Hey all,

Well, since I love metal (duh!), I have certain appreciation to punk music that I put some of it every once in awhile but I was thinking, is there like a punk encyclopedia?

Just like Metal-Archives but dedicatedly for punk music, that would be really interested to check out.

I'm pretty sure I've heard one of the mods (Alhadis?) has ambitions to do such a thing, but it'd be an incredibly tough task building a site like this from scratch. Hell, it's no short of a miracle (well, more hard work and passionate persistence) that has allowed M/A to thrive like it has. I'd like to see it though, as someone who plans to explore punk music in the future, it'd be a tremendously useful resource.

This has been discussed a few times now. I suggest trying to find the thread by doing a keyword search (I can't be bothered to dig it up, sorry!).
Maybe you can chat up some posters from those threads who've expressed interest in getting things up and running. Don't count on it, though, heh.

Alhadis is doing the Tome of Noise. So Power electronics and the like.

Ah, I see. I could have sworn I saw somewhere mention of a mod (or maybe just a prominent user?) who expressed interest in a punk/hardcore site. I may be woefully mistaken though.

That might have been me... :3

I made a thread about it, but couldn't be bothered to go anywhere with it because I am terribly lazy. I keep hoping someone who has the wherewithal to run with the idea does so, though...

"Tome of Noise"? How have I not heard about this? That sounds like something I should know about already.

Not quite. Yes, it's going to cover noise and such, but also industrial, ambient and extreme forms of punk. I think he draws the line at hardcore punk, so obviously no regular punk rock.

I'm not into punk rock, but I respect it and would be all for such an archive. I think it's safe to say that just about everyone here would love to see an archive for every genre. Hell, I can't stand any of the hip-hop I've ever heard, with very, very, very isolated exceptions, but even I would be curious to browse a hip-hop archive just for my own education.

this sounds ownage, is there like an eta on it?

A collection of ideas only at this point. He's pretty swamped with RL work. I guess a year or two at the very least?

So everything from Skinny Puppy to Nurse With Wound to Merzbow to Church of Raism to Caul? Sounds nice....

There will never be a punk archives equal to MA because punks aren't as meticulous and nerdy as metalheads.

Today most punks are metalheads themselves.

This is the truest thing ever spoken.

There was a Hardcore Database for a while, I did a lot of work with it early on (everybody was laughing about how it only had post emo swoopcore bullshit instead of Black Flag and Minor Threat, so instead of laughing at the guy I was busy adding Black Flag and Minor Threat), but yeah the problem is that it's a TON of work and you need a bunch of hopelessly obsessive weirdos to make it work. Luckily MA has that in abundance but we kinda hit a lottery in that regard. I lost interest after a month or so and HCDB went the way of the dodo bird in a very short time, though it probably didn't help that the owner/operator/webmaster wasn't a very good English speaker, so communication wasn't always easy. He was asking me to make rules for the site since he couldn't write very well, and that one simple task wound up being a total pain. This is why I stick to basic site/review modding and help with behind the scenes ideas here, actually being in charge of that shit is ridiculous.

Basically the demise of HCDB and all the attempts at Punk Archives that go nowhere should serve as a reminder to how great MA is and you should all probably send gift baskets to the mods.

Yeah, but there are also several metalheads (in this very forum) fans of hardcore, thrashcore, PV, grindcore, goregrind, metalcore, post hardcore and all those niche genres.
Such site would work if it operated in unison with MA. For a start, bands denied here could be sent to the sister site for evaluation and all users here could have their profiles mirrored there.

For example, the film section of rateyourmusic is kept alive because it's seamlesslly tied to the music section of the site.

The much needed freaks to keep it running are we ourselves.

I like the idea of a punk encyclopedia, but yeah, enormous undertaking. That being said I just don't see it having the same level of completion as MA.
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I doubt the vast majority of metalheads are actually crazy about the various niche extreme punk genres and that most who seem to be are largely faking enthusiasm on the grounds that they are fellow underground genres. Extreme punk just plain doesn't have the same base of support as extreme metal. This is because metal is better, overall, than punk (IMO).

Does it need to be the majority? You just need a good bunch of people to get the thing going.

That's my point, there is no large base from which to draw the true, the elite. There is a much smaller pool which will have no better a ratio of psycho fanatics than the larger pool for metal. So there will be fewer suitable people to run it in absolute terms.

You know a good chunk of the 100k bands here on metal-archives are either totally unknown, irrelevant, never released anything more than a demo or bedroom projects. Those kinds of bands are added by the musicians themselves. The archives would be just as fine without them.

An archive about hardcore and the likes with only the 10000 or so relevant bands would be totally worth it, and that could be mantained with like 5% of the current contributors to MA.

Personally I'd love to see a Punk Archives. I don't know how websites work but if the webmasters were interested, couldn't there be a Punk Archives based on the Metal Archives framework, kind of like with wiki's? Of course they wouldn't have to run it or even have anything to do with it if they didn't want to, I'm just assuming interested users of this site (like myself) would contribute to it.

There was Kill From the Heart, which was a decent archive. It was limited to bands formed before 1990, so that was a limitation. The guy who ran it was in college when it started and it was hosted by NYU's server. He moved it after he finished school but he hasn't updated it a number of years, shortly after moving it, so I don't know what happened there. There is also the Flex hardcore discography. I don't know if it's still updated or not but it listed tons of records, lots with pressing info and some with short reviews. It was strictly about the records and didn't have any band info, though.

I'll have to check those out! The one I have in mind would have only one limit though, what's punk enough, like Metal Archives only accepts bands that are metal enough. I really do think it's worth the effort if there's people willing to put effort into it, I mean I would at the very least.

I think somebody just needs to make this. Have a discussion with Morrigan and HellBlazer on the backbone and specifics on this site, and just start churning and burning and figure it out as you go.

Assuming they'd be ok with it lol, I mean I could ask but I don't know it would go considering I don't have any experience with web design.

So this evidently didnt end up happening, and I have to say, it would probably be incredibly easy to do (hardly any web design required) if the existing metal archives site were open sourced

Well, you'd also need a staff of obsessive nerds to craft policy (e.g. what is "punk enough") and do moderation work, as well as a userbase of obsessive nerds to add bands and shit. A very small portion of the work would go into building the site itself.

Still, why isn't the website open-source? Is there a disadvantage? Security reasons?

Firstly, the owners of the site are under no obligation to share the source code of the hard work they did for free to support and chronicle the history of metal, just so others who didn't have the same amount of dedication can leech off of that insurmountable work and use it for half assed databases with little moderation. Don't forget, the success of metal archives is not only to be attributed to the software, but also the work of the moderating and editing community. The two factors go hand in hand.

Secondly, security reasons for sure. This site might have some people out there with grudges against it, and giving out the source code might open the floodgates for those among them who can analyze code for weaknesses and use it to hack the site, potentially causing damage and downtime. In combination with the relatively few programmers and huge user base, I think making the site open source is a bad idea.

When you put it that way, I don't disagree. I did think of it as a sister site though if it used the source code.

The fact that I'm still having to scrape the ends of the internet to source hardcore/punk/whatever music I discover on YouTube is a shame. Websites like CDBaby and BandCamp are pretty good at giving unsigned, smaller talent a spotlight, and for buying stuff, but it obviously doesn't take the place of an actual archive.

That'd be great, and I can imagine there are already a bunch of dedicated punk fans among the dedicated MA people (staff and non-staff).

Can we not necro threads 3 years old, please?