Thoughts on album/chart of the day and daily posts - Suggestions

albummaster

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Been observing for a long while that both those posts (certainly COTD) aren’t getting much, if any, daily engagement (despite the odd tweak here or there), so after five thousand or so, can’t believe it’s been over ten years, it might be time to change things.

So I've been brain dumping in the background current thoughts for replacements to fill the daily void. I think something still needs to be posted to give the forums a daily rhythm. Thinking back to a conversation last year where automated posts were moved to the announcements forum and a couple of inactive forums were closed down; speaking for myself, I certainly hoped de-cluttering the music forum and creating extra space might have had a bit more of an impact.

However, for whatever reason, it hasn't turned out like that (love to hear insights into why, so they might try to be rectified) and the listening thread continues to absorb a lot of the activity. At whatever time of day, you can pretty much guarantee there’ll be a recent post there. So, people are here, but they are mostly not writing longer-form content. A lot of changes have been made to the site over the past six months, so hopefully people are coming back.

There are still a few forums on BEA which haven’t been posted in for long periods, including the tournaments forum which I’d love to see more active. The number of people posting each day is slightly lower than last year, although the number of active logged-in users across the whole site has increased, meaning more people are using the rest of the site, but they aren’t necessarily posting on the forums for reasons we might get into on this thread.

Here’s what I’m thinking for a shake-up:
• Ditching AoTD for Anniversaries: Instead of a semi-random album, we pivot to anniversaries so the selections become more grounded to the real world (now that we are capturing data for older albums, this is possible). To avoid annual repeats of the same albums, we could talk about an album turning 10 or 20 today rather than just a random pick right now that nobody’s commenting on. Milestone anniversaries should help ensure there’s a bit of rotation (e.g. only celebrate if 50, 40, 30, 25, 20, 15, 10, 5 in descending order, and highest rank wins if there’s a tie etc). At worst, you get to talk about OK Computer once every five years.

• Chart of the Day: Right now it’s just there, so thinking of replacing it with a "Recently updated charts" or "Trending charts" feed (based on activity, or a combination of both) to show off what people here are actually creating on a more timely basis. This might also help to surface newer releases in current-year charts etc. We’d put some safeguards in, so people can’t just spam-save the same chart to stay on top etc.

• The 8-Hour Cycle: Currently, there’s 12 hours between the two posts, which is too long given the intercontinental nature of the user base. I’m thinking of moving to an 8-hour rhythm and adding a third post, but maybe something user-centric? A "Review of the day" based on top-voted album comments in the last 24 hours (meeting a minimum unique word count), with maybe point prizes for the best ones and placement in site newsletter etc (2026 roadmap contains rough ideas along these lines). Or a trending album from the current year, or most-visited artist if due to a death etc? (this could become a 'Trending item' post), which could help make BEA feel more current/timely, and give something more for people to interact with.

One criticism might be that the proposed posts would all still be automated (and I get that), but really to do this manually is too much of a stretch as I need to sleep sometimes - 24/7/365 is unrealistic. By making the posts more interactive and surfacing user-generated/trending/timely content, at least it repositions the debate and adds to the human side of the site. These posts might generate more discussion, or they might not. At worst, we just iterate again until we arrive at something that works (but maybe not waiting ten years next time). Just something to freshen the place up and make it feel more alive and current. The ideas are rough and need some work, but the general direction feels right.

Would this kind of change make any difference, or is it missing the mark?
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Last edited by albummaster on 02/15/2026 10:48; edited 2 times in total

MadhattanJack

Just to end the list

Gender: Male

These are all fine ideas, but I think you have to face facts — the problem is Google. The problem is always Google.

Which is to say, BEA has now vanished from Google completely. I don't mean to be critical, because I know you were getting very pissed off about the AI scrapers, for good reason, but... maybe your efforts at bot management have been too aggressive? Most sites like this just don't include the Googlebots on their block lists, but something in there must be blocking them from BEA — and if you vanish from Google, you might as well vanish from the internet.

I mean, shortly before I registered here, I could type "OK Computer" into Google and there was a pretty good chance BEA would show up within the first two pages of results. When I do it now, it just doesn't show up, period. Last time I checked, I went all the way to page 32, and it just wasn't there at all. (Am I the only one seeing this? I don't think Google would vanish BEA just for me, but who knows, they're a tech-sector megacorporation so they probably do things like that just because they can.)

