I swear, the next idiot who posts about forum features in this thread is getting suspended.

Well, it looks like hell froze over, because Morrigan actually decided that Soulfly are metal enough to be on this website. =p I wonder what album I should review first? XD

Had nothing to do with that. More like "Hell finally froze over, and Soulfly grew some balls and released a decently heavy/metallic album".

Well, I wouldn't exactly say that creating a Machine Head clone entails "growing some balls", but...

But what? It's still more balls than Soulfly had earlier.

I bet you by the next album their balls will have shrunk to their normal pea sized shape...

I hope there won't be a next album, TBH.

Has it been considered to raise the 50kb limit on album images to perhaps 100kb or even 75kb? Depending on the content, certain compression algorithms don't seem to handle all images the same. Some have to be shrunk and quality reduced considerably before they are under the 50kb limit, and many album-covers are graphically intense, it wouldn't be fair to have a beautiful, colorful album cover reduced to a shadow of its former self through resizing and recompression, when a decent quality image could have been used that was still under 100 kb.

Well, 75kb could work because there are also album covers that look nice and are of a decent size and still fall under 50kb. But not all images compress the same, but 75 kb would allow for more equalized album-cover sizes (instead of 400x400 for one and 200x200 for another, etc) and nicer looking images (quality set to medium or high instead of low).

I've been thinking about this more and more lately. JPEG compression tends to butcher solid colours more so artefacts are more aggressive and noticeable... and higher filesizes are required to accommodate better quality images. For some covers to look good AND be at a decent size, the filesize tends to sail far above 50 kbs...

PNG-8 is a wicked sick way of handling covers with very strong, sharp solid colours, but it can't handle everything (and not without flattening some of the details out as well). Maybe it's the graphic artist in me that's being too meticulous, but I'd sure love to see a way of getting higher-quality covers onto MA without a careful juggling act between image dimensions, image quality and filesize.

Yes. It's on the to-do list.

It is?

Yep.

Perhaps edit histories should only be available to users who are logged in. Some data that was removed, specifically real names of artists, is still visible publicly and is probably indexed by search engines.

This is what I keep thinking too.

However, it's unlikely to be indexed by search engines though, as the data is only loaded to the page whenever a list's item is clicked and expanded.

We have a robots.txt file that makes sure anything in /history does not get indexed by search engines.

Maybe this already came up, dunno: http://www.metal-archives.com/report/vi ... 1/show/all

Hey, what's with this feature of "Some bands are missing? Click here to add them." on artists' pages?

http://www.metal-archives.com/artists/T ... ger/246808

WYSIWYG.

That's a rare situation. In such cases we can just delete the artists from the lineup.

I was just thinking how cool it would be if MA implemented a leaderboard type system similar to The Discordance. I guess it could be by band, artist, album, label, etc all by review average. For example, which label consistently puts out the best albums by review average or which subgenre had the strongest 2011, etc. Thoughts? There can even be a mini-leader board on the home page for best albums of the week (not released in that week, just what people are listening to that week). It can be similar to the power rankings on WWE.com

I'd like to thank the powers that be for the new (or maybe not new, but I just noticed it today) feature. Being able to add non-MA bands on artist profiles is a great new addition, and might come as a very useful thing.

Related to that: I've added new rules about this. Please make sure to read them. I'll make a news post about it too when my brain is less fried from exhaustion.

Cool feature, but I think one more field should be added: the genre of the unlisted bands.

We've talked about it and decided not to include the genre.

Why do I get this message all the time when I am trying to edit informations about unlisted bands of the artists?

My guess would be that... your session has expired and you should reload the page, relogin and try again? Also, try using the cookie option in your profile/settings.

Would it be possible to have the number of albums released by a band visible in the Current Roster/Last Known Roster section of a label like how it is in Past Roster? I guess it wouldn't be quite as helpful, but I think it'd still be nice to have.

Sorry, but I can reload it as often as I want, or relog in as often as I want, even with the cookies enabled, it doesn't work.

I can't believe that I'm the only one with that problem, damn!

