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

albummaster

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A smaller site update than last time as mainly working on background changes to improve performance in the ongoing battle against AI bots.

The 2026 roadmap was revised at the start of Q2 to reflect progress so far. Uncompleted changes in Q1 have been rolled forward and new priorities identified and factored into the remaining time for the year. BEA is more active outside of the forums than it was at the same time last year (hopefully due to all the improvements that have been made), but the forums themselves are a bit quieter, so the next site update will have a stronger focus on the forums, with some layout changes to freshen them up a bit.

A Q2 roadmap item was to allow adding collaborations as members of collaborations (in addition to individuals). For example, the members of Velvet Underground & Nico are now just Velvet Underground and Nico (instead of individually adding the underlying members of Velvet Underground plus Nico). This allows easier data maintenance and improved cross-referencing of artists where there have been collaborations performing together (there is no longer a need to add Lou Reed to both Velvet Underground and Velvet Underground & Nico). When a collaboration is added as a member of another artist, all underlying members of that collaboration are displayed on the artist page & the 'see also' links include artists that any of those members are a part of.

In the background, an advertising change has been made as a Premium Membership scheme can't be added until the site's finances are on a better footing to ensure hosting fees can be paid, as the number of potential subscribers is not large enough to fund the site by themselves. If the advertising change is successful, the resulting financial stability will allow the introduction of Premium Membership.

Other changes:
-A profile setting has been added to allow users to hide member comments from aggregate charts. (Comments are currently shown for the top 40 albums in the current year chart, plus the top 10,000 albums in the overall chart).
- A release date is now required for the top 5,000 albums (previously top 4,000). The eventual aim is for the top 10,000 albums to all have release dates (to cover all albums in the overall chart).
- New PM notifications are now also included on the home page in the 'what's new' section
- Added more dark mode tweaks
- Lots of smaller changes

Enjoy the site and more soon.
AM
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MadhattanJack

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albummaster wrote:

A Q2 roadmap item was to allow adding collaborations as members of collaborations (in addition to individuals). For example, the members of Velvet Underground & Nico are now just Velvet Underground and Nico (instead of individually adding the underlying members of Velvet Underground plus Nico). This allows easier data maintenance and improved cross-referencing of artists where there have been collaborations performing together (there is no longer a need to add Lou Reed to both Velvet Underground and Velvet Underground & Nico). When a collaboration is added as a member of another artist, all underlying members of that collaboration are displayed on the artist page & the 'see also' links include artists that any of those members are a part of.

Thanks for doing that, AM! 😄 I remember that was one of the first things I complained about after I got here. (This thread, to be specific, though I assume I wasn't the first to suggest it.)

However: When I added Cluster to Cluster & Eno a few minutes ago, I noticed that "Cluster & Eno" isn't appearing on Cluster's artist page, though it still appears on Eno's. (Likewise, The Summer Kills — which I did around the same time — doesn't appear on Hammock's artist page, and The Lassie Foundation And Duraluxe doesn't appear on the artist pages for The Lassie Foundation or Duraluxe.)

Is the ultimate goal to make the collaborators appear as separate links in the chart links too, as in, Cluster & Eno, the way Discogs does it? I'm not saying that would be better or worse, I'm just curious really.

bonnequestion

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There seems to be something wrong with the rank score of all the decade charts from members.

Right now, it seems like the rank score of any given album is not affected at all by its presence in a decade charts, resulting in the score of every album being only affected by overall charts and year charts. I just noticed it, I don't know for how long it's been going on. Is it normal? I guess not, but maybe I missed something.

While I'm here, there is another thing I noticed a while ago. I think there is something wrong with the counting of a few things on the website. For example, on the Top-Ranked Artists list, there are supposed to be 20 artists per page. However, if you go on page 4, the last artist is 84th, even though it should be 80th. If you look closely, you realize that there is no #64 in the list, no #54, no #30 and no #29 either. And it goes on like that, every once in a while, there's a number that is skipped. So much so that at page 50 (which would normally end with artist #1000), the last artist is #1056. That would mean that 56 numbers have been skipped in the first 1000.

The list of Top Members has the same problem, but there is just one number missing: #129.

I know it's not a big deal so I didn't bother signalling it before, but I figured I could do it now since I was already reporting on the decade charts problem, which seems more serious.

Thanks again for all your good work!

albummaster

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Gender: Male

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MadhattanJack wrote:

Thanks for doing that, AM! 😄 I remember that was one of the first things I complained about after I got here. (This thread, to be specific, though I assume I wasn't the first to suggest it.)

You definitely get the belated credit for this one, as it was your post that triggered the change. Only took three years to get around to it 😉 (which is quite quick around here)

MadhattanJack wrote:

However: When I added Cluster to Cluster & Eno a few minutes ago, I noticed that "Cluster & Eno" isn't appearing on Cluster's artist page, though it still appears on Eno's. (Likewise, The Summer Kills — which I did around the same time — doesn't appear on Hammock's artist page, and The Lassie Foundation And Duraluxe doesn't appear on the artist pages for The Lassie Foundation or Duraluxe.)

Thanks for reporting (and for detail). Looks like there's a bug listing 'see also' links for collaborations (I'll check into this).

