There are several bands in the archives that either started in non-metal genres or moved away from metal.
Maybe it would be better if non-metal albums were highlighted in the Discography tab.
Either, being able to set the genres for each album could do (but this sounds like way more laborious).

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Using italic or underlining text maybe?

And what about albums that are half metal songs and half ballads? Sorry but it's a silly idea, not gonna happen.

Silly Idea? It would be a great thing to desribe individual releases, or even individual songs, under a specific genre. It would actually be very helpful.

People on this site have enough problems agreeing on overall genre's for bands. Extending that headache to individual releases is a terrible idea.

Well, what about just highlighing the non-metal releases? (that was the original idea actually, and seems very feasible).

That's what the genre field, the additional notes and the reviews are for. Moderating band genres is hard enough; giving a genre to each album would be an even bigger pain.

The only conceivable benefit it would have is keeping people from referencing a non-metal album to justify a deleted/blacklisted band's inclusion, but your proposed solution would cause more strife than the original issue.

MCF posted while I was typing, and I don't feel like re-writing it.

While I see what you're getting at, I'll throw out the genre part again. No two users here are going to have the same opinion on what is "metal" and what is not. You see it a lot in the "Why was band x rejected?" thread when users argue about if a band is traditional metal or hard rock, or if a band is more metal than core. By making distinctions between albums, you'll have to entertain conversations like that for a large number of albums, since most of the time, the genre is borderline metal. It would just be more work than it's worth.

Plus, one half of the webmaster duo that program and have final say over the site said no. So the conversation is a little moot at this point.

Additionally, correcting band genres when they are reported tends to take a long time. Simple stylistic changes or mistakes such as a death metal band being listed as black metal, or a band who started out playing thrash and moved to death later on - those are fairly simple to verify, though still time consuming as we try to listen to enough of it to leave no doubt that the change is correct. Larger discographies with variation already have the problem of trying to denote the style of music as simply as possible, but it takes a lot of time and energy to listen through multiple albums, particularly if it's not something you would normally listen to, and try to condense it into a few words taking in many considerations. To try to individually label genres on each album, considering they will be looked at in comparison to the rest of the discography, would be unmanageable. If a band on the archives has non-metal releases, it is generally covered in the additional notes.

I actually quite like idea in principle since I sperg pretty hard on genres (its the reason why I suck at the similar artists function, soon as a band develops two sounds I can't call them similar to a band which only matches one), but yeah, this seems pretty unmaintainable. Metal to non-metal seems like a complete clusterfuck arguments and bitching, while the preferrable genre for every release idea would theoretically be less contentious, the sheer amplification of reports and nitpicks would be too much for the mods to handle.

In short, in an ideal world it'd be wonderful, but earth sucks so no.

"Giving each album a genre would be a bigger pain"
This couldn't possibly be any more of a bigger pain that putting up the lyrics to each & every song, a feture this site actually gives.

He's not talking about sheer physical effort. And he's right.

Sorry, but I don't see how it would be so hard to begin with. I can go through Thousands of albums & give them a genre label, & I'm a lazy person.

It's a pretty useless idea, a word about the genre in the add. notes is sufficient. This will only lead to pedantic arguments over genres like "Opeth's Heritage is not metal!" and we barely have the time to answer the normal reports about wrong genres.

I fail to see how it's useless.
If Opeth albums where listened to carefully & wll digested, it wouldn't be too hard to label it. Whoever does decide to lsten through isn't gonna give it a lazy label.
& just so you know, I'm fine to let see the genre be blank when ever I look for an album. I can understand it will take time to get each album a label. I'm patient.

Listing the individual genres of Opeth albums is of little significance and not at all worth the effort it requires. It adds little value to the archives, and adding a new, marginally subjective field that requires thorough evaluation for 240,000 pages is a massive undertaking for little return. Fields can be left blank, but it would be difficult to manage in that either lazy/idiotic users would just put the band's genre in that field, or if only moderators could edit it, we would need to handle reports for all of those 240,000 albums that people had heard, which involve listening through the albums, and there would also be plenty of disputes, as there is already more than enough whining about genres from incompetent fools - the type of people who file reports because Mercyful Fate isn't listed as black metal (four reports of that that I've seen).

And once again, how do you deal with albums that are only "partially" metal? Either on the lighter rocking side, or albums that are about half ballads and half metal, or half symphonic songs and half metal, or half nu-metal and half groove metal, etc. For example, should we "highlight" Therion's A'arab Zaraq - Lucid Dreaming or not?

Anyway, this is not going to happen, like it or not.