Best Ever Albums

Re: Thoughts on album/chart of the day and daily posts

Johnnyo — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 09:51:24 GMT

Author: Johnnyo

Posted: 02/19/2026 14:51

CA Dreamin wrote:

As for the Beach Boys and Ozzy threads, we're still only partially through their discographies, so we certainly did not run out things to discuss. The issue is we're still awaiting album write-ups from two users whose names don't need mentioning because we know who they are 😶 .

Fair point. I know that I've been very remiss on the latest Ozzy write up. I feel justifiably rebuked and will try to do it shortly

To be fair, nothing to stop you going onto the next album CAD and I can just catch up. As Richard Dreyfuss famously said in Jaws "Don't wait for me for me"

Re: Thoughts on album/chart of the day and daily posts

albummaster — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 11:56:05 GMT

Author: albummaster

Posted: 02/18/2026 16:56

CA Dreamin wrote:

When I googled 'best albums of 2025', BEA did not show up at all. My browser capped results at 20 pages, so yikes, not even in 20 pages did we appear. However, when I changed the search to 'best albums of 2001', BEA appeared on page 3 of the results. That's an improvement, but it's worth mentioning it's still not good, and used to be much better. When I joined the site in 2014, a big reason was because BEA was so visible when I searched the web something music-related. BEA was appearing on page 1 of my search results back then. Not page 3. And that distinction is important, a dramatically affects the visibility of the site. You can look up the stats, but page 1 of search results get the vast majority of clicks, and most people don't even look at page 2 and below. If there's a way to get BEA back onto page 1, I think it would help.

SEO is something I'll definitely come back to after finishing the Q1 roadmap. There's so much other stuff to do, that it probably doesn't get enough dedicated time right now. I'll definitely be digging into the details when I next look at it to see what the underlying issues are. Also, sorry if I've been slack (in many aspects), but there's just so much to do.

Re: Thoughts on album/chart of the day and daily posts

CA Dreamin — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 11:21:16 GMT

Author: CA Dreamin

Posted: 02/18/2026 16:21

When I googled 'best albums of 2025', BEA did not show up at all. My browser capped results at 20 pages, so yikes, not even in 20 pages did we appear. However, when I changed the search to 'best albums of 2001', BEA appeared on page 3 of the results. That's an improvement, but it's worth mentioning it's still not good, and used to be much better. When I joined the site in 2014, a big reason was because BEA was so visible when I searched the web something music-related. BEA was appearing on page 1 of my search results back then. Not page 3. And that distinction is important, a dramatically affects the visibility of the site. You can look up the stats, but page 1 of search results get the vast majority of clicks, and most people don't even look at page 2 and below. If there's a way to get BEA back onto page 1, I think it would help.

As for the Beach Boys and Ozzy threads, we're still only partially through their discographies, so we certainly did not run out things to discuss. The issue is we're still awaiting album write-ups from two users whose names don't need mentioning because we know who they are 😶 .

Re: Thoughts on album/chart of the day and daily posts

Repo — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 14:24:01 GMT

Author: Repo

Posted: 02/17/2026 19:24

albummaster wrote:

I really enjoy browsing your threads and sometimes also participating when I get a chance, whatever happens isn’t intended to take any steam away from other people, but just to supplement it. No obituaries being written and love getting involved when I can. I also really like the Release Day Eve thread and read it quite a bit and don’t see it clashing with anything (the closest thing right now is the weekly new releases post, but that’s more just an informational list to make sure nothing’s missing here and will stay that way).

EDIT: sorry maybe misread what you wrote, latest releases in my post was referring to a trending album and not reviewing/discussing all latest releases. For example, for a while there’s been a trending album on the home page which highlights the current recent album with the most activity in the last time period (this can sometimes be the sane album multiple times in a row, until it falls out of the time window for latest releases), the trending album would be along those lines (algorithm might be different), and it might only be posted when the trending album changes. All these ideas that were posted to kick this off still need refining and were just put forward to get feedback and nothing set in stone

Thanks, AM! Sounds good! 🌻

Re: Thoughts on album/chart of the day and daily posts

albummaster — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 13:33:09 GMT

Author: albummaster

Posted: 02/17/2026 18:33

Repo wrote:

albummaster wrote:

Johnnyo wrote:

Some interesting points here.