Anyway, assuming it isn't just me, without Google it's basically impossible to maintain a positive churn rate on an internet forum, which of course means you don't get enough new users replacing the older ones who lose interest and fall off, and the user base eventually shrinks below the "critical mass" tipping point. I know it sucks having to deal with it, but anything you do really has to start there.

albummaster

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MadhattanJack wrote:

These are all fine ideas, but I think you have to face facts — the problem is Google. The problem is always Google.

Which is to say, BEA has now vanished from Google completely. I don't mean to be critical, because I know you were getting very pissed off about the AI scrapers, for good reason, but... maybe your efforts at bot management have been too aggressive? Most sites like this just don't include the Googlebots on their block lists, but something in there must be blocking them from BEA — and if you vanish from Google, you might as well vanish from the internet.

I mean, shortly before I registered here, I could type "OK Computer" into Google and there was a pretty good chance BEA would show up within the first two pages of results. When I do it now, it just doesn't show up, period. Last time I checked, I went all the way to page 32, and it just wasn't there at all. (Am I the only one seeing this? I don't think Google would vanish BEA just for me, but who knows, they're a tech-sector megacorporation so they probably do things like that just because they can.)

Anyway, without Google it's basically impossible to maintain a positive churn rate on an internet forum, which of course means you don't get enough new users replacing the older ones who lose interest and fall off, and the user base eventually shrinks below the "critical mass" tipping point. I know it sucks having to deal with it, but anything you do really has to start there.

Thanks for responding, general use of search engines is declining due to AI, but BEA is still ranked pretty high on Google for many search terms (but not all). Not blocking Googlebot (and a few others), just the badly-behaved AI crawlers (of which there are many). Of course, there's a lot of competition for high volume search terms (best albums of 2025 etc, BEA is page 2 right now), and BEA isn't participating in paid search, so it's all organic, and obviously battling against much bigger companies with their own teams of SEO specialists and marketers etc (who can concentrate 100% of their time on one task). For long tail search terms, BEA still does pretty well and is top for many, although rankings change each time Google tweak their algorithm, so what's true today, might not be tomorrow.
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Romanelli

Bone Swah

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Location: Broomfield, Colorado

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To me, one of the better things about BEA is that it refers to comments, and not reviews. In most cases, the comments are easier to read here simply because they tend to be shorter and to the point, rather than long and tedious reviews like you get at RYM. RYM calls them reviews, and it's a nightmare of people who love to hear themselves talk, and who write unreadable novels filled with drivel. I would hope that BEA continues to refer to them as comments, and not reviews.

What I have seen is that just having an album on the forum as AOTD doesn't spark people to comment. Someone listening to an album on the long thread really doesn't, either. Even the threads that were sparked by the passings of Ozzy & Brian Wilson are fading into obscurity after the earlier and best works of those artists have been gone over. What DOES seem to gain something of a foothold are the threads about specific albums that go into detail about the album...giving something of a story, and then going over the album track by track and inviting comments. Those are doing much better than the automated posts, on which, realistically, you get in the way of discussion what you put out there...which is nothing more than what you're doing with the long albums thread. In other words...the automated threads are almost the same as the Albums thread...no discussion started, with no real discussion happening as a result. The difference is that the empty automated threads take up whole pages of the forum, while the Albums thread shows as one item.

If you want discussions, someone has to START a discussion. I think it's been proven that a picture of an album cover doesn't do that. Neither does calling something Album Of The Day. There has to be more in order to get more in the way of discussions.

Solutions? Well, I would explore how do we get people involved in creating content. When we have tournaments here, people are encouraged to take on specific films or albums and try to gain votes for them.

https://www.besteveralbums.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=28943

The link is for a list of Best Films Of The 1940's. Since October, it's quietly gained 7 pages of content. People are not just submitting lists of films, they are also discussing the entire subject of films in the 40's. So, how do we translate that to the music forum, and with albums? Maybe we try doing something like lists of albums from specific genres, or decades, or years? Maybe turn those into tournaments (it matters not if it's been done before...chances are that most of the tournaments here were done long ago, with mostly different people involved). Maybe start discussions about what albums or artists you'd like to have discussions about. Encourage people to talk about these, even if it's been done to death. Rumours and the drama surrounding it has been talked about endlessly for decades. But we have a thread about it that's at 4 pages so far. It may have been talked about too much, but the point is, people are still wanting to talk about it. So...let's talk about it. I know I'm probably not articulating this well...maybe someone can help me get to the point better.