MadhattanJack wrote:

Is the ultimate goal to make the collaborators appear as separate links in the chart links too, as in, Cluster & Eno, the way Discogs does it? I'm not saying that would be better or worse, I'm just curious really.

Not planning to do that for now, as not all member artists are listed on BEA (only artists with albums here). It's possibly something for down the line, but not thinking about it for the moment.
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albummaster

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bonnequestion wrote:

There seems to be something wrong with the rank score of all the decade charts from members.

Right now, it seems like the rank score of any given album is not affected at all by its presence in a decade charts, resulting in the score of every album being only affected by overall charts and year charts. I just noticed it, I don't know for how long it's been going on. Is it normal? I guess not, but maybe I missed something.

While I'm here, there is another thing I noticed a while ago. I think there is something wrong with the counting of a few things on the website. For example, on the Top-Ranked Artists list, there are supposed to be 20 artists per page. However, if you go on page 4, the last artist is 84th, even though it should be 80th. If you look closely, you realize that there is no #64 in the list, no #54, no #30 and no #29 either. And it goes on like that, every once in a while, there's a number that is skipped. So much so that at page 50 (which would normally end with artist #1000), the last artist is #1056. That would mean that 56 numbers have been skipped in the first 1000.

The list of Top Members has the same problem, but there is just one number missing: #129.

I know it's not a big deal so I didn't bother signalling it before, but I figured I could do it now since I was already reporting on the decade charts problem, which seems more serious.

Thanks again for all your good work!

Thanks for reporting these issues. I'll check into and see what's going on. The issue with decade stats looks like a bug (and I'll make a fix as soon as I can). The artist stats issue is probably due to 'show child artists' not being enabled in the default view (only parents are listed). The issue with user stats is probably due to the 'BestEverAlbums' bot user, which is hidden from the page, but taking up a place in the rankings (I'll make a fix for this and exclude this user completely).
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MadhattanJack

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albummaster wrote:

You definitely get the belated credit for this one, as it was your post that triggered the change. Only took three years to get around to it 😉 (which is quite quick around here)

Well in that case, double and triple thanks! I just assumed several other people had suggested that. I guess I'm more concerned about bands getting proper credit than I thought... I don't think there will be a huge number of cases where this feature is used, but when it is, it will make the artist pages a lot more sensible-looking — I keep seeing albums credited to artists like "Massive Attack vs. MadProfessor" where only MadProfessor is displayed as a member, when in fact he's just doing remixes and all the tracks are actually by Massive Attack. Now we can fix that! 😁

By the way, if I were to start a thread called "Membership and Collaboration Issues" to get other people's opinions on what to do with certain "edge cases," should I start that in the Music form or the Suggestions forum?

albummaster

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MadhattanJack wrote:

if I were to start a thread called "Membership and Collaboration Issues" to get other people's opinions on what to do with certain "edge cases," should I start that in the Music form or the Suggestions forum?

any edge cases best posted on the artist pages so they can be looked into on a case by case basis as otherwise can get messy keeping track. It'll take a few weeks probably to get everything looking more sensible. I'm personally just starting from the more popular artists and working down, but there's bound to be quite a few that will linger for a while longer.
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MadhattanJack

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albummaster wrote:

any edge cases best posted on the artist pages so they can be looked into on a case by case basis as otherwise can get messy keeping track.

Okay... I assume that means data-moderator comments, not public comments.

There's one specific case I wanted to ask about, though: The Auteurs Vs. µ-Ziq (1994) is an album of Auteurs remixes that were all done by µ-Ziq, and for consistency's sake the album should be credited to "The Auteurs vs. µ-Ziq" or "The Auteurs / µ-Ziq" (with both entities as separate members) instead of just The Auteurs. So in a case like that, should I just put a data-moderator comment in there and leave it all up to you, or would you rather have me (or whoever) enter it as a whole new album under a new artist and then report the original album as a duplicate?

albummaster

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MadhattanJack wrote:

Okay... I assume that means data-moderator comments, not public comments.

There's one specific case I wanted to ask about, though: The Auteurs Vs. µ-Ziq (1994) is an album of Auteurs remixes that were all done by µ-Ziq, and for consistency's sake the album should be credited to "The Auteurs vs. µ-Ziq" or "The Auteurs / µ-Ziq" (with both entities as separate members) instead of just The Auteurs. So in a case like that, should I just put a data-moderator comment in there and leave it all up to you, or would you rather have me (or whoever) enter it as a whole new album under a new artist and then report the original album as a duplicate?

Apologies for missing this, albums on BEA are credited to whatever appears on the artwork. In the case of this album, the artist should be The Auteurs Vs. µ-Ziq (and the members would be The Auteurs and µ-Ziq). This album was added to BEA in 2014 and looks like it needs correcting, which I'll get onto now.

In the case of creating a duplicate with the the right details, BEA always merges the album with the highest ID into the lower ID (the oldest item always wins), so updating the original album should fix this issue with the least amount of work (as the duplicate would end up being merged). If any other items have issues, it's best to add corrections to the specific pages and they can be dealt with on a case by case basis (expecting quite a few anomalies to pop up after the recent changes).
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