Allow collaborations to include other collaborations?

[MadhattanJack]

I've run into this quite a few times now... Today, I was listening to a group called The Summer Kills, which is a collaboration consisting of Matthew Ryan, a solo artist who's made 14 albums, and Hammock, which is a duo. Hammock has made 15 albums and is arguably much better-known than Matthew Ryan, but neither of the two guys in Hammock have made solo albums, so we can't link them.

I'm guessing the reason BEA doesn't allow collaborations to be included in other collaborations is that there would be too many errors for mods to deal with, but these types of group arrangements do exist, and aren't even all that unusual. So... maybe the "Level 2" or higher data moderators could be allowed to do it, and retain the "individuals only" rule for everyone else?

We can already choose other collaborations when adding members to the collaboration being edited (we just can't save them), so while I don't really know how hard this would be to change, it doesn't seem like it would be a big deal, coding-wise.

[albummaster]

The existing functionality here was mainly added because of a request on the forums for an 'associated acts' section on an artist's summary page (the specific example provided at the time as links to Pete Townshend and Ronnie Lane's collaborative album from the pages of both The Who and Small Faces).

The main restriction here is that artists have to be already on BEA to be added into a collaboration. In the example you provided of two artists performing together as a named 'group', one of the artists is already on BEA, but the other isn't. The alternative to this is that BEA allows *any* artist to be created and added to the site so long as they are part of a collaboration that already exists on the site.

The downside to this is that the site gets flooded with a lot of artists and none of them will have any solo output listed on their artist page. In the case of some artists with many members, or with long careers, the list of current/prior members could be massive and it wouldn't, in many cases, add a lot of value to this site (appreciating that some other sites act more as a complete database, whereas BEA doesn't and serves a different purpose).

That being said, the whole membership functionality is still evolving and hasn't been finished (like large parts of the rest of the site), due to lack of time/resources to work on the site full time (lots of other things constantly being addressed in the background). The main reason collaborations haven't been added is behind the scenes the members of those collaborations would need to be parsed (and their other acts iterated) when rendering related artists (there is also logic to consider when variations/aliases are added as members to prevent the same underlying people being added twice, which is mostly working, but does throw up the odd glitch). It's easy to add on the surface but does get quite complicated (not unresolvable), but the main issue is time/resource and being able to have enough time left for my day job and to work on other aspects of the site that also need attention).

[MadhattanJack]

[albummaster]