January 2026 site update - Announcements - Forums : Best Ever Albums

albummaster

Janitor

Gender: Male

Site Admin

Happy 2026 to all. After all the changes over the past few months, this was meant to be a small site update, but grew into something bigger than intended.

Notification settings overhaul
For a long time, BEA’s site newsletter lived outside the main site and required a separate signup. This has now been brought in-house. As a result, notification settings on your profile page have now been reorganised into three categories, making them easier to manage as the site moves forward:

Site news & highlights – the BEA site newsletter
Account activity & progress – milestones, level-ups, and gentle nudges to keep you engaged (forthcoming)
Community interactions – notifications when other members interact with you (PMs, replies, ratings on your charts, etc.)

Existing newsletter subscribers have been migrated across automatically. So, if your newsletter email address matched your BEA profile, nothing changes. If it didn’t, you’ll need to re-subscribe from your profile page by enabling the relevant option. The site newsletter remains low-frequency (roughly quarterly).

N.B. There will be a one-off service email shortly containing more details, as only a small percentage of users will see this post.

Other updates
Forum bookmarks have existed for some time, but until now there was nowhere to view them. So, there is now a Bookmarks link in the Forums menu, where you’ll also find your Drafts. The forums have also had a small tidy-up to make them more consistent with the rest of the site, with more improvements to come as the site continues its makeover.

The Collectors Summary feature has also been updated to allow users to configure how many albums appear in their summary. Some users were finding it too restrictive, others too overwhelming. You can now start small (for example, the top 100 albums), scale up to the top 10,000, or disable the feature entirely - it’s up to you.

Miscellaneous changes

Forum post reactions now appear in activity streams
Added a link to each user’s activity stream from their profile page
Resources menu moved from the main menu to the site footer
Login page no longer repeats the login bar in the site header
Fixed issue searching for artists containing asterisks in the chart editor
Fixed autologin issue
Fixed chart editor tab control sequence
Fixed draft posts screen when more than one draft exists
Added user rating alongside comments on AoTD forum posts
Improved formatting of chart changes (new entries, leavers, etc.)
Added a 2026 playlist on Spotify (to be updated throughout the year)
Many other smaller - and some bigger - changes and fixes behind the scenes

Enjoy the site and more soon
AM

Last edited by albummaster on 15 hours ago; edited 1 time in total

Milhaud

Gender: Male

Firstly, thanks for all the work. It is much appreciated.

One question comes to mind - Have you considered a way to support all the work? I've noticed at some point there was something built in for “Premium Members”, but I don't think it was ever developed. Maybe a Patreon (or similar) could be of interest. I, personally, don't need anything in return, but in case you need to offer to people (to make it a bit more attractive), it can be just a flair for the user, or to disable adds for users willing to pay.

And happy 2026 to you too!

albummaster

Janitor

Gender: Male

Site Admin

Milhaud wrote:

Firstly, thanks for all the work. It is much appreciated.

One question comes to mind - Have you considered a way to support all the work? I've noticed at some point there was something built in for “Premium Members”, but I don't think it was ever developed. Maybe a Patreon (or similar) could be of interest. I, personally, don't need anything in return, but in case you need to offer to people (to make it a bit more attractive), it can be just a flair for the user, or to disable adds for users willing to pay.

And happy 2026 to you too!

Thanks for your feedback, much appreciated. The premium membership idea is still on the radar and ideally it would be implemented with extra bells and whistles outlined on the Member levels page. However, need to increase site activity (by quite a lot) before this happens to make supporting it feasible. I've worked on the site full time for most of the last six months (when I say full time, I mean 50+ hours per week in the background) trying to modernise the site and add improvements. If you step off the gas, people go elsewhere, so development activity needs to be maintained, which is obviously only possible if you have very deep pockets to fund private expenses yourself, or eventually you'll run out of money (already past that stage). There's still a long way to go until things are the way I'd like them to be, the site probably needs another six months work (and then it's a case of continually updating the site, which I wasn't previously able to do due to day job). Hopefully, by doing that, site activity picks up to a level that allows the site to be self-sufficient and fund itself.
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jnmayles

In lieu of a premium membership, is there a donation option that could help increase points? I see a purchase points option. That could help raise funds without building out extra content that a premium option would require. Also a potential win win to lower the bars of entry to get a high degree of points for newer members.

albummaster

Janitor

Gender: Male

Site Admin

jnmayles wrote:

In lieu of a premium membership, is there a donation option that could help increase points? I see a purchase points option. That could help raise funds without building out extra content that a premium option would require. Also a potential win win to lower the bars of entry to get a high degree of points for newer members.

Thanks, intending to prioritise getting this done at some point in Q1 once finished the current site update (which is mainly tidying up email notifications and creating a platform for engagement notifications). Just in the process of working out a development roadmap for 2026, so everyone will have a better idea soon of what's coming up.
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Bluesky · Facebook · Spotify · X