Hello. I was just wondering what the policy is regarding unpublished lyrics. Take Dimmu Borgir's first album, For all tid, for example. They have never published official lyrics to that album, yet we can find poor interpretations by users on the album's page here on the Metal Archives.

My suggestion is: don't include them, or at the very least: make it clear that they are not official lyrics.

Thank you.

PS:
Here is my interpretation of Det nye riket. The one published on the site is awful. "Vikante" is not even a Norwegian word.

Det nye riket


Vårt hat skal vinne
Vår ondskap skal gro
Og feste seg i unge sjeler

Den siste krig skal vi vinne
Og de godes blod skal falle som regn
Våre sorte sjeler skal samles

Vi skal råde over kaos og evig natt
Vi skal glemme de kvinner vi kalte mødre
Og utslette alt

Et rike skal reise seg
Fra asken av brente hjem
Der kun én herre hersker
Vi hyller deg, Satan, de sterkes konge

Din tid er kommet

We don't allow unofficial lyrics. Period. No matter how accurate a "fan-made guess" is, if lyrics aren't confirmed from an official source, they shouldn't be published here.

Good. I agree 100%. I hope then that the lyrics on Dimmu Borgir's album, "For all tid", are removed. I mean, if those are the official lyrics, then they are illiterate dyslectics, which I don't think they are.

Alhadis, please don't post things like "This is the official policy. Period." when you have really nothing to base this on.

Really, if it's not written in the site rules or the FAQs, it's not official policy. Maybe there has been some discussion about it, by mods or others, at some point... and maybe it would be best if we did put this policy regarding lyrics (though I find that debatable), but that still doesn't make it official site policy at this point in time. Worse, you're potentially confusing or misleading users.

Mods, and everyone else: unless you can cite the "policy" from this page or this page, do not claim that something is official site policy, please.

We have quite a few non-official lyrics here. I've even added some myself. Just use your discretion to decide whether the non-official lyrics make sense or not. Discuss with other users. Try to contact the band. If they still don't make sense, then we'll erase them.

Yeah, exactly that. Totally, utterly, absolutely true.

Remember that it's better to have outdated (or, as a part of that, a lack of info) than incorrect info. Part of that is an onus on preferring sourced, official information over guessed or assumed information. While it might seem OK to add lyrics at your discretion - particularly for bands that would be perfectly reasonable for adding non-official lyrics - there are many cases where we don't accept non-official lyrics largely because such lyrics were never intended to be published in any manner (and remain unknown). The best bet is that - if in doubt - don't do it. It's probably for the better that way. But if you feel confident that the information you want to submit is correct and reasonable, then do it.

What about Empyrium - A Wintersunset...? In the album, only the lyrics of track 5 are published. (I own this album) As I remember, the lyrics of other tracks first appeared years ago in the label's forum, a fan-guess definitely. However, except track 6, other guessworks are actually quite accurate. For track 6, there are some missing words and some words seem incorrect. anyway, currently this is the best guess we have, and i believe Empyrium has a huge fanbase. So what about this album, especially track 6?

Should be fine to include them. Think of our thoughts (or practices) towards lyrics focusing - namely - on what is reasonable. Unless Empyrium have let it be known otherwise, or that the lyrics are complete, ridiculous guesswork, then it's safe to include them. Just use common sense, and (whenever possible) seek to back up what you're doing with facts.

But I recommend to always add some remark in the additional notes when adding non-official lyrics; I've seen lots of wrong lyrics here (even if there were correct lyrics published in the booklet or on the band's homepage) without any information that these are not the official ones.
To not include that information is misleading, especially in an in most aspects very trustable database like this.

Then some cleaning needs to be done. I've seen shittons of unofficial lyrics on here, off and on, through the years. Obituary, Entombed, Hypocrisy and The Abyss are just a few examples that come to mind. Unofficial lyrics and a lot of "..." where they don't know the words or just shit that was made up and doesn't even sound close.

Perhaps you should read the complete thread: