I don't know the track list of an album. Can I still add the album/band? The band's not on the archives, but there's proof of a physical copy of an album of theirs.

As long as there's conclusive proof of the release's existence, yes.

To elaborate - if I may - "yes" for the band, not the album. Give the release a mention in the additional notes. Same goes for listed bands. Don't add an album unless you have a definite tracklist.

whoops, what he said.

Wouldn't it be possible to add a way of allowing for the addition of those releases to the discography - like a non-clickable entry, maybe one that says "tracklist unknown" somewhere (optional, might look too ugly/be unnecessary)? In my mind that would look more tidy than having it in the additional notes. Kind of like the non-listed bands on artist pages, just an entry that isn't a link to another page.

Of course that still wouldn't help with releases where the year of release isn't known, either.

You must think really highly of most contributors, drone. While it may not be a bad idea for bands with locked discographies, implementing it in a way that allows every Tom, Dick and Harry to add such entries is a semi-open invitation to point whoring.

This will not be a rare sight:
1987 Demo
1988 Demo II
1988 Death and Destruction

The additional notes are easy to monitor, and most are locked for newbs, which is great.
In theory, the idea's pretty neat; in practice, the outcome will be very messy, or so I think.

Well, everything else is possibly prone to abuse, but we still have it anyway. I don't see why we couldn't have something like this.

While we already do sorta have a standard for listing these in the notes, I think this would be something worthwhile aside from just looking tidy. It'd make the releases show up in a search and we'd be able to keep track of all the albums without tracklisting more easily. It'd also solve all the questions about bands without discographies that people have when they overlook the notes.

The one problem would be we'd lose info about formats, limitation, etc. so maybe more than just an unclickable listing? Heh, that kinda makes it untidy,

I've brought something along these lines up to Derigin before. Just some sort of way to get the bloated and, in my opinion, unappealing look of releases sitting in additional notes.

But it has boiled down to it not being feasible to police and set standards for. While it would be nice in the long run the system we have now works fairly well %99 of the time.

I think there's potential to this idea.
But there will also be added mindless crap, like 2017 releases, just because a band has a cd out late October. Or uncomfirmed releases.

Dummy discography entries have been on the requested feature list for a while now, but I remember the owners not being too keen on the idea.

Perhaps those dummy entries could be restricted to staff only, similar to marking a band's country of origin as "unknown".