We have now reached an incredible 90,000 bands listed in the database! Needless to say, a gargantuan thank you from the owners and the staff goes out to all contributors who made this possible.

The magic six digits aren't too far away now, onwards to 100,000!

-Azmodes

Once again apologies for the sad state of the site today. We are aware that it's very slow or even unresponsive, and our host is looking into the problem. Nothing has been perfect since the server crash earlier this month, and believe me we are as sick of this situation as you are. We will try to get everything back to normal as soon as possible.

-HellBlazer

As mentioned in the post below, there are still performance issues to take care of, as the site performance hasn't been the most optimal since the crash recovery. So we'll have a short server maintenance update tonight, at around 1 AM EST. The update should not take long, and should revert the server configuration to what it was (or closer to it, at least) before the crash, so it will hopefully help with the sporadic downtimes and slowness we've been experiencing lately.

Once again sorry for the troubles, and thank you for your understanding.

-Morrigan

To the best of our knowledge, the bugs or glitches left over from the backup restoration (search engine, label pages, etc.) have been fixed and the site is now fully functional.

There may be some minor performance issues from time to time, as many of our server tweaks haven't been configured yet, but they should hopefully not be too noticeable and will be fixed in the next few days.

We once again apologize for the inconvenience.

-Morrigan

So a partition on our server was corrupted earlier today. Our host worked hard at rebuilding the system and getting the site back online, and we had a backup from this morning, but unfortunately some data entered in the few hours after the last backup may have been lost.

As of right now, some parts of the site are still broken: the search isn't working (except the Google search), label pages are not loading, among other things. We are doing our best right at this instant to fix all these problems, so we ask for your patience.

We know the site stability hasn't been the best lately, and we apologize for that: this is the biggest issue we've had in a while, but hardware failures are random and beyond our control (in other words: "shit happens"). Hopefully this is the last of our problems for a while.

We will post more updates as soon as we have them. Thank you for your patience and comprehension.

EDIT: the search is back, at least. Still working on other issues.

-Morrigan

Just a heads up that the site will be going down soon for a short time while some maintenance is going on the server. It should be back quickly.

EDIT: Everything is fine now.

-HellBlazer

### IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL BAND SUBMITTERS ###

As of this new year of 2013, we have now changed our policy concerning the band approval process.

Before today, bands were required to have a physical album before being eligible. Since digital distribution is becoming more and more widespread, we have decided to now accept bands who release their music entirely through digital medium.

However, this does not mean we accept any bands with a few songs on Myspace or Youtube. Only bands with serious digital albums will be accepted. I urge all band contributors to revisit the rules and guidelines page for the details of what kind of digital albums are considered acceptable.

We apologize for the inconvenience caused to the contributors who may have recently deleted their drafts of bands which, despite having no physical album, may have had a valid digital album. If you had a very detailed draft and deleted it recently, it might be possible to restore it. Please post in this forum thread about such a matter.

Note that after much time spent rejecting a number of non-metal bands, we have also put in writing some additional examples of what kind of music we do not consider acceptable for this site (j-rock, djent, post-hardcore, etc.). This is not a change of policy, but just a matter of clarification for those confused users out there who may think these styles as metal.

To all our contributors and visitors: thank you again for all the great work, and we hope 2013 will be another great year for the Encyclopaedia as it continues to grow and prove itself to be the greatest online resource for heavy metal.

-Morrigan

A few new features have been deployed today:

• Labels by country: this was requested a good while ago, and I finally got around to it.
• I've also slightly revamped the left menu alongside with this new link to make it look tidier.
• There is now an autocomplete helper when adding external links.
• A Years active field to document a band's various periods of activity: years of formation, disbanding, reunions, name changes, and so on.

For contributors, please see the help page for more information on how to correctly enter this data (with examples for various cases). Note that we are also keeping the old "year of formation" field, as this field is used for advanced search purposes, and is also not necessarily the same year as the first year in the band's history (for bands that changed names, for instance).

Enjoy!

-Morrigan

The site will be down for a short time starting around midnight EST (5 am UTC) while the server team replaces a hard drive. Sorry about the inconvenience; it's a simple procedure and shouldn't take too long.

EDIT: The drive has been replaced and the site is back. There's a small problem with the forum that will be fixed soon.

EDIT 2: The forum is back. Everything seems fine now, but let me know if you see any errors.

-HellBlazer

I'm upgrading our search engine so you might get some errors or odd behaviors when using the search in the next few minutes.

EDIT: Well that was quite painless. Everything should be fine now, let me know if you see anything unusual concerning the search.

-HellBlazer