I think that the Ozzy & Brian Wilson threads worked really well and lasted for quite a few pages but you ultimately run out of things to say so I think that Churn is very important. We need a number of new threads going up each month to keep conversations going on new topics. Some will work well and some won't but we need to give people different topics to engage with

I am part of two listening groups, 60's and 70's albums, so I'm posting at least two threads per month around the next months album and these are getting pretty good take up. I think that the Rumours one is now up to 4 / 5 pages. I'm going to continue to do these for the foreseeable future

Also, if someone is the owner of the thread, they have a vested interest in trying to keep the thread going and that seems to work for me anyway as I want to learn what peoples views are on the album.

I'm more than happy to continue to create mean full content

NB - I think that tournaments are a good idea

I love reading all the different threads and the ones you've created are amazing, but sometimes if threads aren't being created, automated posts help to fill a void. I'm hoping by improving the content of the daily posts that they could really help keep BEA looking current (by highlighting activity) and up-to-date in terms of the latest albums (and very much also keeping the historic albums in play, so the site can look both ways). Even if nobody responds, the site will appear to tick along and there's something new for people to look at.

In the background, one of the things I'm working on is creating Instagram posts (part of Q1 roadmap), which obviously target a different type of audience and need to be formatted very differently to the text-heavy content that the site delivers right now, but a nice side-effect of this might be that the new posts get some of that type of delivery (supporting graphics etc) with much better hooks to help engage people, which the current daily posts are lacking.

As pointed out elsewhere, latest releases aren't the site's primary purpose, but if they help to attract new users or engage existing users, then I'm all in favour of it (by definition they will keep things looking fresh). Of course, not every new release will end up in the Overall or Decade chart, but some will over time, and why miss out before they get there. Latest releases are important for current year charts, and surfacing the better ones is useful for people that like to keep on top of new music and an album site seems a decent place to talk about them (the aim won't be to surface releases that nobody has charted etc, so a trending algorithm would be used).

I think this ...

2026 Release Day Eve

... new-ish thread has been pretty helpful with that! It's been a great resource for finding 2026 albums for me with some AMAZING recs from MadhattenJack & Tap in particular.

Don't be writing the obituary for the Ozzy & Beach Boys threads just yet!!! :twisted:

Re: Thoughts on album/chart of the day and daily posts

Repo — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 12:44:46 GMT

Author: Repo

Posted: 02/17/2026 17:44

albummaster wrote:

Johnnyo wrote:

Re: Thoughts on album/chart of the day and daily posts

Johnnyo — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 12:41:41 GMT

Author: Johnnyo

Posted: 02/17/2026 17:41

albummaster wrote:

Johnnyo wrote:

Valid points AM.

A combination of the automated posts and more users posting their own is the ideal scenario and I’m going to do my part in trying to make that happen.

Keep up the great work that you are doing on improvements. They are really appreciated

Re: Thoughts on album/chart of the day and daily posts

albummaster — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 10:02:49 GMT

Author: albummaster

Posted: 02/17/2026 15:02

Johnnyo wrote:

Re: Thoughts on album/chart of the day and daily posts

Johnnyo — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 09:48:55 GMT

Author: Johnnyo

Posted: 02/17/2026 14:48

Forgot to say. We know that What album are you listening to is the most successful thread by a huge distance in both the number of posts and it's longevity. I thought that it might be useful to think about why and can we replicate that success. The first three thoughts that came to mind;

1. It's immediate. It's what someone is actually doing at that moment so there is no thought needed regarding content

2. It prompts engagement with other, again, pretty much straight away. If someone posts an album that I have thoughts about I'll respond to their post

3. I actively look out for anyone posting about my post so that we can start a conversation

Do you have anything else to add as to why it's so successful and can we replicate that?

