Does anyone else get annoyed of the long lists of musicians for bands? I feel that those pages would look a lot cleaner if grouped by instrument and then year, rather then just year. Maybe that could be made a profile settings option?

I agree, I reckon that'd be a much cleaner way to sort information, actually.

I have another idea. Trying to figure out all of those Russian and Japanese bands (for example) and their discographies is such a pain. There should be an option on their page to choose an English translation or again maybe a profile settings option to automatically do so.

... okay, now that's just plain silly. What's wrong with usin' this helpful little tool?

Can't be bothered. Hahah I mean, it isn't very convieniant. Especially since we used to have them in English before. I don't want to have to use another website to understand this one, y'know?

The translations should ideally be in the additional notes for any album whose album title/song titles aren't in English. If they're not, feel free to file a report requesting that someone add them.

Yeah, I know for the most part they are in additional notes, which is okay. But eh, I guess it is a just me thing. I'll be the first to say I told you so, if this ever comes to fruition though.

I'm sorry if this is the wrong thread, but I re-submitted my review for Disembowelment - Trancencence Into The Peripheral some time in January and it is still marked as "pending". Are the mods just busy, or did anything happen to it (bug)?

EDIT: The review got accepted some time ago, so it's no issue anymore

The site is not functioning properly off-late. Lots of users from India contacted me and told that they were facing problems with the registration procedure. I told Alhadis & Hellblazer about it. I hope thinks are back to normal again!

Suggestion: How about allowing the use of a tilde (~) in lineups years to manually sort them (like with years active) to avoid things like this with Scar?

That's already been requested by some mods.

There is some problem with advanced search for albums. When you searching albums from single country, it's OK. But when you try to search from multi-selection with all selected countries and with one or two countries excluded, there is no search results in the end (waiting them for an hour in three browsers - Chrome, Firefox, IE) and selected option "only full-length" is gone. If ten or less countries selected, search results is successfully provided. I don't know with how many selected countries this trouble begins. Screens:

What we want to do:


Example of selection:


How it looks in the end:

For external links' autocomplete, both Big Cartel and CD Baby should have spaces in them. (BigCartel > Big Cartel; CDBaby > CD Baby).

Have you considered using the median instead of the mean to calculate overall review score? I've seen a fair number of albums where the majority of reviews hold to the 80-100 range, but a couple of 0-20 reviews drag this number down to 50-70. The median would not be subject to these outliers and would be more representative of the general consensus from reviewing users.

There's a small bug when displaying lyrics for instrumental songs. Some songs are checked for instrumental, but has still lyrics (like a narrator or something). When clicking on "Instrumental" (the same as "Show lyrics" for songs not marked as instrumental) and then hide lyrics it will say "Show lyrics" there, instead of "Instrumental". If these songs are not supposed to be checked for instrumental, then it probably shouldn't be possible to mark a song with lyrics as instrumental, or at least not make it possible to display those lyrics.

Here's an example: http://www.metal-archives.com/albums/At ... e_Soul/298


I think the reviews would be even more skewed by using the median.

38%, 42%, 45%, 85%, 95% (avg 61%, median 45%)
38%, 42%, 80%, 85%, 95% (avg 68%, median 80%)

Look at how incredibly wrong those median values are based on my made-up review score. I don't know anything about statistics , but I don't think median is very good to represent such small pools.

Some instrumental tracks are accompanied with related poetry or other text, I don't see a reason why they should be omitted. The text changing to "Hide lyrics"/"Show lyrics" shouldn't probably happen though.




Incredibly wrong, you say... In a way I don't understand the fuss about review scores. Why do people look at only them? The score is pretty arbitrary, everyone has a different (seemingly random) system with deciding them. What the reviews are about is the text, and the scores are never going to represent the text properly. One written review is worth a thousand scores. If you see a review and look at the score and see it's 0%, you know someone probably doesn't like the album at all (which is hugely surprising really). Only once you've read the text and have some kind of idea why the reviewer thinks it sucks you know something potentially useful.

Some people even seem to get offended when an album they like has a low score. The whole score thing is so misleading that maybe we'd be better off them? Maybe the scores would be more meaningful there were strict standards regarding them, or something, but at the moment they are pretty random. Anyway, I suppose the scores aren't likely to go, and I do get that it makes sense to give a general idea about the reviews, so would showing the average of the average and the median work? Or both the average and the median, or even some more detailed statistics? Or just boldly emphasizing that the scores are meaningless (no one'd read that, though)? Would a little trouble make fewer people confused?

The review scores are fine, I like that there's no set standards for them as it allows the users to be more "themselves" when writing, and most people fall into either the school system style (90-100 = A, 80-89 = B, et cetera), or the system that droneriot and myself use (<50 = positive, >50 = negative). It's really easy to tell what they think by simply reading the damn reviews.

