We've made some pretty substantial updates to the FAQs in Item 3.1: "Why is this band not featured? How do I add a band?". These are mostly soft changes - that is, no drastic shifts in our suggestions policy - but please read the new language and I'll explain a bit about the effects and reasoning here.

In short, we'd like to see people more routinely helping out with band profiles that we have added at their suggestion. We have an excellent staff and some dedicated users who work tirelessly to maintain our database, but we don't have nearly the manpower to become a rival to the Metal Archives in terms of volume. There are thousands upon thousands of bands that are certainly metal enough to be featured on Metal Storm (and, in an ideal world, would be), but we don't have the resources to cover them all; part of the reasoning behind the Suggestions list is to give us an idea of what artists people are most interested in seeing on Metal Storm so that we know how to prioritize our efforts. A lot of those suggestions are made by users who are otherwise inactive, and that's not very helpful to us.

Thus, while the Suggestions list is open for you to suggest any artist that meets our basic requirements for inclusion, it's more helpful to us, and we think better for the experience of the site, if you focus on bands you're really interested in and therefore would be willing to help take care of once they're on the site. When you go to make a suggestion, keep in mind that our ability to add bands and keep their profiles up to date is limited; if you're recommending a band for the sole reason that it's not on the site, that may not be enough to justify the expenditure of effort. It's much better if you recommend a band you're invested in, that you might comment on or talk up in the forums, that you might review or rate positively, that you might be willing to stay abreast of in case there are changes that have to be made to the profile in the future, etc.

I said "in short" before, and that was a lie, but here's a better "in short": Metal Storm is, as it has always been, a community effort. We'll always need your help to keep things going, and if you focus on stuff that means something to you and want to put effort into, that's best for everyone.

And while you're at it, we've added another item to the FAQs in the Contributions section: Item 4.3: "What are acceptable sources?". This codifies some policies that we've needed to tweak for a while. Have a look at that before you go making any new database edits.

I'll close by mentioning that our Suggestions page is actually in great shape compared to how it used to be - newer users may not recall, but the list used to be hundreds of pages long and contain thousands of bands. The top-voted suggestions were added by users who hadn't logged in for ten years; there were bands who suggested themselves and spammed their way up; the list was so dense that there was almost no hope of getting anything added unless you directly asked a member of staff. Nowadays, we're a lot more conscientious about monitoring the list, and we have our wonderful database team to thank for the fact that it has been consistently limited to under a single page for a while now. In the current era of Metal Storm I like to think that we're a lot more receptive to user input than we ever were and we prefer to accommodate those suggestions when we can. But do remember that we're only here because of a lot of hard work on the back end, and that's why it's important to us that we see users interacting with the profiles we've added.

If you have any questions about the policy or want something clarified, feel free to ask below or PM a member of staff (such as our new Database Manager, Yaniv).