[/quote]

Re: Thoughts on album/chart of the day and daily posts

Johnnyo — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 08:35:09 GMT

Author: Johnnyo

Posted: 02/17/2026 13:35

Romanelli wrote:

threads that were sparked by the passings of Ozzy & Brian Wilson are fading into obscurity after the earlier and best works of those artists have been gone over. What DOES seem to gain something of a foothold are the threads about specific albums that go into detail about the album...giving something of a story, and then going over the album track by track and inviting comments. Those are doing much better than the automated posts, on which, realistically, you get in the way of discussion what you put out there...which is nothing more than what you're doing with the long albums thread. In other words...the automated threads are almost the same as the Albums thread...no discussion started, with no real discussion happening as a result. The difference is that the empty automated threads take up whole pages of the forum, while the Albums thread shows as one item.

If you want discussions, someone has to START a discussion. I think it's been proven that a picture of an album cover doesn't do that. Neither does calling something Album Of The Day. There has to be more in order to get more in the way of discussions.

Solutions? Well, I would explore how do we get people involved in creating content. When we have tournaments here, people are encouraged to take on specific films or albums and try to gain votes for them.

Ultimately...I think we're looking at things backwards. We shouldn't be relying on automated posts to create conversations for us. We should be putting in more effort as a community to make that happen. Not every thread is going to work, but I think we can finds ways to create better content here. It's not like we don't all have things in common...

Re: Thoughts on album/chart of the day and daily posts

albummaster — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 12:50:01 GMT

Author: albummaster

Posted: 02/16/2026 17:50

Romanelli wrote:

I also do not believe that plowing my way through ten to twenty new albums every week is going to find the best ever albums. On the BEA overall chart (top 1000), there are only 21 from the decade of the 2020's. To me, the fixation on new releases is kinda the opposite of the premise of the site.

I may be alone in this thinking. I may not be. Point is...it would not be unanimous in thinking that concentrating AOTD on new releases would be a good thing. I get that a lot of people dig new releases. I'm just putting it out there that not everyone here does.

The direction will probably be one anniversary post, which will by definition be an older album, and then a 'trending' album in a different post (8 hours apart) which will likely be a new release constrained within a recent time period. This will keep the site fresher because we won't always be talking about the same albums, and there are users who want to know about the best of the current releases (including myself) and the trending aspect should act as a filter because the site won't be highlighting albums that haven't got any comments/ratings/rankings etc. This is the best of both worlds and people can simply ignore posts they are not interested in (like they do now). It might be slightly against the premise, but don't want BEA to be a museum that people visit once in a while to check out the exhibits, to grow it needs to appear more current.

Romanelli wrote:

Also: I did a google search of Best Albums Of 2025, from my spot in the central US. 22 pages, zero BEA results. Best Albums All Time - page 1, 3 results down. Best Albums 2026 - page 2, 5 down. It looks to me like BEA got buried in the 2025 search because everyone else in the world has published their own lists for best of 2025.

Good to know, impossible for the site to rank top for everything (as you say, a lot of competition for those search terms), but BEA does well for 'best albums by [artist]' searches and many others. The game changes all the time, but generally on top of it as much I can with everything else that I need to do (it's not something I can focus on as much as other sites), so just something I keep an eye on, but not every day.

Johnnyo wrote:

I've been populating a few of the albums with "invalid release date" each day and happy to start to do far more over the next week or so to help enter dates for pre 2004 albums so that we can have a variety of albums to pick from each day

Thanks and noted (and other insights on comments seem aligned). Need to wait for at least the top 1,000 to be populated to give a fair chance of a daily anniversary (as not evenly distributed). Once there's a decent population and background stuff done (like new post/social media designs etc) this can be changed, but probably not for a few weeks as hands very full with Q1 roadmap.

Re: Thoughts on album/chart of the day and daily posts

Johnnyo — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 11:09:01 GMT

Author: Johnnyo

Posted: 02/16/2026 16:09

Romanelli wrote:

To me, one of the better things about BEA is that it refers to comments, and not reviews. In most cases, the comments are easier to read here simply because they tend to be shorter and to the point, rather than long and tedious reviews like you get at RYM. RYM calls them reviews, and it's a nightmare of people who love to hear themselves talk, and who write unreadable novels filled with drivel. I would hope that BEA continues to refer to them as comments, and not reviews.

