No, the FBI did not seize our domain. No, no one was indicted with racketeering, money laundering and other nefarious activities. This was all, of course, an April Fools prank. Nothing illegal has ever been going on here, obviously.

I admit, the prank was a lot more successful than I expected, based on various reactions I have seen all over the Internet. I had written the date in the browser's title and allowed the clicking of the image to make it disappear and lead to the site normally, yet apparently many people failed to notice any of that... Sorry if we caused any heart attacks ;) but this goes to show that people tend to be very reactionary instead of stopping for a second and using a bit of critical thinking.

Sorry again for that wee bit of trolling. But hey, that's what April the 1st is for! Until next year. \m/

-Morrigan

New setting

As stated in the previous post, we're continuously adding new features and settings, and the latest one is the "Complete lineup" tab on the band and album pages. The default behaviour is unchanged, and shows the "Current lineup" (or "Band members" for albums) tab. But you can now check the complete member list on one single tab, and if you prefer it that way, you can go into your settings and select the lineup sub-tab you prefer to load by default.

You can also completely disable tabs for lineups, and always show the full artist listing, by ticking the appropriate checkbox(es). Choosing this setting will override the tab choice above it, obviously. For those who would never bother to filter the lists using the tabs, this may be useful.

New feature

This was requested a while ago, so here it is: logged users can now use the internal bookmark system to add bands, labels and artists to a list of private bookmarks. Click the star icon on the respective pages to add the item to your bookmarks. You can access and manage your bookmarks under My bookmarks in the top-left menu. For now, the list doesn't do anything beyond that, but we might use it as a starting point for a "watch list" or a notification system. We'll see.

Oh, and just in case the star icon does not work, please hit Ctrl + R to hard-refresh your browser cache.

Enjoy!

-Morrigan

We added some new preferences/settings under "my profile" (settings tab). To summarize:

• Default discography tab: Some people find long-ass discographies to be an eyesore, so we've added a way to change the default tab being shown. The default setting is still the complete tab, so you don't need to change it if you like things the way they are.


• Hide my profile information: name, age, email, etc. For example, some people wanted the possibility of displaying their email address, but only to logged users. This setting will allow them to do that. The rest of their info (submitted bands, reviews, etc.) will always remain public for obvious reasons.


• Private collection: requested by a few people; if you want to use the site to build your collection but don't want unsolicited trade requests, you can use that.

-Morrigan

We've added a new section in the rules about the use of multiple accounts.

Fair warning to those who ever intended to register multiple accounts to rig the "similar artists" recommendation system; if we catch you doing that, we're banning you instantly (and, of course, wiping your voting record in one click, making your efforts useless). This behaviour was never allowed in the first place, obviously, but now there's the bonus of no longer having ignorance as an excuse, as it is written down rather plainly. If you have been doing that and haven't been caught (yet -- you will be, trust me ;) ), I suggest you quietly remove your duplicate votes before someone notices.

Multiple accounts, or sock puppets as they are called, are often used for other purposes, from sending misleading reports to skewing review scores. Sock puppets are always caught in the end, and it's a lot less effort for us to undo their damage, so just don't do it.

-Morrigan

You can now search for multiple countries and band status in the advanced search. Just click the "multi" link to toggle the country/status list from a dropdown to a multi-select box.

You can also search by location (city, state and/or province) in the album search. This is useful to check out (for example) new releases from bands in your area.

Enjoy.

-Morrigan

It is now possible to enter* the cause of death for artists listed as deceased (e.g. marked with a date of death). For deceased artists whose date or cause of death is unknown, non-moderators can still report the artist as dead and a moderator will update the artist page.

A list of deceased artists can be found here, or by clicking the "R.I.P." link in the left menu.

*Important: when entering the cause of death, please keep the description as brief as possible , and write down further details (if publicly available of course) in the artist's biography or trivia sections. Examples of valid entries include (but are not limited to) "Brain cancer", "Murder", "Suicide", "Heart attack", "Car accident", "Hit by a drunk driver", etc. Non-valid examples would be "Stabbed 27 times by Varg Vikernes" or "Died after a concert in Los Angeles when the band's tour bus ran over him." This kind of details belong in the bio/trivia section at best. Also, please only capitalize the first letter (e.g. "Car accident" and not "Car Accident").

-Morrigan

By now, most of you have probably heard of the SOPA and PIPA bills being considered by the US government. These are poorly thought out "anti-piracy" laws backed by corporate lobbyists that threaten freedom of speech and information on the Internet. This is especially worrisome for sites that rely on user-generated content like MA, because it gives the authorities the right to take down a whole domain due to complaints against content posted by a single user. Though this is an American law, it unfortunately has the potential to affect the whole world, as a major part of Internet infrastructures are US-based. While SOPA has been put on hold for the time being in the House of Representatives (though who knows when it will return?), PIPA is still going forward in the senate and the vote on it is scheduled for January 24th. You can read more details about this issue and why this is really detrimental to the Internet in this article on the Electronic Frontier Foundation website.

Now, many sites (led by heavyweights Reddit and Wikipedia) are organizing a planned downtime or "blackout" on January 18th to protest against these bills and raise awareness for the situation, and MA will be joining in. This means that the site will be inaccessible for a period of 24 hours starting on the 18th at 05:00 UTC (or midnight EST). We apologize for this inconvenience, but we hope you agree that this is a worthy cause and give us your support. Please spread the word about this issue and, if you are American, consider contacting your local representative or senator to voice your opposition to these bills. The website americancensorship.org has quick forms that make it very easy to send your comments to the relevant authorities, as well as a petition for non-US citizens, plus other actions you can take and information about the subject.

-HellBlazer

And we're back to normal.

-HellBlazer

The site will be in read-only mode and the search will be disabled for a few minutes while I update some software. Sorry for the inconvenience, it shouldn't take very long.

-HellBlazer

The site had some issues during the last two days, but everything should be back to normal now.

Thank you for your patience.

-Evenfiel