[albummaster]

Just spent the past few days reviewing all open changes (around 300 of them) and prioritising them into a 2026 roadmap.

Before getting into the roadmap itself, a quick update: all email notification templates have been refreshed as part of this update (along with a few other small changes), and BEA is about to send its first-ever global service announcement about changes to newsletter hosting. These emails are going out in batches, so delivery times will vary.

The 2026 Roadmap
The below items are not set in stone and may change depending on any issues that may pop up. This is, as always, an intention which doesn't mean it becomes reality. However, this year might be different as I no longer have a day job to contend with. Ideas and suggestions are always welcome.

Q1 2026:

• Add Dark Mode option (in progress and very close to completion)
  
• Launch site upgrade options (points purchases and subscriptions)
  
• Allow specific release dates for all albums (pre-2004)
  
• Add a social media presence on Instagram to try and expand the reach of the site
  
• Focus on user onboarding & re-engagement of existing users (ongoing)
  
• EDIT: My Charts page reorganisation

Q2 2026:

• Add birthday/death days for artists flagged as individuals (to support anniversaries and tribute posts)
  
• Allow adding artist genders for diversity tracking and chart composition analysis
  
• Allow users to comment/rate the site-wide aggregated charts (Year/Decade/Overall etc) to encourage debate
  
• Enable rich formatting (BBCode) in comments and chart notes (e.g. bold, italic etc)
  
• Expand badges and achievements on user profile pages (ideas to be refined nearer the time)
  
• Add "Mod response notifications" for data corrections
  
• Improve disambiguation for artists/albums with duplicate names
  
• Enable collaborations to be added as members of other collaborations

Q3+ 2026

• Tagging/mentions of members in forum posts and comments (to enable notifications and easier searching etc)
  
• Filter to show only "Movers & New Entries" within a chart
  
• Daily anniversary posts to the forums (birthday, deaths, and album anniversaries)
  
• Allow inserting of BEA links into comments and chart notes (a la forum posts)
  
• Add "Order by Random" sort option for charts
  
• Re-instate the "Ignore" option for the Collector's Summary (if an album isn't of interest it will be excluded from the summary)
  
• Chart-specific and comment-specific achievements (perhaps worth extra points) to reward quality content (e.g. "Review of the Week")
  
• Pagination for interaction lists to improve performance (ratings/comments/rankings etc)

In progress (& ongoing):

• Continue modernisation of the site and underlying dependencies, including 'friendlier' URLs

The list of changes in Q1 is larger than Q2, but the total development effort is roughly the same. Things may get shifted around between Q2 and the rest of the year depending on site finances, priorities & the detail behind some of these changes not being fully apparent yet. There's also a great deal of work not mentioned above (e.g. smaller or less "exciting" items), but that doesn't mean they won't get done. Everything is logged, and if it's the right thing to do for the site, it'll be added.

Site activity has increased year-on-year, and the goal for 2026 is to build on that momentum.

Enjoy the site and more soon
AM
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Bluesky · Facebook · Spotify · X