Agree with that. I have done a few comments that are maybe three or four longish paragraphs but I try to keep my thoughts as succinct as I can. Maybe a fairly generous limit on characters might be helpful but I think people here tend to not do the RYM mega posts that are just too much.

Re: Thoughts on album/chart of the day and daily posts

Johnnyo — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 09:47:46 GMT

Author: Johnnyo

Posted: 02/16/2026 14:47

[quote="albummaster"]

• Chart of the Day: Right now it’s just there, so thinking of replacing it with a "Recently updated charts" or "Trending charts" feed (based on activity, or a combination of both) to show off what people here are actually creating on a more timely basis. This might also help to surface newer releases in current-year charts etc. We’d put some safeguards in, so people can’t just spam-save the same chart to stay on top etc./[quote]

Ditch Chart of the day. Personal, If I want to comment on a chart I go to the comments section for that chart.

I'm not so sure about replacing it with recently updated as there's already a way of searching for those if you want but I like the idea of Trending Charts,

Re: Thoughts on album/chart of the day and daily posts

Johnnyo — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 09:43:33 GMT

Author: Johnnyo

Posted: 02/16/2026 14:43

Romanelli wrote:

I may be alone in this thinking. I may not be. Point is...it would not be unanimous in thinking that concentrating AOTD on new releases would be a good thing. I get that a lot of people dig new releases. I'm just putting it out there that not everyone here does.

Also: I did a google search of Best Albums Of 2025, from my spot in the central US. 22 pages, zero BEA results. Best Albums All Time - page 1, 3 results down. Best Albums 2026 - page 2, 5 down.

It looks to me like BEA got buried in the 2025 search because everyone else in the world has published their own lists for best of 2025.

I agree with you Rom. I think that AOTD needs to be a significant anniversary of some sort (5, 10, 15 all the way to 60 or beyond etc.) which would automatically preclude new releases which is why I'm happy to do some work on the "invalid release date" entries so that we can have a reasonable database to work from.

I, like you, buy very few new releases any more. I may buy maybe 10 / 20 a year but that's a small %age of my overall purchases per year.

Re: Thoughts on album/chart of the day and daily posts

Romanelli — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 09:34:08 GMT

Author: Romanelli

Posted: 02/16/2026 14:34

Just a note here...

Again, I realize that everyone's musical and album journey is different. Me? I don't touch new releases, and I have absolutely zero interest in them. Why? I simply don't have time. There are so many albums from other years and decades that I haven't discovered yet, and so many still out there. New albums are like the lottery. People are going to make themselves crazy trying to hear all the new music...the reality is, they are going to listen to the most bad music possible. In about five years, when I start picking up my first 2025 releases, there will be a MUCH smaller number of those albums to choose from, because most of the new stuff people are filling up on right now will be gone and forgotten, and for good reason. There is no way that even half of the new releases being digested are even worth hearing. It's always been that way, and it always will be. Ignoring new releases has always been my simple and easy way of weeding out the bad albums without having to actually do all that work.

I also do not believe that plowing my way through ten to twenty new albums every week is going to find the best ever albums. On the BEA overall chart (top 1000), there are only 21 from the decade of the 2020's. To me, the fixation on new releases is kinda the opposite of the premise of the site.

I may be alone in this thinking. I may not be. Point is...it would not be unanimous in thinking that concentrating AOTD on new releases would be a good thing. I get that a lot of people dig new releases. I'm just putting it out there that not everyone here does.

Also: I did a google search of Best Albums Of 2025, from my spot in the central US. 22 pages, zero BEA results. Best Albums All Time - page 1, 3 results down. Best Albums 2026 - page 2, 5 down.

It looks to me like BEA got buried in the 2025 search because everyone else in the world has published their own lists for best of 2025.