----

e.g. I just wanted to add "The Varukers" to Tony 'Rat' Martin page, so I first added him as a vocalist from 1993 to the present, but afterwards adding the date 1979 to 1988 as a vocalist just doesn't work.

Requested.

A while back I deleted the alternate spelling of "WTC" from Waking the Cadaver's page (because really, do people seriously type in the band's abbreviated name to look them up? ), and now the alternative name field is stuck with "\" and I can't figure out how to get rid of it.

Weird... I dunno how that happened but I just added a bogus alternate spelling and cleared it again and it worked.

For the addition of bands not featured on MA, could the search function be edited to yield a result if multiple musicians have played in the same band? Two of Avenged Sevenfold's members are listed, as well as two members of Mudvayne.

http://www.metal-archives.com/artists/M_Shadows/191848
http://www.metal-archives.com/artists/S ... ates/95719

http://www.metal-archives.com/artists/G ... bett/48838
http://www.metal-archives.com/artists/Chad_Gray/48837

I think that could help with organization.

I was going to request that as well, but then I remembered that there would really be no use to document the members of a non-metal band on the Metal Archives. Look at it this way:
Metal musician plays in non-metal band = still related to metal.
Non-metal band's other members listed = has jack shit to do with metal.

MT, that wasn't what I meant.

My intention was that when searching for a band (ie. Avenged Sevenfold), that band name would show in the results field. It's almost like when we were still clearing legacy data from band entries. Musicians already added can be selected with the check, with the appropriate information added (aliases and roles) There are plenty of musicians who have participated in bands listed in MA but have also participated in bands not listed on MA. We certainly don't need to add any of the other members.

The only reason you would search the non-metal band would be to link the two artist profiles together by the non-metal band they played in, right? Well, then you'd either have to have glaring gaps in the non-metal band's lineup, or you'd have to add the entire fucking gang, and both would look ugly. Think of it this way: if you search for, say, Winterhalter (an artist who has been involved in several metal bands), and you want to see what non-metal bands he's played in, your search is based on a metal artist, and you will see all the relevant information you seek. If you want to see all the members of Les Discrets that have been in a metal band, you are basing your search on a non-metal band and should thus seek your information on another website.

Just because we can pointlessly link together everything on this site doesn't mean that we should.

I don't see any harm in having non-MA bands displayed in the search results. At all.

Provided we sort unlisted bands after listed bands in the search results (and they're clipped normally for artists that have tonnes of them), there's no harm in listing it.

E.g., it'd look weird to see Kurt Cobain's list of bands as "Earth, Melvins" when he's mostly known for his involvement in Nirvana.

Another example would be to add a band that's been previously unlisted (either because they finally released a metal album, or because they never had a proper release for a long time) and having the lesser-known members show up in search results. E.g., if Inextricable Entrails had a ex-guitarist of "Tom Bee" who played with Viral Load for a few years, and he's not mentioned in the page's bio, don't you think it'd be worth having that involvement displayed to users looking up such a generic name...?

It's great that I can bookmark any band now on MA! Thanks! It's a really good feature.
But if it will have the empty fields for notes, like in 'My collection' page, it will be greater!
I want to write some notes to the bands I've bookmarked that's what I mean. I guess many users will appreciate it.
Is it possible?

I do, and there is no way in the seven hells I'm going to have that feature. You wanna search for Avenged Sevenfold? Why would you do that on this site? Too bad, you can't. Period.

The band search is for bands listed on the site. The only reason I'm letting people add non-metal bands to artist page is for nicer presentation and avoiding the cluttering of the trivia fields.


I know what you mean and I suggested it to the people who wanted bookmarks but people mostly said they didn't really need it... I could add it if there's really a big demand, I guess.

I'm pretty sure that Alhadis was referring to the artist search, not the band search, and was proposing that non-metal bands be listed in a given artist's "example" bands if that list hasn't already been filled by >3 metal bands (which, honestly, sounds like a good idea).

Yeah, I was. Who the hell would be searching for non-MA bands on MA?