Now coming out of the summer lull in good shape following all of the changes since the start of the summer. After a year's worth of work, the site is finally getting into decent shape for the busiest time of year and the lead-up to the year end.
Site newsletter
A site newsletter is going to be sent towards the end of September (the 29th edition). Registered users can subscribe to the newsletter from their profile page, and guest users and lurkers can now also subscribe. This wasn't available following the migration to the new newsletter system, but has now been restored after some recent development work.
BEA has also migrated around 1,000 addresses from the previous platform that aren't already associated with BEA accounts. It's possible that some people may have subscribed using multiple email addresses over the years, so apologies in advance if you receive the next newsletter more than once. You can unsubscribe using any addresses you no longer want to use.
Social media
Posting to Twitter/X is also back after a few months' hiatus. Twitter recently started requiring API credits to be purchased to allow automated posting, and it took a couple of months to decide whether to enrich the richest man in the world (or not) with a few more bucks. In the end, the decision was made to do it. BEA now posts a few times a day with things such as Album of the Day, as well as posting to Bluesky and Facebook. This gives the site a footprint outside of here and hopefully brings a few more people back to the site.
There are plenty of operational costs involved in keeping the site going at a reasonable level. Spotify, for example, now requires a Premium account rather than a free account to access their API. BEA provides Spotify playlists for the best albums of each year and decade, plus playlists for each of the top-ranked artists on BEA. These have now also been updated for the first time in several months, so give them a follow!
Navigation
The most visible change is probably the updated navigation for logged-in users, which is now always the first menu option visible once you are logged in. This makes the main site navigation easier to access and also allows the site header to collapse better and be more compact, especially on mobile.
Release dates
Release dates have now been populated for all albums in the top 10,000 of the overall chart! Massive thanks to everyone who has helped with this. The project commenced in January and took around eight months to complete. These release dates are in addition to all albums on the site released since 2005, which already have release dates populated.
Cross-references to forum posts from album pages
On album, artist, track and other object pages, cross-references have now been added to forum posts where BEA links have been inserted. This means you can see what's been said about an album and jump directly into the discussion. This was an idea from @Johnnyo and also @Listmeister, who originally suggested something similar 10 years ago.
Formatting of comments Users can now add some basic formatting to their comments on the object pages, including italic, strikethrough, underline and [mention], as well as inserting BEA links. This is another item from the 2026 roadmap checked off and will be enhanced in a future update to allow forum posts to be referenced directly from BEA links (as well as the existing albums etc). Try formatting your next review or comment!
Smaller changes
- Any new user mentions in forum posts or comments are now displayed on the home page to make them more visible
- Added back-end checks for browser notification inconsistencies, such as when a browser is subscribed but no notifications have been selected
- Added help text explaining duplicate browser notifications when more than one of your browsers is subscribed to receive notifications
- Fixed a bug with mentioned users if they were re-[mention]ed inside a [quote] tag
- Fixed albums without artwork appearing in the carousel on the home page
- Tidied up the report a post/comment screen
- Dark mode improvements
- Migrated more pages to friendly URLs
- Fixed direct linking to specific forum posts from activity streams
- Fixed the latest activities page auto-update filter state not being remembered
- Added new levels as activities, e.g. alfred is now level 3
- Made object pages more compact, with less feedback shown by default
- Made forum topic pagination links a little bigger to improve usability on touch-screen devices
- Added a deep link to each top track for the anniversary album on the home page
Thanks for visiting the site and more soon as the site continues to work its way through the 2026 roadmap.
AM _________________ Bluesky · Facebook · Spotify
Last edited by albummaster on 09/22/2026 07:36; edited 1 time in total
Wow, seems like a lot of awesome stuff has been happening behind the scenes. Thanks for putting so much effort into continuing to make this site great! _________________ My overall top 100 is far from fleshed out at this point, so here are some charts I am actually proud of:
Top 100 Albums of 2025
Thanks for all the hard work and your patience, it is truly appreciated!
On a side note, is it possible that the Member Total Scores are not updated correctly since the last update? It seems like they have been stuck for the last few days.
Thanks for all the hard work and your patience, it is truly appreciated!
On a side note, is it possible that the Member Total Scores are not updated correctly since the last update? It seems like they have been stuck for the last few days.
Anyhow, thanks again and keep up the good work!
thanks for feedback and pointing out issue with total scores. Bug crept in during deployment of last site update (now fixed). 🫠 _________________ Bluesky · Facebook · Spotify
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