We don't tolerate bigots and trolls, that's about it. If you look at the many political threads in the tavern area, you'll see the literal owners and admins of this site openly in disagreement with those that are very obviously not liberal in any sense of the word. Those people have never been censored or banned, thus proving you wrong right away.

We just prefer people to not be assholes and to hold themselves to an acceptable standard of human respect. It's not much more complicated than that.

I've just heard that MA used to be more relaxed fun. I frankly don't remember as I only ever used it every now and then, so maybe I'm jumping to conclusions here but just on a personal level, it certainly feels a bit hostile and far left. The funny thing is, I grew up and have been around far left/alternative people all my live but perhaps due to old age find this new, current batch, too humourless and obsessed with little things, but I guess that's what generally happens. See old feminists getting into trouble with people concerned about gender now, etc.

As a rule of thumb though, if I may give some old man advice, it's best to not always assume the worst about people straight away, which, again, to me, seems to have become a bit of a standard these days. If that's partly as people can be more crude anonymously online....both seems to have gotten more exreme, the arsehole trolling and the offence taking.

It's kind of true that right-wing opinions get banned more than in the past but that isn't the forum's fault, it's more than moderate conservatives seem like a dying breed and too many of them drift into KKK/Nazi/etc-friendly territory, and definitely talking to a John McCain fan in 2004 and talking to a Donald Trump fan in 2019 are entirely different ball parks. If you could pull back all the former moderate conservatives back from spewing bigotry I'm sure you'd see a lot more of them that aren't instantly kicked for hate speech.

I think you'll be hard pressed to find a single example of someone being censored on banned on this forum for expressing a conservative or right-leaning political opinion.

Caveat, if the person is expressing hate speech or being deliberately inflammatory or trolling, that is the reason they were banned. Not the political content of their discourse.

That's my point though, hate speech has become the current mainstream right-wing "opinion."

Was not responding to you.

I think it’s important to point out that conservatism isn’t the target. Far-right/racist/alt-right/etc are the things that don’t get tolerated. Pulling names from the post above, John McCain supporters (or Romney, et all) are not at risk for being “censored”. The alt-right MAGA trolls who traffic in racist rhetoric are the ones who get banned/censored/whatever.

Those people are not having a civil discussion about ideas. For example, we had a really long-running thread about whether or not people will support/listen to nazi bands - and the only people who got banned were actually just trying to troll and be assholes to people. I think most of us tend to be more progressive in our views here but we certainly have civil discussions about things.

That said, none of that is similar to what NWN was allowing and welcoming. Especially towards the end of the forum, it was overloaded with that kind of stuff. So, yeah, those people definitely wouldn’t feel safe just moving over to MA - and I think we should be proud of that.

Like I said in my earlier post, there are a bunch of nazis that have come into the underground scene but that doesn’t mean we let them take it over. I like to think MOST of us are better than that.

UM's Nevermore board was great because Warrel Dane posted all the time. Well, not any more. I left before he died because the board had descended into a circle jerk of 5-6 posters who bitched about everything. Hard to keep a message board going for a defunct band.

Steve DiGiorgio used to post on his board as well. Haven't been on it in ages though so I don't know if he still does.

I see on the Heresy Labs Facebook page they have a "Fuck the Police" propaganda drawing. I know that police are like any other group of people - some good, some bad - but without police presence, this country would be an anarchist's dream come true.

If you think NWN was overrun with Nazis you're an ignorant moron. It did have a rabid record/tape/music collecting base, mostly interested in discussing the music and art, and rarely injecting politics into discussions (while it did happen on occasion). You sound like you went there searching out "unsavory types" (what a pathetic term) and had no interest in the topics at hand.

I was a member there for 10 years and have seen more than my fair share of it to lead me (and by the looks of it at least 20 or so others in this very thread as well as the brand new RoD forum, *gasp!*) to that conclusion, so leave your petty insults at the door as they just make you look childish. So while you can feel free to single me out for that comment, know that every other person who feels the same way as I do is just laughing at your ignorance.