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.
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?
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.
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... _________________ Bluesky · Facebook · Spotify · X
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. _________________ Bluesky · Facebook · Spotify · X
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. 🤔
Thanks, sorry about that and thanks for reporting, just checking into now... (EDIT: hopefully fixed). _________________ Bluesky · Facebook · Spotify · X
DommeDamianImperfect, sensitive Aspie with a melody addictionProfile where the flowers grow.
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. _________________ My Top 100 :
www.besteveralbums.com/thechart.php?c=4...amp;page=1
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.
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.
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). _________________ Bluesky · Facebook · Spotify · X
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albummaster
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