September 2011 site update: New member ranks

[albummaster]

Member ranks
Over the next couple of months, BEA will finish delivering the 2011 roadmap, and a lot of work already has been carried out behind the scenes to facilitate some fairly big changes to the site. As part of this, member ranks on BEA have now been changed to use a points system which takes into account your contribution across the whole site.

Once the new points system goes fully live (in the next couple of weeks), your points will then determine the functionality that is available to you on BEA. The new system will not affect your ability to use any of the existing functionality on the site, but it may affect your ability to use some future functionality which is not yet released.

The only difference to now is that new members will start off with a maximum chart size of 40 entries, which will then grow in size the more that you use BEA. Additional (unreleased) features will also become available for those members beyond Level 4.

For existing members, if you already have a chart of 100 entries, and you are Level 3 or below, your chart will NOT be taken away from you. However, if you have already have a chart and you then delete it, your replacement chart will be subject to the new level restrictions.

Other important changes:
Alongside the above, several other changes have been made this month:

'Wish list' enhancements.
If you're anything like me, you might sometimes forget why you've added something to your wish list. So, a new feature has been added which allows you to add a note to each item on your wish list and set a priority. You don't have to supply these details, but if you do, when you come back to your wish list (after maybe not looking at it for a while), you'll have something to remind you of why you added a particular item to your wish list, and how important it was.

Chart moderation
A problem on BEA is that some users register multiple times and submit multiple charts. This can cause the overall rankings to be skewed a little bit, which then spoil the stats for other people. To help weed out these 'extra' charts, a screen has been added which shows all charts updated from the same IP address, and other charts similar to the one being viewed. Using this information, a member can then flag a chart as 'suspect'. Once a chart is flagged as 'suspect', it will be investigated by an admin.

Data moderators
Users with 1,000 mod points and over 100 forum posts can now edit 'locked' items and approve other user's edits. You will know if you have access to do this as there will be an extra help message on the admin pages, and your user profile page will show a 'Data moderator' label underneath your rank.

Rating other member charts.
If you don't have a chart of your own, you can no longer rate other member charts. (N.B. Members can still leave comments on other member charts, just not rate them.)

Voting comments up and down
The thumb icons, that indicate whether a comment is helpful or not, have been changed to a simple yes/no. The thumbs up/down had the wrong connotation before because people were incorrectly using them to 'endorse' comments rather than as a tool to say whether a comment was helpful or not. There is no change to the underlying function, and the 'helpful' label remains the same.

Ignore lists.
An 'ignore' button has been added across the site to allow people to filter out comments from particular users. When you 'ignore' somebody, comments from those members will be hidden (and the other person will not know you are ignoring them - unless you tell them!).

Support us
If you'd like to support BEA, you can do so in any of the following ways:

• Link to BEA from other websites. Talk about us on other websites, create a buzz and get people to check us out (but be careful not to do this in a spammy way!)
  
• Buy your music via BEA. If you discover a new album or track, with help from BEA, use the iTunes, Amazon and eBay buttons on this site to buy it from your favourite store. BEA gets a small commission (pennies), and it helps to pay our hosting fees.
  
• Subscribe to our newsletter. Keep up to date with the latest site news by subscribing to our FREE newsletter.
  
• Use our chart widget. Share your chart on Facebook (or any other website)! You can find our chart widget on the resources page.
  
• 'Like' us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. Liking us on Facebook is a great way to promote BEA! If some of your friends see that you 'like' us, they might check us out too!

Enjoy the site and more soon...

albummaster