Best Ever Albums

Re: June 2026 site update (forum refresh)

albummaster — Thu, 9 Jul 2026 10:32:46 GMT

Author: albummaster

Posted: 07/09/2026 14:32

DommeDamian wrote:

I have now done the review in a separate thread
https://www.besteveralbums.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=759382#759382

Let me know when it'll show as a link on the charts (like it does here) and not just text. And thanks again for all the edits.

No worries and thanks for your understanding and the great review. I'll keep you posted (more than likely be a couple of updates away as quite a bit upcoming/already in progress). There was a bit of pushback against very long reviews in the past, ~8,000 chars was the max figure settled on somewhere in the mists of time. Not sure how many other people have had problems with this limit, it would be interesting to know.
(EDIT: located)

Re: June 2026 site update (forum refresh)

DommeDamian — Thu, 9 Jul 2026 10:19:34 GMT

Author: DommeDamian

Posted: 07/09/2026 14:19

I have now done the review in a separate thread
https://www.besteveralbums.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=759382#759382

Let me know when it'll show as a link on the charts (like it does here) and not just text. And thanks again for all the edits.

Re: June 2026 site update (forum refresh)

albummaster — Thu, 9 Jul 2026 06:58:22 GMT

Author: albummaster

Posted: 07/09/2026 10:58

DommeDamian wrote:

My review is 15769 characters. Maybe I should post the review as a thread, and then the description on my chart could be a link. But is it possible to make links/URLs in charts like we do in the forums?

The current 8,000-character limit is intended to keep reviews readable. I'd consider increasing it slightly in a future update, but 15,000+ characters is quite a bit higher than the current limit (roughly equivalent to six A4 pages of text). It is planned to allow links to other parts of the site (from comments) on the 2026 roadmap, which could include links to forum threads.

DommeDamian wrote:

Another bug currently: whenever I go on a chart or a user's ratings, and I click "Show all" on the artists, as soon as I click the alphabetical order, it goes out.

Apologies, I'll look into that and get it fixed. (EDIT: fix deployed / some areas may still be cached for a short while)

DommeDamian wrote:

A question: regarding tracks on an album that has long words, it goes over the track-rating stars, for example track 2 on
The Holy Bible (1994) by Manic Street Preachers. Any ideas?

I'll look into that and get it fixed as well. It looks like some background changes in the last site update may have introduced that issue. (EDIT: fix deployed)

Re: June 2026 site update (forum refresh)

DommeDamian — Thu, 9 Jul 2026 06:45:21 GMT

Author: DommeDamian

Posted: 07/09/2026 10:45

My review is 15769 characters. Maybe I should post the review as a thread, and then the description on my chart could be a link. But is it possible to make links/URLs in charts like we do in the forums?

Another bug currently: whenever I go on a chart or a user's ratings, and I click "Show all" on the artists, as soon as I click the alphabetical order, it goes out.

A question: regarding tracks on an album that has long words, it goes over the track-rating stars, for example track 2 on
The Holy Bible (1994) by Manic Street Preachers. Any ideas?

Re: June 2026 site update (forum refresh)

albummaster — Sat, 4 Jul 2026 08:23:41 GMT

Author: albummaster

Posted: 07/04/2026 12:23

DommeDamian wrote:

Also, how many characters can I write on a description for an album on a chart? Because right now, I have a long review for an album next time I update my Top 100 Greatest Albums, and I know it's about the character count.

Currently, the limit is about ~8,000 characters (roughly 1,200–1,500 words). If you hit that limit, let me know. It's something that could be increased in a future update, but would probably still keep a limit in place to help maintain the readability of charts.

Re: June 2026 site update (forum refresh)

DommeDamian — Sat, 4 Jul 2026 08:13:34 GMT

Author: DommeDamian

Posted: 07/04/2026 12:13

Also, how many characters can I write on a description for an album on a chart? Because right now, I have a long review for an album next time I update my Top 100 Greatest Albums, and I know it's about the character count.

Re: June 2026 site update (forum refresh)

albummaster — Fri, 3 Jul 2026 13:05:20 GMT

Author: albummaster

Posted: 07/03/2026 17:05

baystateoftheart wrote:

Thank you for all your work AM!

In my opinion the new design would look cleaner and better without the (started by username ) tags, which don't add a lot of value and make it feel a bit cluttered, especially on mobile. Also, is there a way to have the archive section of the forums collapsed by default?

