Less limitations for custom charts - Suggestions

Borve Baunehoj

Custom charts are for fun, so why not increase the fun? A few suggestion points:

Unlimited entries: Since custom charts doesn't contribute with album points, I see no reason for a maximum of 100 albums. Imo they should be a place for freedom without having to select the 100 correct albums

Allow duplicate albums: And since custom charts doens't contribute with album points, it shouldn't matter how many times an album appears in a chart. This may be a redundant feature to most, but I wanted a chart with Trout Mask Replica appearing several times. Again, freedom is the key word

Unlimited comment lenghts: In fact this isn't exclusively for custom charts (I just first discovered it through custon charts), but I'm not a fan of the limitation of comment lenghts for your chart entries. If anybody wanted to write entire essays, I'd sure love to read them. Personally I wanted to throw in some Scaruffi quotes on a chart, but his rants are usually too long for BEA

Seperate highest rated custom charts from highest rated greatest album charts: Here it would be cool if you could select a list with only custom charts, as it would make it easier to discover new custom charts, considering that the list is mostly dominated by greatest album charts

None of these are necessities, but suggestions

Mother Nature's Son

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Borve Baunehoj wrote:

Unlimited entries: Since custom charts doesn't contribute with album points, I see no reason for a maximum of 100 albums. Imo they should be a place for freedom without having to select the 100 correct albums

I think it would be very nice with unlimited entries too. I know many people also make hundreds of "My overall chart: 101-200", "My overall chart: 201-300", etc., which would make it a lot more well-arranged if unlimited entries were introduced. But this would of course once again break down the "Overall charts are limited to 100 entries. Period!"-wall that albummaster has builded.

Borve Baunehoj wrote:

Allow duplicate albums: And since custom charts doens't contribute with album points, it shouldn't matter how many times an album appears in a chart. This may be a redundant feature to most, but I wanted a chart with Trout Mask Replica appearing several times. Again, freedom is the key word

I wouldn't have anything against this if only a kind of "Allow duplicate albums"-bottom goes with. I'd still like to make custom charts where I can arrange it in a way so it isn't necessary to worry about having the same album appearing several times.

Borve Baunehoj wrote:

Unlimited comment lenghts: In fact this isn't exclusively for custom charts (I just first discovered it through custon charts), but I'm not a fan of the limitation of comment lenghts for your chart entries. If anybody wanted to write entire essays, I'd sure love to read them. Personally I wanted to throw in some Scaruffi quotes on a chart, but his rants are usually too long for BEA

Another great idea. I missed this when I made the comment for Abbey Road where I wanted to make comments for each song.

Borve Baunehoj wrote:

Seperate highest rated custom charts from highest rated greatest album charts: Here it would be cool if you could select a list with only custom charts, as it would make it easier to discover new custom charts, considering that the list is mostly dominated by greatest album charts

This would be very helpful too. Overall, great suggestions. Applause

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albummaster
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Borve Baunehoj wrote:

Custom charts are for fun, so why not increase the fun? A few suggestion points:

Unlimited entries: Since custom charts doesn't contribute with album points, I see no reason for a maximum of 100 albums. Imo they should be a place for freedom without having to select the 100 correct albums

The number of albums limitation is there mainly for technical reasons and as well to make the site easier to administer. If there were floods of new albums not in the database it creates a lot of time-consuming work for people who look after the site in checking/adding the details etc. 100 is a compromise, which still creates a lot of work, but also allows the data to be managed fairly well. This number is not set in stone and could be increased in the future once the database here is a bit bigger.

Borve Baunehoj wrote:

Allow duplicate albums: And since custom charts doens't contribute with album points, it shouldn't matter how many times an album appears in a chart. This may be a redundant feature to most, but I wanted a chart with Trout Mask Replica appearing several times. Again, freedom is the key word

Personally, it's quite a lot of work to introduce this. You might get someone with the same album listed 100 times (& there are some that will do this just because they can), & what's the point in that? As well, it would mean changing how some of the stats are calculated e.g. chart appearances etc so there a few knock on effects that might not be obvious but will create quite a bit of work for a relatively small feature.

Borve Baunehoj wrote:

Unlimited comment lenghts: In fact this isn't exclusively for custom charts (I just first discovered it through custon charts), but I'm not a fan of the limitation of comment lenghts for your chart entries. If anybody wanted to write entire essays, I'd sure love to read them. Personally I wanted to throw in some Scaruffi quotes on a chart, but his rants are usually too long for BEA

Comment lengths could definitely be increased, but they could never be unlimited as there does need to be a maximum somewhere. I think the max length is currently 1024 characters. The length could be doubled without causing too many issues & should be enough for most people.

Borve Baunehoj wrote:

Seperate highest rated custom charts from highest rated greatest album charts: Here it would be cool if you could select a list with only custom charts, as it would make it easier to discover new custom charts, considering that the list is mostly dominated by greatest album charts

I like this idea. Something could be added on that screen to filter by chart type so you could also see the top-rated decade/year/custom charts. (You can already do this at the moment from the charts page by filtering custom charts and choosing to sort by average rating.)

Quote:

None of these are necessities, but suggestions

I like the ideas, thank you. The problem that I have at the moment is having the time to implement all of the great suggestions that have been submitted recently, so these need to be prioritised amongst everything else. It's almost a full time job looking after the site, but I'm hoping to have a break from my day job soon so that I can work on BEA a bit more.

Robert Anton Wilson
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Borve Baunehoj wrote:

Unlimited entries: Since custom charts doesn't contribute with album points, I see no reason for a maximum of 100 albums. Imo they should be a place for freedom without having to select the 100 correct albums.

I do not think that would be reasonable for 2 reasons
(a) An infinite list is no longer a list but an inventory or a census.
(b) The number of entries in a list is limited but is the number of lists limited? If your list cannot be long enough, just create a second list and call it part II, III ... and put a link to it in the original list's description. Freedom is cool but restriction is more often mother to ingenuity.

Borve Baunehoj wrote:

Allow duplicate albums

I do not see the advantage in that. As albummaster said, I would fear that for one creative and worthy application of this feature there will be 10 idiotic applications. For that reason would discourage this possibility.

Particualry as long as this site does not encourage/alloe multiple entries for multiple editions of a given album (there are exceptions which pose problems, e.g The Clash or Are You Experienced)

Borve Baunehoj wrote:

Unlimited comment lengths ... If anybody wanted to write entire essays, I'd sure love to read them. Personally I wanted to throw in some Scaruffi quotes on a chart, but his rants are usually too long for BEA

I would see that this could be done using the forums. Putting a link to the thread you create in the comment box of the album. I sure would like to read essays about albums from people capable and willing to write them, but I do not necessarily need to see it on the list. The other advantage of the forum option is it would allow to type in the essay in many entries, making it more manageable to the writer - you wouldn't want a 2,000 page rant or rave about an album disappear due to a technical glitch when saving a page. If enough people get into writing essays about albums, we could have a separate Forum for essays or critics. The option to be able to link in the album comment box seem to me a better solution than an unlimited word count. I recognize the replies of people in the thread would likely derail the essay but I would rather request for an option to limit responses on a post until the author allows rather than unlimited comment box sizes.

Borve Baunehoj wrote:

Separate highest rated custom charts from highest rated greatest album ... easier to discover new custom charts

Definitely a great suggestion. Can't that be done already? I know I can easily search only among custom chart but I haven't tried by rating. For now the number of custom charts is still manageable but yes as the feature remains, I agree that search options should become more and more refined to allow to find that needle in the haystack.

My 2 cents