PHP's one saving grace is that it was used to build MA. The update they did a few years back was great, especially because of the search improvements. The one caveat is that it's not mobile friendly at all; there was an android app created by a member some years back but it hasn't been updated in years. I think it crawled pages and then re-rendered them into a mobile-friendly layout but it didn't always work. MA doesn't have any kind of API which would help with this, but every facet of it is voluntary effort, it's unfair to hold this against the maintainers, great folks who I've met at Montreal fests. \m/
If there is anything like the Metal Archives for electronic music or rock music (actually any genre) out there, I'd like to know about it. It's simply the greatest music encyclopedia I've come across, albeit entirely focused on metal.<p>As much as I appreciate Discogs and RateYourMusic, they tackle different things and don't really function as encyclopedias, the former functioning more as a catalogue and the latter as a way to track and list your favourite albums.<p>Edit:
Looks like this post resulted in a hug of death over on metal-archives.com!
And for the 20th anniversary it sounds like the project could use some better architecture to protect against a DDoS despite using Cloudflare. I'll be sure to donate somehow given it's been a big part of my life and I've sadly probably used it more than Wikipedia in my life.
Ah, yes. The site that has a thousand reasons why the band you're looking for isn't "metal" enough to be in its database, but then has an entry for Rush:<p><a href="https://www.metal-archives.com/bands/Rush/1206" rel="nofollow">https://www.metal-archives.com/bands/Rush/1206</a>
MA, as well as several metal forums I've been a part of, have stayed shockingly consistent over the years. It's really neat to me. There's drama in every corner of the internet, but I've always enjoyed my metal spaces.
!mab or !metal for DDG and Kagi, in case someone is interested ;)<p>I often use them to find out if some band I found in the depth of my hard disk still exists, or to help decide what genre to sort some band in.
I visit MA pretty often and was glad to see it on the front page. However, it looks like Hacker News crowd gave MA a hug of death for their 20th birthday!
Cool site, I love the detail each band has. I learned a lot about my favorite bands than I did on Wikipedia or similar. Although, I think each album's user reviews are my least favorite part. You will commonly see every review score from 100% to 0% with justification like "I don't get it, it just sounds whiny" but in long-winded review format.
Somewhat surprising and very nice to see metal-archives posted here. It seems rare these days to see continual high quality from a single website, but metal-archives has just been solid good for a real long time. Many things have been tainted or destroyed with the maturity of internet business.<p>More decades, let's go!
The most metal part about metal-archives.com is the RIP section: <a href="https://www.metal-archives.com/artist/rip" rel="nofollow">https://www.metal-archives.com/artist/rip</a>
Aweso\m/e - I keep digging there for new, and old bands. I'm all over when comes to styles, but last years death/black metal kept my sanity.