Greetings and felicitation, children of technology!
We have something good to announce - going forward, we're focusing our efforts on only the good metal bands.
We have grown the database to 128k bands, 362k albums, 680k artists, 34k labels, and 102k reviews, thanks to contributions from 85k users. We have adapted our rules to accept digital releases, which are being released at a faster rate than ever. What hasn't changed much is the size of our staff, who have been listening to every single band we accept, assessing every genre we list, and overseeing the whole operation. We are tremendously proud of our work, but we're all getting burned out. The greatest challenge in moderating the site is that the majority of bands on the site are, well... not good.
We, the staff, have decided that we're not going to give up on what we love, but we're going to give up on what we don't like. The current staff have started to curate Encyclopaedia Bonum Metallum: The Good Metal Archives. In this day and age, we're finally comfortable coming out as elitists. We're sick of accepting metalcore bands because they stole enough In Flames riffs. We're sick of In Flames, too, so we've reverted their discography to how it was when the site started, back in 2002. We're cutting off some classic bands when they should've cut themelves off, like Metallica and Slayer. We've got a blanket exclusion on bands with tribal tattoos, white guy dreadlocks, and oiled beards.
We debated how to manage the existing site, and we found the answer from the same place which killed our passion for running it - artificial intelligence. We discovered a series of atmospheric black metal albums that were made by neural networks, which had a fanbase consisting primarily of other robots commenting on YouTube. It felt dehumanizing. We later found some of the code behind it had been made open source on GitHub, and we eventually started working on developing automated assistance for moderating the archives. We also experimented in the potential sabotage of false genres, which led to converting ASCII data from the text of reviews on the archives down to binary, then into synthesized 'djent' music - this project was nixed when the script caused the web server to hang and every song it created sucked. That's not the only type of work we're going to leave to other people, though. The plan is to automate about 95% of current moderator work, while allowing our loyal userbase to continue adding and editing information on their favorite bands, which probably suck.
Encyclopaedia Bonum Metallum will be publicly viewable starting today. Existing non-staff user accounts have been migrated and banned, because we don't want you f*cking this up. Over 500 bands have been migrated, and we are starting to focus our attention on curating the pages and implementing sweeping qualitative improvements on them. At this time the public-facing frontend of the site has been borrowed from the old site, but our agile software development team has made strong improvements on a beta version, and our first six sprints of 2019 have been a learning process, but nonetheless led us to complete our objective of a public release at the end of Q1. We slept on it, we had a meeting this morning, and the site is ready to go.
We still have some work to do on the site, such as removing the no-longer-needed "metalcore/deathcore" section under "browse bands by genre" as well as deleting reviews with incorrect opinions, and making a new logo once we confirm the Latin in the new name is correct. The search still utilizes the old site's database, because we're working on developing a script that redirects you to a calculatedly similar good band when you search for and click on a crappy band (apologies for this feature not being live, but the current beta version redirects every link to the entry for Carnivore, which, while it fits our proselytizing modus operandi, is not by design.)
We are proud to present Encyclopaedia Bonum Metallum: The Good Metal Archives.
"We never ever will die 'cause Heavy Metal is life
And not eternal hell"
-Manilla Road, "Crystal Logic" (RIP Mark Shelton)