Thanks for feedback, can definitely lose the started by username tags on mobile to declutter a bit (but retain on desktop for the time being, personally find it useful to see who started a thread). Also, hadn't realised the archive forums were showing at all. I'll check into why that's happening and make a fix.

Re: June 2026 site update (forum refresh)

baystateoftheart — Fri, 3 Jul 2026 12:51:50 GMT

Author: baystateoftheart

Posted: 07/03/2026 16:51

Thank you for all your work AM!

In my opinion the new design would look cleaner and better without the (started by username ) tags, which don't add a lot of value and make it feel a bit cluttered, especially on mobile. Also, is there a way to have the archive section of the forums collapsed by default?

Re: June 2026 site update (forum refresh)

albummaster — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 04:52:30 GMT

Author: albummaster

Posted: 06/28/2026 08:52

DommeDamian wrote:

A suggestion regarding parented artist: if a collab is between two registered artists on the platform, the album can go into both artist when shown (e.g. in user's ratings) For example, Molina & Johnson (2009) by Molina & Johnson could both show on in Jason Molina and Will Johnson's catalog.[/qoute]

ManhattenJack wrote:

It seems to me that would require some sort of "non band-member collaboration" flag to be set for each collaboration album, to distinguish Molina & Johnson-type collaborations from albums made by regular bands whose members also make solo albums, no? It might be feasible though, since such a flag would be set to "No" by default, but it still involves a value judgement plus a lot of work — if you did it for every collaboration, you'd get (for example) all the Led Zep albums when you just want to see the Robert Plant solo stuff.

I'm not saying it's a bad idea, nor would I deign to speak for anyone else, it's just that personally I'd much rather see basic BBCode tags enabled in chart annotations and album comments before getting into anything like that.

Thanks for the idea DommeDamian and I get why this has been suggested, but it will be hard to differentiate 100,000 artists and work out if they are a duo or a band etc, or if one artist has more input than the other (also for different albums they have performed/composed together etc). Do we limit this to duos or how about trios, quartets etc. The current system isn't perfect, but it's relatively simple to administer and I think a change along the lines proposed would add extra layers of complexity and the costs of adding it (in terms of the impact to the site) might not outweigh the benefits of doing it.

I do understand that some artists might be 'ranked' lower than they might otherwise be on BEA due to some of their work being with other people and only their solo work mainly being considered, but the artist rankings on the site were really just an offshoot and haven't had a lot of time spent on them compared to other areas of the site. I agree, to be more accurate, the rankings should take into account artist appearances in other collaborations etc and maybe there's a way of doing it without too much disruption to the inner workings of the site (& MJ has commented on potential difficulties of doing that), but there also are many artists not listed in collaborations on BEA because they haven't released solo work, so whatever rankings we came up with on BEA, they'd always be imperfect and missing those artists (unless the site relaxed the rules on artist memberships).

Re: June 2026 site update (forum refresh)

MadhattanJack — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 18:19:40 GMT

Author: MadhattanJack

Posted: 06/27/2026 22:19

DommeDamian wrote:

A suggestion regarding parented artist: if a collab is between two registered artists on the platform, the album can go into both artist when shown (e.g. in user's ratings)
For example, Molina & Johnson (2009) by Molina & Johnson could both show on in Jason Molina and Will Johnson's catalog.

Re: June 2026 site update (forum refresh)

DommeDamian — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 12:46:55 GMT

Author: DommeDamian

Posted: 06/27/2026 16:46

This is all cool. Thanks for all the awesome work and updates, AM.
A suggestion regarding parented artist: if a collab is between two registered artists on the platform, the album can go into both artist when shown (e.g. in user's ratings)
For example, Molina & Johnson (2009) by Molina & Johnson could both show on in Jason Molina and Will Johnson's catalog.

Re: June 2026 site update (forum refresh)

albummaster — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 05:15:12 GMT

Author: albummaster

Posted: 06/26/2026 09:15

Thanks, sorry about that and thanks for reporting, just checking into now... (EDIT: hopefully fixed).

Re: June 2026 site update (forum refresh)

MadhattanJack — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 04:08:40 GMT

Author: MadhattanJack

Posted: 06/26/2026 08:08

albummaster wrote:

Thanks for reporting (and for feedback), that was a bug. Hopefully fixed now...

