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

Just in case some of you hadn't noticed, we have added a small (but, according to some, significant) improvement to the advanced search for albums and songs: it is now possible to select multiple release types at once, instead of picking just one from the drop-down. So just hit your Shift or Control key and click on the release types you want to search for.

Enjoy.

-Morrigan

I've updated the rules and help pages regarding the new External Links feature (see previous post).

Please make sure you follow those guidelines for adding external links, especially for artists, so we can avoid clutter. Thanks!

-Morrigan

You can now attach external links for artists and labels the same way you can for bands (see the help page for more details).

The link categories are a bit different than for bands:

For labels, we (tentatively) have "official" (to include links such as the official label site, the youtube channel, the Facebook/Myspace sites, etc.), and "merchandise" (to link to the label's webstore), but we might merge all that under the same "official" category later.
Note that labels still have a generic field for "homepage". You can add the label's main official website there AND in the external links, but only use this field for the label's main site. Any other links should go under the new Links tab.

For artists, we kept mostly the same categories as for bands, minus the "label" one obviously. Again, these categories are tentative; we're not sure that merchandise or tablatures are a valid category for artist (maybe for some famous guitarists, but that's probably a stretch), so they might be removed later. But the other categories allow you to include an artist's Myspace, Facebook, official website, youtube, etc. but also fan sites with more detailed bios and the likes (but NO interview links, please, this will just create huge clutter).

Enjoy!

-Morrigan

We are currently updating the site with an important security fix. This mean you might get login errors or expired sessions in the next few minutes, so do not be alarmed if this happens. Simply relogin normally if this happens. We apologize for the inconvenience.

-Morrigan

As most of you are probably aware, today marks the sad anniversary of the passing of heavy metal legend Ronnie James Dio.

You all know who he was, what he has accomplished, how much he is missed, and the great debt everyone who enjoys metal and hard rock owes him, so I won't attempt to put it into insufficient words. I was instead hoping we could try to accomplish something worthwhile in his memory.

As you might know, Dio was a strong supporter of the charity organization called Children of the Night, whose mission is to help children that have been forced into prostitution. They are based and act in America, but they also help advise similar agencies across the world. As evidenced by many songs throughout Dio's discography, speaking out and acting against child abuse was a cause very important to him.

There is also the Ronnie James Dio "Stand Up and Shout" Cancer Fund, created by his wife Wendy after his death in order to support programs for cancer prevention and education. Its goal is to reduce the risk of developing life-threatening cancer.

I would invite everyone who is willing and able to make a donation to either or both of these organizations, thus doing a bit of good in this world while honoring the memory of this great man. I am certain that even a few dollars can be put to good use, and I am hoping that with the significant traffic going through this site, the accumulation of all our donations will make a noticeable impact for these charities. Any other metal website interested in making a similar request to their visitors should definitely feel free to do so; perhaps we can get a kind of unofficial donation drive going in the metal world.

Thank you all for reading and considering.

-HellBlazer

We are still working with our new host to make the server as smooth as possible. This currently involves some server setting tweaks that may or may not cause periodic downtimes or PHP errors. So if you see this... please do not be alarmed, it's all for the greater good. :)

Thank you for your comprehension.

-Morrigan