May site update

[albummaster]

I'm going to start out by saying a big thank you to those people that are posting on the forums or using the site regularly, particularly The_111th_Beatle for a really interesting thread to vote for the best UK album. (I have to stay neutral, otherwise the site would be accused of bias, but I am looking on with interest to see who ends up winning!)

For everyone else, your continued support for visiting the site is really appreciated, so a big shout particularly to AfterHours, bc1991, Mr.Music, empire22, Slops, EriK, Johnny Cage, warren1949, indianstallion, rooneydbc, smudge, hsfear, doop, Carnagevisors, darkstar87, YellowBook, SamTheMan, bpaulb, CrustyJello, GOMETS81, michael_reeves and brjaga (and for anyone else I may have missed.) Also, thanks and welcome to the new members (especially So_MucH_Critics and dopethrone) - you are very welcome!

So, the notable changes:

• A new poll added to the home page for the best US album. Apologies if some of the selections are not to everyone's taste and obviously there are a *lot* of albums that have been missed off (there's only room for so many!) The candidates for this list were taken from the Make Chart functionality and I wanted to get a mix of albums from different decades to make it more interesting.
  
• The login area has been changed so it's a bit more private as to who is currently online etc. Also, it was taking up too much space before - it's a lot smaller now.
  
• We've added a strip to display twelve random albums across the top and bottom of certain pages to make the album pages more accessible and also to throw up interesting albums that perhaps are a bit more low key than some of the more obvious one (e.g. those albums that lurk towards the back of some of the charts.)
  
• Band names are now displayed as 'The Beatles' rather than 'Beatles, The' - before it was to help with sorting on some of the charts, but now where sorting is required e.g. on the search page, albums are sorted using the old style of name but the name is displayed correctly.

Your ideas are always welcome to help improve the site so please drop us a note in the suggestions forum. All ideas are considered, no matter how small or far out they may seem and a lot of them do get implemented.

More updates to follow...

albummaster