Ultimately...I think we're looking at things backwards. We shouldn't be relying on automated posts to create conversations for us. We should be putting in more effort as a community to make that happen. Not every thread is going to work, but I think we can finds ways to create better content here. It's not like we don't all have things in common...
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albummaster

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Romanelli wrote:

To me, one of the better things about BEA is that it refers to comments, and not reviews. In most cases, the comments are easier to read here simply because they tend to be shorter and to the point, rather than long and tedious reviews like you get at RYM. RYM calls them reviews, and it's a nightmare of people who love to hear themselves talk, and who write unreadable novels filled with drivel. I would hope that BEA continues to refer to them as comments, and not reviews.

Thanks, appreciate all the insights and thanks for taking the time to write it. I didn’t intend to raise too many eyebrows with the review/comment statement and to be honest that’s only a small aspect of everything. I guess I’m using the term review interchangeably with comment because people can use the comment text box to say whatever they like, in whatever way they like and a review doesn’t have to be an essay. Some people are using the text to write short form comments or to engage in conversation, others like to leave reviews (whatever length but generally short), and others like to list all the ratings they made for each track.

I think an upper character limit should be capped at a level that contains existing comments which could prevent the extreme long form that you are alluding to as I’m not a big fan of those either, but I don’t think we have any here (or if we do, they are a tiny proportion). I’ve no wish either to mimic other sites and want to keep BEA unique. I don’t have access right now to check the database to see what that the current comment extremes might be. Another aspect is not whether you can add a long comment or not, but how BEA surfaces them. If you are on album page, it would be possible to present the first x lines of a comment with the ability to expand it. In the same way, any comments that were to be part of any vote as the ‘best comment’ could be based on engagement (replies, votes etc). That way, a 50-word comment that sparks activity is worth more than a 2,000-word essay that nobody reads. However, in terms of that proposed third post, I think it’s more likely to head in the direction of a trending album.

Romanelli wrote:

What I have seen is that just having an album on the forum as AOTD doesn't spark people to comment. Someone listening to an album on the long thread really doesn't, either. Even the threads that were sparked by the passings of Ozzy & Brian Wilson are fading into obscurity after the earlier and best works of those artists have been gone over. What DOES seem to gain something of a foothold are the threads about specific albums that go into detail about the album...giving something of a story, and then going over the album track by track and inviting comments.
Those are doing much better than the automated posts, on which, realistically, you get in the way of discussion what you put out there...which is nothing more than what you're doing with the long albums thread. In other words...the automated threads are almost the same as the Albums thread...no discussion started, with no real discussion happening as a result. The difference is that the empty automated threads take up whole pages of the forum, while the Albums thread shows as one item.

Part of the problem is the current posts are badly implemented in that they are not seeking debate, but they could be changed. Instead of just an automated anniversary post, maybe the bot’s job is to "set the stage" for a human. It’s how things should be now, but probably my real-life autistic personality shining through, which is not very conversational. For example, the anniversary post could include a "Track-by-Track" prompt or a specific "Where were you?" question to give people a hook to hang a comment on. The current aotd posts lack any kind of real hook and rely too much on users to think of something new to say when most of these albums have already been discussed a lot.

Agree about tournaments, I used to love seeing those and people are always welcome to run them (I wish there was enough time in a day and I had the right personality). Sometimes tournaments suffer from not getting enough participation as numbers on the forums for a while have made voting difficult, but if there’s any way to funnel people into these then worth thinking of solutions as they can be very enjoyable for everyone.

Romanelli wrote:

Ultimately...I think we're looking at things backwards. We shouldn't be relying on automated posts to create conversations for us. We should be putting in more effort as a community to make that happen. Not every thread is going to work, but I think we can finds ways to create better content here. It's not like we don't all have things in common...

Ideally, yes, but it hasn’t happened for a while (in regular volume) and seeding the forums helps things chug along with no constraint put on anyone else wanting to post their own material. At the end of the day, the purpose of the automation is to be the scaffolding, not the whole building. It should provide the rhythm, but we (the humans) provide the actual content. In terms of clutter, I agree this could be dealt with better and moving posts into announcements has made them far more visible than they were when they were interleaved amongst other threads in the music forum (also has the side-effect of burying site announcement history, so could look at archiving old posts out of sight maybe a few weeks after posting).

At the end of the day, if it doesn't work, we iterate again. Just trying to freshen the place up and inject something new.
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MadhattanJack

Just to end the list

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albummaster wrote:

Thanks for responding, general use of search engines is declining due to AI, but BEA is still ranked pretty high on Google for many search terms (but not all). Not blocking Googlebot (and a few others), just the badly-behaved AI crawlers (of which there are many). Of course, there's a lot of competition for high volume search terms (best albums of 2025 etc, BEA is page 2 right now), and BEA isn't participating in paid search, so it's all organic, and obviously battling against much bigger companies with their own teams of SEO specialists and marketers etc (who can concentrate 100% of their time on one task). For long tail search terms, BEA still does pretty well and is top for many, although rankings change each time Google tweak their algorithm, so what's true today, might not be tomorrow.

