People had been submitting Alestorm a lot to the point where a thread was made on January 20th about it. In short, because their first album wasn't due out until January 25th, it wasn't supposed to be submitted until then.

I think what happened (I tried to search for the old posts but it may be that the thread was deleted at some point because I am unable to find it) is that I submitted it right around 12:01 AM, but another user had submitted it a few hours earlier (on January 24th, technically not supposed to). That user had a fit, and I responded. Nightgaunt rejected both of our submissions.

After submitting Alestorm again, Nightgaunt dursted me. I still stand by my defense that I didn't realize I was "banned" from submitting Alestorm again, since it was already January 25th and it was okay to do so at that point for any regular user.

Oh, actually, it gets funnier... see - Alestorm themselves got wind that they weren't "allowed" on the Metal-Archives because of that technicality and raised a shitfit of their own over it. There was a thread on Ultimateguitar about it. It got to the point where Witcher had to post this thread: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=34013

And I also remember exactly what thread was deleted, because it was the "Why was Band X Rejected / Deleted" thread from before June, 2008. It got erased somehow.

Oh man, back then, I was the worst fucking minimod. It is probably for the best that I assumed a new identity here because "Goatfangs" is way more metal.

I read some posts from back then. The forums seemed a lot more chaotic than they are now. Was it not possible to blacklist Alestorm?

It was a weirder time. I didn't use the forums but I remember a lot more Deathcore on the site (including Suicide Silence!) and I think BtBaM was still on the site then

what's the rationale behind the Band submission queue having a 300 band limit?

Or the submission cap to 15 bands per head? I guess it would have to the same logic behind a thread I saw on the review forum about review submissions being limited to 5 per head. Or not.

Long story short, it makes it less daunting and stressful for us.

thanks for the reply I wrote a small essay last weekend, when I initially saw it, but then scrapped it. now, as the queue is full again, I re-write...

what's the difference between having 300, or 302, or even 389 bands "queueing"? I get the frustration (maybe even stress) of a long queue of bands mods don't really fancy listening to for musical value, esp with users like me who insist on submitting any punk/rock/core band with 1.5 metal riffs they came across on bandcamp, but capping the queue does not solve that problem, merely prolongs it :/

I'd also add that if, say, there's a new, anticipated band whose album is finally released, and the queue is full, there could be several users fixing elaborate drafts of it and waiting for the desired one slot to clear, who will be disappointed at all the useless, pointless effort they put in it when the lucky user refreshes the page and beats them to it...

it's no biggie waiting, I just wanted to give a potentially unconsidered view from the other side...

There's an interesting discussion going on here. The 300 bands limit likely reduces the total number of submissions - a new user might create a draft, but the queue is too full to submit... then they later read the rules and discover that their submission wasn't acceptable anyway, or just forget about it with time... and for one of those reasons, their band never gets submitted. That can be seen either as an upside or a downside - it's easier for the mods (less work) but bands that could have been archived might end up lost in oblivion forever. Our goal is to make this encyclopaedia as large as possible.

While I wouldn't consider any non-staffer qualified to say what makes working the band queue stressful or what doesn't... if it were me, I would also scrap the limit. 389 bands looks more daunting... but it's no worse than 300 bands in the queue with 89 bands waiting to be submitted... it more or less is 389 bands (perhaps more like 360-370 given how many I badly estimate will get forgotten about), but made to look less daunting. I suppose one upside is spam prevention, but I think more effective measures would be to set a limit of bands per user... and if there is already (I have no idea), then that's a great start. I don't know if it's possible to delete all of a user's submissions with one click... that could work.

I find myself agreeing with aloof. But maybe I'd think differently if I ever had to attempt tackling the band queue.

Maybe you should start focussing on metal bands then ;P

As for submissions that get lost...you'll always get that. We have tons of bands that get rejected for lacking proof and never get touched again even though they are perfectly fine. Just look at my last 20 additions or so. Most of them are long-forgotten rejections I went through amd they turned out to be perfectly fine if the submitter cared enough to provide any sort of proof. And for bands that are newly formed, I do think our userbase is big enough to find one who brings up "forgotten" bands eventually. And since we, the staff, are doing all this in our free time, we should be allowed to make it a little more comfortable for us to work on it. 300 "core/atmospheric/post grind" bands are less frustrating than 2000, imho.

Haha. Like you, huh!?


I understand your point, Deri, but isn't it a bit more rewarding to start working on the queue while it's at 456 and go down to 300, thus seeing actual results, than to keep on approving and rejecting bands only to see the number back at 300 every time one tries to bring it down? I remember TUA had weekends when he'd clear half the queue on his own, and come monday the queue was full again.

This has probably been addressed already, but were a bunch of reviews deleted recently? I remember looking at albums with scores in the 90's and now some are down to 80% or less.