It is... sort of? The images are back, but sometimes when I click to see the next page of New Releases results, I get this error message page:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 268435456 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 16384 bytes)

...which looks fairly concerning. Maybe this has something to do with AI scraperbots and that sort of thing, but it doesn't seem to happen on other charts, just New Releases. 🤔

Re: June 2026 site update (forum refresh)

albummaster — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 03:47:14 GMT

Author: albummaster

Posted: 06/26/2026 07:47

Johnnyo wrote:

Thanks for all of the work that you do here AM.

I abandoned similar sites quite a while ago and only post on BEA as I feel that the interaction from others is interesting, knowledgeable, genuine and respectful, even if we sometimes disagree.

Love the site and the people here.

Thanks, appreciate it. And thanks for helping make the community what it is.

Re: June 2026 site update (forum refresh)

albummaster — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 03:40:34 GMT

Author: albummaster

Posted: 06/26/2026 07:40

MadhattanJack wrote:

Hmm... I think I like the new look? Thanks for doing all that stuff! 😁

One little issue I noticed, though: I'm not seeing any cover art on the New Releases chart anymore. (It's happening on both Firefox and Safari — Firefox shows a blank grey square, Safari shows it totally blank, but the link still works in both.) Other charts don't seem to be affected — is it intentional?

Thanks for reporting (and for feedback), that was a bug. Hopefully fixed now...

Re: June 2026 site update (forum refresh)

Johnnyo — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 12:40:40 GMT

Author: Johnnyo

Posted: 06/25/2026 16:40

Thanks for all of the work that you do here AM.

I abandoned similar sites quite a while ago and only post on BEA as I feel that the interaction from others is interesting, knowledgeable, genuine and respectful, even if we sometimes disagree.

Love the site and the people here.

Re: June 2026 site update (forum refresh)

MadhattanJack — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 19:11:29 GMT

Author: MadhattanJack

Posted: 06/24/2026 23:11

Hmm... I think I like the new look? Thanks for doing all that stuff! 😁

One little issue I noticed, though: I'm not seeing any cover art on the New Releases chart anymore. (It's happening on both Firefox and Safari — Firefox shows a blank grey square, Safari shows it totally blank, but the link still works in both.) Other charts don't seem to be affected — is it intentional?

June 2026 site update (forum refresh)

albummaster — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 04:33:51 GMT

Author: albummaster

Posted: 06/24/2026 08:33

A site update has just been deployed mainly focusing on the forums. It took a bit longer than anticipated, but the forums now blend in better with the rest of the site. Spending so much time on this has pushed what was originally planned with the rest of the site backwards. If you want to chat with humans about albums, then BEA is set up for it and the community here is what differentiates BEA from talking to an AI prompt.

Over the past few months, the focus has shifted to improving the tooling on BEA for communicating and interacting with other users and surfacing these interactions and the underlying data to humanise the site. This year has been unlike any other in BEA's history due to the trend towards AI and ensuring BEA can continue to be an important destination for album fans.

Due to the volume of changes in this update, the next few weeks will probably be spent mopping up any issues before reverting back to the items on the 2026 roadmap and taking stock again at the start of Q3.

Other changes:
- Increased invalid release date threshold to top 8,000 albums (top 10,000 target)
- Year/decade artist summary now grouped by parent artist (also all chart compositions and user listened etc)
- Fixed can't add member to collaboration if member contains quotes
- Migrated more pages to friendly URLs
- Highlight top comments on album & artist pages
- Fixed 'see also' links for collaborations didn't include collaboration memberships
- Fixed rank numbering when only viewing parent artists on band stats page
- No longer include BestEverAlbums bot user in the user rankings
- Add OP to forum home page
- Fix search button still disabled after clicking back after a search
- Fix source still locked after saving/updating
- Fixed no artist stated in reassign album message

Further modernising the site and keeping it current remains a key part of the 2026 roadmap and a lot of progress has been made. It’s coming up to a year where I’ve been working on the site full time and the site has now pretty much had a nose to tail overhaul. There’s still loads to do and it's far from finished (if it ever will be). The site can't stay still for too long because it needs constant change just to survive.

Visitor numbers have increased during this year compared to last year which is encouraging to see across the site. The forums are the current focus and hoping that the latest changes will help to boost activity. Thank you to everyone who continues to support the site. It is genuinely appreciated.

Enjoy the site and more soon.
AM