Hi everyone, just two I think could improve the site.

1. It's currently practically impossible to find instrumental tracks by searching. Not full on instrumental bands- those are super easy to find- but singular instrumental tracks, especially on releases by bands not known for their instrumental songs with tons of tracks that have lyrics. I've tried to search for instrumental tracks before by bands with vocalists and establish lyrical themes that aren't "instrumental", but I've had to search through the entire discographies of these bands just to find the tracks. What would be better is a box to check in the "Search Songs" portion of the Advanced search section which would restrict the songs to tracks with an instrumental value- for examples of the kind of tracks I'm referring to check out the instrumental tracks on albums like these:

https://www.metal-archives.com/albums/F ... ein/565030

https://www.metal-archives.com/albums/A ... ion/851912

https://www.metal-archives.com/albums/C ... nium/83909

2. For archival purposes, I think it would he highly useful to archive the genre classification and lyrical theme changes of bands in their update history. For example, Meshuggah used to be classified as "Technical Post-Thrash Metal", but you'd never know that if the whole Meshuggah page didn't get time capsuled when the old website was discontinued and "version 1" archives of pages were kept for every old band. Also, check out this band Cthulhu: https://www.metal-archives.com/bands/Cthulhu/3540437107 Did you know they used to be just classified as "Drone/Ambient" when they were first added, without the avant-garde black metal tag? There's no way to find that out now, the only reason I know is because I've known about this band for years, that information isn't visible in the update history. Same thing goes for lyrics. I know it sounds simple and petty, and I apologize if this comes out as condescending, I honestly don't see a reason to leave anything out of the update history though.

I don't think a checkbox for instumental stuff in the advanced search next to "lyrics" is a bad idea.
+1


Everything that gets updated is captured in the update history. The problem is, the update history was only introduced in V2, so every update pre-2011-ish wasn't tracked and there's nothing we can do to get it back. You can find a fair bit of it using the Wayback Machine, but that's about it.
Hurts us even more than it does hurt you, because aside from funky genres, there's also a lot of valuable info lost and for the old obscure entries, there's no way to reconstruct modifications, checking whether certain things were added by trusted users or trolls.

Forget the second point, I foolishly didn't double-check all the band pages to see that the information I referred to was in fact publicly available. Sorry about that- the first point still stands but the second point is now a non-issue. In fact, does this forum support strikethrough?