[albummaster]

The first substantial site update of the new year has been deployed today, which includes progress on the 2026 roadmap. The main change is that release dates can now be optionally populated for any album released since 1960, but required if an album also features in the top 1,000 of the overall chart (to allow anniversaries from higher ranked/popular albums to be highlighted). The top 1,000 threshold will be revised once the new feature has bedded in (this thread can be used to continue discussion if anyone wants to chime in).

Next up on the 2026 roadmap will be a My Charts page reorganisation, which feels more urgent than the other changes in Q1 right now, before tackling the other Q1 changes in the next few updates.

A large number of background changes have been made in this update to combat the astronomical surge in AI crawlers (who are sucking the life out of the servers). These updates will help to ensure the site remains fast and accessible for human members rather than bot traffic. Previously, search engines crawled the site with the mutual benefit that they'd drive traffic to BEA through people searching on Google etc, but AI is in the process of destroying the 'old' web to feed its own algorithms (and expects sites like this to pay for the privilege).

Main changes:
- Updated release date validation to take into account albums released since 1960.
- Invalid release dates filter on 'newly added albums' page now includes top-ranked albums without release dates
- Fixed issue with hyphenated searches
- Fixed no image displayed for 'reaction' activities in activity stream
- Improve forum search performance
- Apply year/decade filter to country stats CSV download (issue reported here)
- Show ranks from smallest to biggest scope in AOTD forum post
- Fix default album art not rendering on iPad
- Add a more obvious 'new PM' indicator

(A tiny bit behind on the roadmap due to the huge amount of time spent dealing with AI crawlers).

Enjoy the site and more soon.

AM
_________________
Bluesky · Facebook · Spotify · X