Site update

[albummaster]

A site update has just been deployed which has been in development (on and off) for about a year. The main change is to do with external/recognised charts attributed to sources outside of BEA. You can now click through on any of these sources to a dedicated page for each source which shows all their charts making it easier to browse through them (and from the admin page for each source, identify which charts haven't been added yet if people want to add any 'missing' year/decade/overall lists). External charts can be added to the site via custom charts and flagged for promotion from the admin page for each chart via a data correction. If a chart is from a source that's currently not on BEA, the source will be vetted/verified to ensure it meets minimum criteria before it is promoted. If you are wanting to contribute, the best way to do this is to help backfill charts from existing sources rather than add charts from new sources. (If a source isn't listed here already, it might suggest it isn't notable enough).

Currently, *all* albums on BEA receive an overall ranking, but only the top 10,000 of these are presented on the overall chart (ranks beyond 10,000 are only displayed individually in some odd corners of the site). A score of just ~2.5 pts is currently sufficient to get an album into the top 100,000 on BEA (this equates to an album appearing in one chart out of ~60,000 on the site). Overall chart positions become fairly meaningless beyond ~100,000 as one change in chart placement can have a dramatic effect in an album's ranking (some would argue the real threshold could be set a lot lower). Albums beyond 100,000 on BEA will shortly appear unranked in terms of their overall ranking to help server scalability and keep costs to a known level (this will only affect overall rankings and not ranks in year/decades as these types of chart have populations of less than 100,000).