Re: Thoughts on album/chart of the day and daily posts

Johnnyo — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 09:04:43 GMT

Author: Johnnyo

Posted: 02/16/2026 14:04

Coming late to the conversation and can see a lot of discussion already but wanted to respond, where I can to each point rather than pull them into one post which would be so long as to try the patience of Job, so here are my thoughts on the original post by AM. Other thoughts to follow where I think I might have something constructive to contribute

albummaster wrote:

Been observing for a long while that both those posts (certainly COTD) aren’t getting much, if any, daily engagement (despite the odd tweak here or there), so after five thousand or so, can’t believe it’s been over ten years, it might be time to change things.

Here’s what I’m thinking for a shake-up:
• Ditching AoTD for Anniversaries: Instead of a semi-random album, we pivot to anniversaries so the selections become more grounded to the real world (now that we are capturing data for older albums, this is possible). To avoid annual repeats of the same albums, we could talk about an album turning 10 or 20 today rather than just a random pick right now that nobody’s commenting on. Milestone anniversaries should help ensure there’s a bit of rotation (e.g. only celebrate if 50, 40, 30, 25, 20, 15, 10, 5 in descending order, and highest rank wins if there’s a tie etc). At worst, you get to talk about OK Computer once every five years.

Absolutely. I do comment on the AOTD posts sometimes but not on a regular basis.

I think that celebrating an anniversary is a great idea.

I've been populating a few of the albums with "invalid release date" each day and happy to start to do far more over the next week or so to help enter dates for pre 2004 albums so that we can have a variety of albums to pick from each day

Re: Thoughts on album/chart of the day and daily posts

albummaster — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 03:35:43 GMT

Author: albummaster

Posted: 02/16/2026 08:35

MadhattanJack wrote:

Okay... I can accept that that's what you're seeing, but I can't physically go to Spain right now and use a residential internet connection to get a legitimate Spanish IP address. (I wish I could — I would stay there too, if possible!) The best I can do is set my VPN to connect via proxies in Madrid or Barcelona.

But when I do that, and I enter anything album- or music-related into Google, even if I specifically enter Google.es into the URL for the search results, I still get no BEA results whatsoever, checking through 15-20 pages of results each time. I even tried "mejores álbumes de 2025," and got the same (non-) results. (I don't have "SafeSearch" on either, btw, or whatever they're calling that now.)

So I hate to ask this and be such a pain in the butt, but if other members here are reading this, especially those on residential ISPs outside of the United States, could y'all try entering "Best Albums of 2025" into Google, and seeing where (if at all) BEA shows up in the results? I'm not an "SEO professional," and maybe they've got some sort of algorithmic shenanigans going on, so I could be inadvertently blowing smoke here... but normally I just don't see this unless the Googlebots are being completely blocked.

By the way, I also believe (strongly) that new AOTD-type threads about new albums would generate more replies and discussion than threads about old albums. How you'd pick them is anyone's guess, but for me at least, it's just more fun to talk about new stuff than old stuff, even if I'd rather actually listen to old stuff most of the time.

Thanks for follow up and interesting findings. I treat all reports seriously and will perform checks to see if something is amiss (there are always segments worth reviewing more closely, so I’ll dig into the specific cases you’re describing). SEO is one of the many tasks I have to juggle, but I check web stats weekly at a high level to see if the analytics dashboard is flashing red (Google would figuratively tell me if pages are unable to be indexed & there's nothing right now indicating a problem on a big scale and Googlebot is certainly not being blocked). I also check stats monthly at a more detailed level and make tweaks if they are needed (e.g. specific pages with issues). I’ve made a note to spend time in the next monthly review to get underneath the issues you are raising and to see if there might be drop-offs in some segments of traffic. The percentage of visitors to BEA arriving from search engines is not ringing alarm bells right now, traffic levels are higher than last year (even after blocking a huge number of AI scrapers).

There’s obviously a myriad of factors why your results are different to mine and not just location. I’ll break down performance by device and geography in the next review. If so, might be more related to factors beyond pure indexing (not just text on page) and may require bigger changes to the site. If structural changes are required, they’ll be sequenced after Q2 as I’m very keen to get the front half of the roadmap completed before I go back and do another site overhaul (the first half of the roadmap is critical).

