Dear fellow Metal Stormers,

We have decided to take the bold step of slashing our Suggestions list into tiny ribbons. Rest assured that this is not because we don't care about what you have to say - on the contrary, it's because the list has become so cluttered and unwieldy over years of accumulation that we feel it no longer serves as an accurate measure of which bands our users care about. As far as we know, the list has never been emptied since its institution; many bands that somehow acquire enough votes to make it to the "Top Suggestions" list are now defunct, or they were suggested by a now-inactive user, or we find that their profiles don't attract a lot of activity once added. We've had the occasional case of fraudulent vote-boosting by bands that don't meet our requirements, as well as duplicate suggestions of bands that have already been submitted to the list (or added to the site) with slight misspellings or variations; the place is kind of a mess. And as it says in the FAQs, our goal is not to feature every single metal band out there - we just don't have the manpower to maintain a database the size of the Metal Archives, so knowing which bands our users will actually pay attention to is important for the direction of our efforts.

Don't worry; the Suggestions feature isn't going anywhere. We won't even be deleting the whole list - we settled on every suggested band below ID#11111 because it leaves us with a semi-manageable pool of recent suggestions (and for the metal meme). If you suggested a band within the last couple of years, it should still be there once the ax has fallen. If your suggestion was deleted, you may submit it again (assuming the band meets our requirements). This action is just to get rid of the massive glut of suggestions that have been languishing for years and whose omission will not rankle the feathers of many current users.

Of course, we must accept some amount of blame for allowing the quality of the list to deteriorate so; you don't get to 250 pages of unheeded suggestions by being attentive and thorough. Part of our purpose in deleting all these suggestions is to make the list a little easier to handle for ourselves and a little more representative of what people actively want to see. Unfortunately, we don't always have a reliable supply of contributors with time on their hands to add these bands, track down the necessary information, and build complete, respectable profiles, which is why bands get added irregularly.

Consider this, therefore, an invitation to all MS users to participate in the database-building process. If you get a notification that a band you voted for has been added, we would appreciate it if you took some time to fill out their profile yourself (discography, lineup, links, images, ketchup, mustard, pickles, the works). Some of you have figured out that the easiest way to get a band added is to link it in the ShoutBox instead of going through the formal process, or sending a PM to a staff member; we can set up a shell profile in no time at all, but it lightens the load on us if you volunteer to find all that information. If you don't have enough community points to submit edits by yourself, your submissions will have to be checked by the staff before going through, but any extra effort that you can save us will go a long way in procuring the addition of bands you want to see on Metal Storm. After all, there are only a few of us here in MS Towers, and we can't manage the thousands of bands in our database and the thousands more in the Suggestions list alone.

With all that said, please keep a few things in mind:

- Whenever you make edits to the database, you should provide a source; if your edits have to go through the proofreading queue, a source is a must for us to check your work, but even if you have all the permissions you need, providing a source is still recommended in case we have to fix something or find a disputing piece of data.

- You should all know this by now, but it warrants saying over and over again: only official sources are acceptable. Official websites, social media pages belonging to the band or label, press releases, published band interviews - these are the types of sources we will accept. The Metal Archives is not an official source and their profiles are often filled with errors. Wikipedia is not an official source. If you learn of something through another news outlet, try to track the story to its official origins. If you use Blabbermouth as a source for making database edits, you might as well be submitting edits with crayons and a typewriter.

- Once again, we have no intention of featuring every metal band that has ever released an album; we prioritize maintaining our current database over expanding it, so even with our refurbished Suggestions list, submitting something doesn't guarantee addition. Sometimes we decide that a band doesn't meet our standards of inclusion; sometimes we just don't have the time to worry about the list. Like everything else on MS, the Suggestions list is a kind of balancing act for us.

We will be dropping the hammer on June 1st. You don't necessarily have to do anything in the next week; if your suggestions were recent, they will still be there, and you can always resubmit a suggestion that was deleted; there will be less competition now, so that suggestion will be a little more likely to attract attention. In all likelihood, the list will grow back to an inordinate size in no time at all, but hopefully we'll be able to keep more of a lid on it with our powers combined this time.

- Love,

The Metal Storm Staff