Okay... I can accept that that's what you're seeing, but I can't physically go to Spain right now and use a residential internet connection to get a legitimate Spanish IP address. (I wish I could — I would stay there too, if possible!) The best I can do is set my VPN to connect via proxies in Madrid or Barcelona.

But when I do that, and I enter anything album- or music-related into Google, even if I specifically enter Google.es into the URL for the search results, I still get no BEA results whatsoever, checking through 15-20 pages of results each time. I even tried "mejores álbumes de 2025," and got the same (non-) results. (I don't have "SafeSearch" on either, btw, or whatever they're calling that now.)

So I hate to ask this and be such a pain in the butt, but if other members here are reading this, especially those on residential ISPs outside of the United States, could y'all try entering "Best Albums of 2025" into Google, and seeing where (if at all) BEA shows up in the results? I'm not an "SEO professional," and maybe they've got some sort of algorithmic shenanigans going on, so I could be inadvertently blowing smoke here... but normally I just don't see this unless the Googlebots are being completely blocked.

By the way, I also believe (strongly) that new AOTD-type threads about new albums would generate more replies and discussion than threads about old albums. How you'd pick them is anyone's guess, but for me at least, it's just more fun to talk about new stuff than old stuff, even if I'd rather actually listen to old stuff most of the time.

albummaster

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MadhattanJack wrote:

Okay... I can accept that that's what you're seeing, but I can't physically go to Spain right now and use a residential internet connection to get a legitimate Spanish IP address. (I wish I could — I would stay there too, if possible!) The best I can do is set my VPN to connect via proxies in Madrid or Barcelona.

But when I do that, and I enter anything album- or music-related into Google, even if I specifically enter Google.es into the URL for the search results, I still get no BEA results whatsoever, checking through 15-20 pages of results each time. I even tried "mejores álbumes de 2025," and got the same (non-) results. (I don't have "SafeSearch" on either, btw, or whatever they're calling that now.)

So I hate to ask this and be such a pain in the butt, but if other members here are reading this, especially those on residential ISPs outside of the United States, could y'all try entering "Best Albums of 2025" into Google, and seeing where (if at all) BEA shows up in the results? I'm not an "SEO professional," and maybe they've got some sort of algorithmic shenanigans going on, so I could be inadvertently blowing smoke here... but normally I just don't see this unless the Googlebots are being completely blocked.

By the way, I also believe (strongly) that new AOTD-type threads about new albums would generate more replies and discussion than threads about old albums. How you'd pick them is anyone's guess, but for me at least, it's just more fun to talk about new stuff than old stuff, even if I'd rather actually listen to old stuff most of the time.

Thanks for follow up and interesting findings. I treat all reports seriously and will perform checks to see if something is amiss (there are always segments worth reviewing more closely, so I’ll dig into the specific cases you’re describing). SEO is one of the many tasks I have to juggle, but I check web stats weekly at a high level to see if the analytics dashboard is flashing red (Google would figuratively tell me if pages are unable to be indexed & there's nothing right now indicating a problem on a big scale and Googlebot is certainly not being blocked). I also check stats monthly at a more detailed level and make tweaks if they are needed (e.g. specific pages with issues). I’ve made a note to spend time in the next monthly review to get underneath the issues you are raising and to see if there might be drop-offs in some segments of traffic. The percentage of visitors to BEA arriving from search engines is not ringing alarm bells right now, traffic levels are higher than last year (even after blocking a huge number of AI scrapers).

There’s obviously a myriad of factors why your results are different to mine and not just location. I’ll break down performance by device and geography in the next review. If so, might be more related to factors beyond pure indexing (not just text on page) and may require bigger changes to the site. If structural changes are required, they’ll be sequenced after Q2 as I’m very keen to get the front half of the roadmap completed before I go back and do another site overhaul (the first half of the roadmap is critical).

Agree about newer albums, they definitely have the potential to freshen up the debate by including them more often and ensure there’s always something new to say. I think the trending album idea is heading in that direction (a recent release with high current activity, however that ends up being defined). By limiting the release period, it'll help to ensure no repeats. The anniversary album would then become the historical album for discussion to retain both past and future time windows. COTD evolving into a feed of recent charts will round out the changes to daily posts and give the site the feeling of being more alive.