Agree about newer albums, they definitely have the potential to freshen up the debate by including them more often and ensure there’s always something new to say. I think the trending album idea is heading in that direction (a recent release with high current activity, however that ends up being defined). By limiting the release period, it'll help to ensure no repeats. The anniversary album would then become the historical album for discussion to retain both past and future time windows. COTD evolving into a feed of recent charts will round out the changes to daily posts and give the site the feeling of being more alive.

The rest of the site is doing quite well in terms of overall activity, it’s really just the forums that have become a little stale. I'm hoping this will change through ongoing site improvements and obviously Google is a part of that, but there's also 50,000 existing users here to reengage and an incredible amount of work has happened (and is happening) in the background in that regard.

Re: Thoughts on album/chart of the day and daily posts

MadhattanJack — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:01:44 GMT

Author: MadhattanJack

Posted: 02/16/2026 05:01

albummaster wrote:

Thanks for responding, general use of search engines is declining due to AI, but BEA is still ranked pretty high on Google for many search terms (but not all). Not blocking Googlebot (and a few others), just the badly-behaved AI crawlers (of which there are many). Of course, there's a lot of competition for high volume search terms (best albums of 2025 etc, BEA is page 2 right now), and BEA isn't participating in paid search, so it's all organic, and obviously battling against much bigger companies with their own teams of SEO specialists and marketers etc (who can concentrate 100% of their time on one task). For long tail search terms, BEA still does pretty well and is top for many, although rankings change each time Google tweak their algorithm, so what's true today, might not be tomorrow.

Re: Thoughts on album/chart of the day and daily posts

albummaster — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 15:06:07 GMT

Author: albummaster

Posted: 02/15/2026 20:06

Romanelli wrote:

Thanks, appreciate all the insights and thanks for taking the time to write it. I didn’t intend to raise too many eyebrows with the review/comment statement and to be honest that’s only a small aspect of everything. I guess I’m using the term review interchangeably with comment because people can use the comment text box to say whatever they like, in whatever way they like and a review doesn’t have to be an essay. Some people are using the text to write short form comments or to engage in conversation, others like to leave reviews (whatever length but generally short), and others like to list all the ratings they made for each track.

I think an upper character limit should be capped at a level that contains existing comments which could prevent the extreme long form that you are alluding to as I’m not a big fan of those either, but I don’t think we have any here (or if we do, they are a tiny proportion). I’ve no wish either to mimic other sites and want to keep BEA unique. I don’t have access right now to check the database to see what that the current comment extremes might be. Another aspect is not whether you can add a long comment or not, but how BEA surfaces them. If you are on album page, it would be possible to present the first x lines of a comment with the ability to expand it. In the same way, any comments that were to be part of any vote as the ‘best comment’ could be based on engagement (replies, votes etc). That way, a 50-word comment that sparks activity is worth more than a 2,000-word essay that nobody reads. However, in terms of that proposed third post, I think it’s more likely to head in the direction of a trending album.

Romanelli wrote:

What I have seen is that just having an album on the forum as AOTD doesn't spark people to comment. Someone listening to an album on the long thread really doesn't, either. Even the threads that were sparked by the passings of Ozzy & Brian Wilson are fading into obscurity after the earlier and best works of those artists have been gone over. What DOES seem to gain something of a foothold are the threads about specific albums that go into detail about the album...giving something of a story, and then going over the album track by track and inviting comments.
Those are doing much better than the automated posts, on which, realistically, you get in the way of discussion what you put out there...which is nothing more than what you're doing with the long albums thread. In other words...the automated threads are almost the same as the Albums thread...no discussion started, with no real discussion happening as a result. The difference is that the empty automated threads take up whole pages of the forum, while the Albums thread shows as one item.

Part of the problem is the current posts are badly implemented in that they are not seeking debate, but they could be changed. Instead of just an automated anniversary post, maybe the bot’s job is to "set the stage" for a human. It’s how things should be now, but probably my real-life autistic personality shining through, which is not very conversational. For example, the anniversary post could include a "Track-by-Track" prompt or a specific "Where were you?" question to give people a hook to hang a comment on. The current aotd posts lack any kind of real hook and rely too much on users to think of something new to say when most of these albums have already been discussed a lot.