I'd also like to point out that most people who complain about the scores being "misleading" have, to my knowledge, always been from users saying they unfairly drag the album down, never the other direction. They're usually proponents of the whole "less than 59% equals a failure" thing from their school days as well. To me, this basically means one of two things, either fans of an album who are bummed to see the score lower than they believe it should be, or people who are unable to grasp the idea of people using a different scale to grade. The way I (and most reviewers) look at the average score is that it's pretty arbitrary and not representative of the album as a whole. I mean, for years and years, Skyclad's The Silent Whales of Lunar Sea was the lowest rated of their generally regarded classic era, and it took me a whole one second to look at the reviews and see that it was because there was one lone 8% review dissenting against the general consensus. You know what I did then? Read the review to understand that perspective, and that particular review made it sound like I would like the album anyway.

Basically the complaints almost always stem from ID-10T errors, and the thing the complaints are about isn't something that even matters anyway.

Hey thought I'd post this here to see if this is a site error that can be fixed.

Anyone else get off-count reviews since that Nickelback day? I did three reviews for the joke and since the page has been deleted the system on the statistics still considers me having 3 extra reviews. On my profile page, it has the correct amount of reviews written.







The number now is 505 actual written reviews but 508 show up in the stats page.

Suggestion: Can you make hyperlinks to countries at every label's page? Just as hyperlinks to countries at every artists and band's page.

Ozzy: you're right, that was caused by the band deletion. Apparently the stats didn't filter out reviews from deleted bands. Should be fixed now.

BlackenedZeroth: sure, don't see why not.

A bug? See here where I have Quorthon credited for lyrics, but on his artist page it's not shown. Is it because he was credited posthumously?

I cleared the caches for both pages and it's now displaying fine.

I know that it's been requested before that the option for adding an artist to multiple bands in a split be added to the site. Did that happen at some point and I just missed it?

This split between Antigama and Nyia features artist Szymon Czech being credited for both bands. However, as a test, I tried to amend this split to credit Mike Hrubovcak as providing artwork for both bands on the split instead of only one, but it returned an error message about Hrubovcak already being credited on the release.

So I guess my question is, is the inability to add Mike Hrubovcak twice a bug of a site feature, or is Szymon Czech simply credited to both bands through a fluke?

EDIT: It occurs to me that Szymon Czech is credited to both bands, but never in the same tabs (band members and misc. staff for Nyia, guest/session for Antigama). Perhaps this is a loophole that is allowing him to be credited to each band.

Szymon Czech is credited under Guest/Session AND Miscellaneous Staff, two separate categories. I know the webmasters are aware of that problem where someone can't be credited under multiple bands on a split, it's probably a lower priority though. You can fill out the lineup part and list them under one band and note that they did it for both bands, add it in the additional notes, or something like that.

Btw, composers/lyricists of cover songs aren't supposed to be mentioned in there. They had nothing to do with the making of that album.

Thank you very much for adding the notes/comments thing on the bookmarks!

I don't know if it's the right place to ask about this, but what is considered correct when writing track listings of full-lengths, EPs etc that include cover songs? I see that many original releases don't explicitly state "Song Title (that-band cover)" and instead only read "Song Title", with the credits being stated somewhere else (example - Agalloch's "Of Stone, Wind, and Pillor" - http://i.imgur.com/BqQtwN4.jpg)
I understand that there are tons of release pages on the archives that actually state "Song Title (that-band cover)" and that this would be a huge task to accomplish, but wouldn't it be better if the original performer/author/composer is rather mentioned in the 'Additional Notes' tab?
I'm asking this because for me (and for many others, I believe) this site is a main source when organizing and adding tags to digital music.

"(XYZ cover)" is the accepted site standard, it should be added even if it's not included on the backcover in that way. Additional details can go in the notes. Personally, I think this is the neatest, most efficient way to go about it.

Don't know if this has been suggested before, but in the vein of "Similar Artists," how would you feel about a "Influences" and "Influenced" tabs for bands? Users can list which bands/artists influenced specific bands and, conversely, list bands they influenced provided they include links/scans to specific interviews for proof. I'm aware this may cause some issues (Black Sabbath and Judas Priest having overwhelming "Influenced" sections).

Ah, thanks for the link.

Oh well.

I created this topic and was told to come here.
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=98811

(((...))), or Three Black Dots in the Brackets, don't appear in the search function when searching for the actual name. All searches for (((...))) end up simply redirecting to ... (which has no other pronunciation). Do parenthesis not work with the search function?

Why isn't it possible to add the total running time of a release? I am suck lazy, and I don't want to write down the lengths of a 20-song CD each until the total running time is determined, but just add the normal running time of the whole CD.

If you're too lazy to add the track lengths... em, too bad, that's not the kind of editing behaviour we want. The total running time is automatically calculated by the single song durations, seems pretty obvious and logical to me. If you can't make that little effort, leave it to someone else.

It's annoying if you have an vinyl-record (LP or 7") and no running times of the songs anywhere. So I check my clock and calculate like "36:00min" having in mind the time it takes to switch from Side A) to Side B). But ok, I leave that point to others.

Can't you just time every track once?

You can just mention the total duration in the notes in that case. Make it apparent that it's an approximation, though.

Bug (?) report for artist pages: When a link is changed into the "unlisted bands" category (from "official", in this case), the "new value" remains blank, rather than saying "unlisted bands", like any other link type would:
2013-05-31 22:14:43

^Looks fine to me, could you clear your cache and double check that it's a problem? I don't see that.