For a while now, I've had misgivings about the way that MA handles the listing of deceased band members in a lineup. It seems that the current standard, utilized by moderators and contributors alike, is:

1) If the band of the deceased member is split-up, do not change the "last known lineup" member to a past member.
2) If the band has any other status, immediately move the deceased member from the active members to the past members section.

I disagree with 2) for a variety of reasons. There are many occasions when a band decides not to move forward after the death of a key member; Type O Negative and Death are very salient examples among hundreds of other famous occurrences. We should not presume automatically that a band is going to continue on without that deceased member, since many do not. If the band thinks about it and *does* eventually decide to split up as a result of the member's death, they would usually say that the band ceased to exist when the person died. It's not like "a past member of our band died and we split up a few days later". More worrying is that, when the band does split up, somebody always has to remember to move the "past" deceased member back to "last known lineup", or else it just looks like the person left the band before they died.

Then we have situations like this. A band goes on hold in 2013 and their only drummer ever dies in 2018. A moderator moves the dead drummer to the "past members" section even though the band isn't currently active. What if the band never reforms and splits up while in this on-hold state? After all, the drummer was in the band for the entire time they were active as a musical group. For this mistake to be corrected, somebody has to have a reason to sift through the edit history, see that the drummer was active in the lineup when the band originally went on hold, and mentally connect the timeline enough to know to add him back to the last known lineup. The scenario I listed in the previous paragraph seems to be a case of jumping the gun a bit on the part of our editors; a situation like the one in this paragraph seems to actually have the potential to severely muddy the quality of the database.

What do I suggest? I think the Metal Gods should implement guidelines saying something like "Do not move a deceased musician to 'past members' unless the band has declared in an official publication either that they are still active or that they have found a replacement". Otherwise, we open ourselves to problems with chronological inconsistency that are hard to monitor with MA's current database system.

I'm open to thoughts and discussion on this. What do you think?

I think the wording of the lineup categories is what's important here.

A deceased artist cannot be part of an active band and it would look silly if we listed as such in an active lineup... I think they might even be moved automatically, but I'm not sure. Of course, you're right we can't presume a band continues... but unless the band releases an official statement, the only other solution to this would be to mark the band's status as "unknown" every time a member dies, which for obvious reasons, would be a huge cleanup pain. It's debatable whether leaving them as (deceased) active musicians is a better alternative to moving them then someone potentially forgetting to move them back to the last known lineup after changing the status. I personally would say it isn't, especially if that particular members' years active are clearly shown as ending in the same year as the band's activity. Yeah, it's not perfect and does leave us open to minor inaccuracies, but I just can't see leaving deceased musicians in an active lineup as a better solution.

Now for the other category: last known lineup. In my opinion, it was a bad decision from the moderator move the drummer to past members, when he died 5 years after the band's cessation. The tab clearly shows "last known" (implying until 2013), and he was indeed a member until then. If the band had reformed, then he would've had reason.

EDIT: I just tested, moving to past members is not automatic. Metal gods, feel free to remove 2 undeserved points gained from testing.