Agree about tournaments, I used to love seeing those and people are always welcome to run them (I wish there was enough time in a day and I had the right personality). Sometimes tournaments suffer from not getting enough participation as numbers on the forums for a while have made voting difficult, but if there’s any way to funnel people into these then worth thinking of solutions as they can be very enjoyable for everyone.

Romanelli wrote:

Ultimately...I think we're looking at things backwards. We shouldn't be relying on automated posts to create conversations for us. We should be putting in more effort as a community to make that happen. Not every thread is going to work, but I think we can finds ways to create better content here. It's not like we don't all have things in common...

Ideally, yes, but it hasn’t happened for a while (in regular volume) and seeding the forums helps things chug along with no constraint put on anyone else wanting to post their own material. At the end of the day, the purpose of the automation is to be the scaffolding, not the whole building. It should provide the rhythm, but we (the humans) provide the actual content. In terms of clutter, I agree this could be dealt with better and moving posts into announcements has made them far more visible than they were when they were interleaved amongst other threads in the music forum (also has the side-effect of burying site announcement history, so could look at archiving old posts out of sight maybe a few weeks after posting).

At the end of the day, if it doesn't work, we iterate again. Just trying to freshen the place up and inject something new.

Re: Thoughts on album/chart of the day and daily posts

Romanelli — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 11:30:17 GMT

Author: Romanelli

Posted: 02/15/2026 16:30

To me, one of the better things about BEA is that it refers to comments, and not reviews. In most cases, the comments are easier to read here simply because they tend to be shorter and to the point, rather than long and tedious reviews like you get at RYM. RYM calls them reviews, and it's a nightmare of people who love to hear themselves talk, and who write unreadable novels filled with drivel. I would hope that BEA continues to refer to them as comments, and not reviews.

What I have seen is that just having an album on the forum as AOTD doesn't spark people to comment. Someone listening to an album on the long thread really doesn't, either. Even the threads that were sparked by the passings of Ozzy & Brian Wilson are fading into obscurity after the earlier and best works of those artists have been gone over. What DOES seem to gain something of a foothold are the threads about specific albums that go into detail about the album...giving something of a story, and then going over the album track by track and inviting comments. Those are doing much better than the automated posts, on which, realistically, you get in the way of discussion what you put out there...which is nothing more than what you're doing with the long albums thread. In other words...the automated threads are almost the same as the Albums thread...no discussion started, with no real discussion happening as a result. The difference is that the empty automated threads take up whole pages of the forum, while the Albums thread shows as one item.

If you want discussions, someone has to START a discussion. I think it's been proven that a picture of an album cover doesn't do that. Neither does calling something Album Of The Day. There has to be more in order to get more in the way of discussions.

Solutions? Well, I would explore how do we get people involved in creating content. When we have tournaments here, people are encouraged to take on specific films or albums and try to gain votes for them.

https://www.besteveralbums.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=28943

The link is for a list of Best Films Of The 1940's. Since October, it's quietly gained 7 pages of content. People are not just submitting lists of films, they are also discussing the entire subject of films in the 40's. So, how do we translate that to the music forum, and with albums? Maybe we try doing something like lists of albums from specific genres, or decades, or years? Maybe turn those into tournaments (it matters not if it's been done before...chances are that most of the tournaments here were done long ago, with mostly different people involved). Maybe start discussions about what albums or artists you'd like to have discussions about. Encourage people to talk about these, even if it's been done to death. Rumours and the drama surrounding it has been talked about endlessly for decades. But we have a thread about it that's at 4 pages so far. It may have been talked about too much, but the point is, people are still wanting to talk about it. So...let's talk about it. I know I'm probably not articulating this well...maybe someone can help me get to the point better.

Ultimately...I think we're looking at things backwards. We shouldn't be relying on automated posts to create conversations for us. We should be putting in more effort as a community to make that happen. Not every thread is going to work, but I think we can finds ways to create better content here. It's not like we don't all have things in common...