The rest of the site is doing quite well in terms of overall activity, it’s really just the forums that have become a little stale. I'm hoping this will change through ongoing site improvements and obviously Google is a part of that, but there's also 50,000 existing users here to reengage and an incredible amount of work has happened (and is happening) in the background in that regard.
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Johnnyo

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Age: 67

Location: London Town

Coming late to the conversation and can see a lot of discussion already but wanted to respond, where I can to each point rather than pull them into one post which would be so long as to try the patience of Job, so here are my thoughts on the original post by AM. Other thoughts to follow where I think I might have something constructive to contribute

albummaster wrote:

Been observing for a long while that both those posts (certainly COTD) aren’t getting much, if any, daily engagement (despite the odd tweak here or there), so after five thousand or so, can’t believe it’s been over ten years, it might be time to change things.

Here’s what I’m thinking for a shake-up:
• Ditching AoTD for Anniversaries: Instead of a semi-random album, we pivot to anniversaries so the selections become more grounded to the real world (now that we are capturing data for older albums, this is possible). To avoid annual repeats of the same albums, we could talk about an album turning 10 or 20 today rather than just a random pick right now that nobody’s commenting on. Milestone anniversaries should help ensure there’s a bit of rotation (e.g. only celebrate if 50, 40, 30, 25, 20, 15, 10, 5 in descending order, and highest rank wins if there’s a tie etc). At worst, you get to talk about OK Computer once every five years.

Absolutely. I do comment on the AOTD posts sometimes but not on a regular basis.

I think that celebrating an anniversary is a great idea.

I've been populating a few of the albums with "invalid release date" each day and happy to start to do far more over the next week or so to help enter dates for pre 2004 albums so that we can have a variety of albums to pick from each day

Romanelli

Bone Swah

Gender: Male

Location: Broomfield, Colorado

Moderator

Just a note here...

Again, I realize that everyone's musical and album journey is different. Me? I don't touch new releases, and I have absolutely zero interest in them. Why? I simply don't have time. There are so many albums from other years and decades that I haven't discovered yet, and so many still out there. New albums are like the lottery. People are going to make themselves crazy trying to hear all the new music...the reality is, they are going to listen to the most bad music possible. In about five years, when I start picking up my first 2025 releases, there will be a MUCH smaller number of those albums to choose from, because most of the new stuff people are filling up on right now will be gone and forgotten, and for good reason. There is no way that even half of the new releases being digested are even worth hearing. It's always been that way, and it always will be. Ignoring new releases has always been my simple and easy way of weeding out the bad albums without having to actually do all that work.

I also do not believe that plowing my way through ten to twenty new albums every week is going to find the best ever albums. On the BEA overall chart (top 1000), there are only 21 from the decade of the 2020's. To me, the fixation on new releases is kinda the opposite of the premise of the site.

I may be alone in this thinking. I may not be. Point is...it would not be unanimous in thinking that concentrating AOTD on new releases would be a good thing. I get that a lot of people dig new releases. I'm just putting it out there that not everyone here does.

Also: I did a google search of Best Albums Of 2025, from my spot in the central US. 22 pages, zero BEA results. Best Albums All Time - page 1, 3 results down. Best Albums 2026 - page 2, 5 down.

It looks to me like BEA got buried in the 2025 search because everyone else in the world has published their own lists for best of 2025.
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I'm leaning on the threshold
Of her mystery
And crashing through the walls
Of dying history

Johnnyo

Gender: Male

Age: 67

Location: London Town

Romanelli wrote:

I may be alone in this thinking. I may not be. Point is...it would not be unanimous in thinking that concentrating AOTD on new releases would be a good thing. I get that a lot of people dig new releases. I'm just putting it out there that not everyone here does.

Also: I did a google search of Best Albums Of 2025, from my spot in the central US. 22 pages, zero BEA results. Best Albums All Time - page 1, 3 results down. Best Albums 2026 - page 2, 5 down.

It looks to me like BEA got buried in the 2025 search because everyone else in the world has published their own lists for best of 2025.

I agree with you Rom. I think that AOTD needs to be a significant anniversary of some sort (5, 10, 15 all the way to 60 or beyond etc.) which would automatically preclude new releases which is why I'm happy to do some work on the "invalid release date" entries so that we can have a reasonable database to work from.

I, like you, buy very few new releases any more. I may buy maybe 10 / 20 a year but that's a small %age of my overall purchases per year.