2026 roadmap - Announcements - Forums : Best Ever Albums

albummaster Janitor Site Admin Profile

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

zwiebel Grunger Profile

I just wanna say "thank you" for all the work you put into this site. It is really special
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if u love life, do not waste time, because time , is what life is made of

albummaster Janitor Site Admin Profile

zwiebel wrote:

I just wanna say "thank you" for all the work you put into this site. It is really special

Thanks, much appreciated. Hundreds of background tasks required just to keep the site running, so hoping not too many other distractions preventing roadmap getting done. New year so far has just been a battle against AI crawlers.
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Bluesky · Facebook · Spotify · X

Jabapac Profile

Thank you very much for the efforts!

What about the customised chart's option of excluding decade/year charts?

I really like to see how the overral chart will look like depending on all time charts only.

albummaster Janitor Site Admin Profile

Jabapac wrote:

Thank you very much for the efforts!

What about the customised chart's option of excluding decade/year charts?

I really like to see how the overral chart will look like depending on all time charts only.

Yes, on the list but a smaller change than some of the others (not forgotten)
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Bluesky · Facebook · Spotify · X

Last edited by albummaster on 02/04/2026 09:07; edited 1 time in total

Jabapac Profile

albummaster wrote:

Jabapac wrote:

Thank you very much for the efforts!

What about the customised chart's option of excluding decade/year charts?

I really like to see how the overral chart will look like depending on all time charts only.

Yes, on the list but a smaller change than some of the others (not forgotten)

Thanks!

albummaster Janitor Site Admin Profile

Now writing at the start of Q2 after working full time on the site since the new year (& last October in reality). Lots of other changes have already been completed that were not on the roadmap, including battling AI crawlers and humanising the site, but specifically versus the published roadmap:

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

The goals for the rest of 2026 remain largely unchanged, so uncompleted Q1 changes will be rolled into Q2 (and added the aim of an app store listing in Q3+). Right now, it feels like the site is battling against AI prompts for the share of traffic it usually receives, so the immediate challenge for the site is to try and stay alive and add as much AI mitigation as possible.

Q2 2026:

Launch site upgrade options (points purchases and subscriptions)
Add a social media presence on Instagram to try and expand the reach of the site
Improve disambiguation for artists/albums with duplicate names
Add birthday/death days for artists flagged as individuals (to support anniversaries and tribute posts)
Enable collaborations to be added as members of other collaborations
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)
Daily anniversary posts to the forums (birthday, deaths, and album anniversaries)
EDIT: Forum layout improvements/modernisation

Q3+ 2026

List BEA on Apple and Android app stores to mitigate against reduced organic traffic from search engines due to AI prompts (dependant on finances improving for listing fees)
Tagging/mentions of members in forum posts and comments (to enable notifications and easier searching etc)
Expand badges and achievements on user profile pages (ideas to be refined nearer the time)
Filter to show only "Movers & New Entries" within a chart
Allow adding artist genders for diversity tracking and chart composition analysis
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. top-ranked comments/charts)
Add "Mod response notifications" for data corrections
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
Focus on user onboarding & re-engagement of existing users (ongoing/continue from Q1)

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Bluesky · Facebook · Spotify · X

albummaster Janitor Site Admin Profile

Just a quick quarterly roadmap update (update a month late due to recent updates taking a little longer than planned). I've now been working full time on BEA for the whole of 2026, barring a couple of weeks in January when I took a vacation. An incredible of amount of work has been done, the site is a lot different today compared to the start of the year, even if all items on the roadmap haven't yet been completed.

The existential threat of AI to all content websites hangs as well over BEA, and a big part of this year has been spent on mitigation against that threat and protecting the site from bots. A huge number of changes have been made in the background to this end, not all of it is visible to somebody browsing the site, but the mere fact that the site is able to withstand the extra traffic is a testament to the work that has been done.

Progress versus the roadmap as at the time of writing:

Q1/Q2:

Add Dark Mode option
Allow specific release dates for all albums (pre-2004)
Focus on user onboarding & re-engagement of existing users (ongoing)
ADD: My Charts page reorganisation
Launch site upgrade options (points purchases and subscriptions)
Add a social media presence on Instagram & YouTube to try and expand the reach of the site
Improve disambiguation for artists/albums with duplicate names
Add birthday/death days for artists flagged as individuals (to support anniversaries and tribute posts)
Enable collaborations to be added as members of other collaborations
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)
Daily anniversary posts to the forums (birthday, deaths, and album anniversaries)
ADD: Forum layout improvements/modernisation

Q3+ 2026

List BEA on Apple and Android app stores to mitigate against reduced organic traffic from search engines due to AI prompts (dependant on finances improving for listing fees)
Tagging/mentions of members in forum posts and comments (to enable notifications and easier searching etc)
Expand badges and achievements on user profile pages (ideas to be refined nearer the time)
Filter to show only "Movers & New Entries" within a chart
Allow adding artist genders for diversity tracking and chart composition analysis
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. top-ranked comments/charts)
Add "Mod response notifications" for data corrections
Pagination for interaction lists to improve performance (ratings/comments/rankings etc)
ADD: Threaded comments on album, artist, chart & track pages

In progress (& ongoing):

Continue modernisation of the site and underlying dependencies, including 'friendlier' URLs
Focus on user onboarding & re-engagement of existing users (ongoing/continue from Q1)

Now to explain why some of the items have been performed out of sequence (or not at all yet). AI mitigation is the biggest driver for implementing any change right now. Anything that will counter that threat has been prioritised. The level of threat of AI wasn't really apparent to me before the start of the year when the roadmap was conceived, but has emerged since then. January (during my vacation) was very painful particularly with bots causing downtime crawling all over the site like cockroaches for no real benefit to BEA. This is still happening, but BEA is able to withstand their activity a lot better.

Instagram and YouTube remain important objectives, but they're also substantial projects in their own right. Producing content that's actually worth watching would require stepping away from development for days, if not weeks. I just haven't been able to justify to myself stepping away from here and abandoning other items on the roadmap to dedicate proper time to this yet.

Premium membership as well is a massive task, it might benefit the site financially in a very small way (and may partially fund other improvements and operational costs such as server hosting, Spotify and Twitter/X API costs, email gateway etc), but before asking people to financially support the site, I want to continue making BEA a better place to use. Improving the experience for existing users and making the site more engaging still feels like the higher priority.

There are big data moderation projects happening in the background that have prevented birth/death days and artist genders from happening just yet. BEA doesn't want to overwhelm the people that usually perform most of the data moderation & two big projects have been ongoing for most of the year (assigning release dates for the top 10,000 albums and also verifying all albums on BEA with less than five tracks are over 20 minutes). Once these projects have finished, additional data attributes could be added putting less stress on normal activities.

Now that threaded comments and member mentions have been completed, the groundwork has been laid for a number of related improvements. Features such as BBCode in comments, comment reactions and inserting BEA links into comments should now be much more straightforward to add and will allow several more roadmap items to be ticked off. (This will also bring the functionality of comments more in line with what's available on the forums).

The other features for Q3+ were lower priority at the start of the year and most of these could still be achieved given the time left in the year, but once the new year comes around, priorities will be reassessed from scratch using the ~300 changes in the backlog to inform the goals for 2027.

As ever, thanks to everyone who continues to use the site, report issues, contribute data, post comments and keep discussions alive. BEA has changed enormously over the past year, and there's still plenty more to come.
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