Where is the red (!) that I thought came with the pop-up when a critical warning is sent? If a regular warning is sent, is the top message identical but without the "final"? A few people also told me about a yellow (!) for first warnings.

https://imgur.com/a/gVdGKPL

We've had a few users - one in particular with a little over 100 reviews or so - who ended up deleting/terminating their accounts since we added that feature last year. That might explain why you have seen a bunch of reviews being deleted. Users are also free to delete their reviews whenever they want, so there's also a possibility they removed their reviews to fix/change them later, or simply because they no longer want them on MA.


I take it klausader shared that somewhere? He did in fact get a final "red" warning there. Admittedly, I don't know what the warnings look like from the users' end, but I'll bring up the lack of a red (!) mark on the second warning up to the programmers. That's probably just an oversight if the first warning includes the mark, and the second warning does not.

Yes, he did share it and his choice of thread in which to share it was interesting at best. I have never seen the mark nor received any warnings... but I know a user who did receive a critical warning once and he told me that he saw a red mark, and found out that the mark is the same but different colour according to the warning type. Perhaps it disappeared since? I have no history at all of receiving warnings, so I have no idea whether the mark appears for neither, one or both warning types. I suppose (and hope) you don't often receive warnings either.

Could I ask who that user was?

I think they should just delete every review that it isn't written by autothrall, but that's just me.

About Firebreather/s

Could it go that they were booted without a mention in this thread, given that With Ink Instead Of Blood got to be de-listed without a mention why in the same thread (does this happen that often?), but probably it's because the standards on -core seem to have tightened up. The blacklist entry part beats me.

The 300 cap is honestly there for the mental health of our staff, because it's daunting and exhausting to clear 10 submissions only to see the number still so high, or worse, continue to climb upwards.

As well as both for the sanity of our mods and for the quality of the site, I would encourage submitters to focus more on unambiguously metal projects if they can, instead of submitting every half-assed bandcamp trash they come across. Just sayin'...


A red ! is a more severe/serious warning than an orange one. It's not always a very-final-warning about everything, but it's usually a "final warning" for the behaviour you are being warned about.

For a hypothetical example, if you break a minor rule such as adding lyrics one by one, you will probably get a normal warning or even a non-warning message telling you to stop. If you do it again 1 year later after being inactive, you might get a reminder warning. And then if you continue to do it again, you may get a "final warning" upon which you will be banned if you continue the behaviour.

If you break a more serious (but not insta-bannable) rule, you might get a red warning right away because we'd want you to stop that behaviour immediately and we don't think leniency is appropriate.

Ok... I remember being told there are 3 types of messages from administration: a message, a warning and a final warning. What surprised me is that from the quoted screenshot, there is no visible red ! despite it being a final warning... maybe it's only visible when you check your profile? Derigin even questioned if it's a programmer oversight. If necessary, feel free to send me test warnings and I'll screenshot what we see from a user's end.

Yeah, the "Attention: final warning" part is what tells the user the severity of the warning, rather than the colour-coded ! which just shows up on the message list. It's not the most consistent UX usage, I'll admit, but when it's a normal message it just says "Notice" and when it's a regular warning it says "Warning". :shrug:

Ah, I get it now.

Whoa. Not even sure if this applies here, but these reviews for Grand Belial's Key have a curious case Mocking the Philanthropist; Castrate the Redeemer. A non-compilation compilation.

I’ll never forget this.
And the funniest part was all the users coming out of their “kvlt” shells and reviewing the fuckers’ albums pronto.

“This is the best metal album of the 90’s” kinda shit being used as titles.

Dear god

Also, I haven’t been on the MA for a fair few years now - what happened to Diamhea?
I saw he passed away in Derigin’s sig, does anybody know what happened?
Heartbreaking to see the news.

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=121203

I took a couple years off as well, and just happened to randomly notice it, too. RIP.

Also, when I popped back in, it seemed that things here overall had slowed way down. I'm curious - are people just seeming to lose interest, or running out of things to discuss, or acquiring new responsibilities in life?

This site doesn't seem any slower than when I first joined. I actually think we're far more efficient than we were half a decade ago - the review and report queue are usually close to empty. As for the forums... well, I don't visit them as much.

I would surmise that the Discord channel is sucking the life out of the forum.

...there’s a discord? Link?

Preserve the Wizzardstorm thread in Metal Archives memory:

viewtopic.php?f=27&t=125117

Even if he is just trolling that is still worthy of memorializing

is there a rule of thumb on when to post a new album in the metal forum, making a separate thread for it, or when to just mention it in the recomms forum?

I've seen super-big and super-small ones in the metal forum, but I don't wanna clog it up with threads...

I don't see an issue with creating a thread for a release you genuinely want to discuss in the metal subforum. Provided you don't spam like a dozen threads with OPs like "discuss!" or stuff like that, obv.

thanks