Improving our awareness of 'missing artists' on PA

If you culled subgenres on PA, there would not be fewer artists, there would be more. You just call them prog, rather than playing ping pong between narrow definitions of the constituent parts.

Agreed, and that is why the audience for PA is diminishing. Whilst I am not a fan of a mass market approach, neither do you only want to attract a bunch of sad geeks. I would, incidentally, think of the subcategories - I am a relatively intelligent person. I just don't want that level of detail on a music site.

I will agree that forum traffic from participating members seems to have dropped. I'm not so sure the number of visitors has dropped. As I type this, there are 19 members on the forum with 2052 guests and 76 search robots. Who those 2052 guests are is anyone's guess, unless the forum software can't differentiate between people and something else. I'm assuming the search robots are search engines crawling the forum and indexing it.

But back to David's idea. I think a list would be helpful. I believe in the very early days of this site, quite a few people were working off lists in a similar manner. I believe I stumbled onto some them quite some time ago when I was checking on if a band was ever proposed before. Not sure I could replicate the search of the forum I did back then, but they were there from well over a decade ago. I would recommend treating the lists as a secondary priority where we can work on them when we have time. Active band suggestions should still remain top priority. 

- The tagging is entirely optional. Artists and releases can be added to AP without any tags.

- The tagging can be quite generic, and that is intentional. At the most basic level, you can just tag a release as "Prog" (or "Non-Prog", or "Prog-Adjacent"). Then you can add a base genre like "Rock" or "Metal". That's really quite enough for 90% of users and use-cases. More specific sub genres exist because users ask for them, or because they are just well established and frequently used. But I'm resisting the urge to add most of the "newfangled" genres that RYM has, like "Plunderphonics" or "Swancore".

- Tags do not necessarily create "division" - they just add information, which can be ignored if you're not interested. For instance, I recently assigned the "atmospheric" tag to the latest Klone release (which is excellent btw). As a result, the genre says something like "Atmospheric Prog Post Rock/Metal". This shouldn't be read as a really small box where only this release and ten others reside. It's just an attempt to give visitors some vague idea what other users think it sounds like. It's a Prog release which is mostly Rock, but also quite a bit Metal, it has a "Post Rock" vibe to it and is quite atmospheric.

Then about PA:

- I don't think that Max will change anything in the structure of this website. He wasn't willing to do that twenty years ago when I was heavily contributing to the website, and he certainly won't do so today.

- I think the main purpose of this website is to rank high in search engines, any prog aspect is secondary and only a means to a cause.

- And if that is the case, it explains why Max would not change anything unless he felt that it a) was necessary to ensure the ranking or b) the ranking decreases and Max feels like a major change is needed to fix that.

Considering the SEO priorities of the website, I don't think the biography requirement will be dropped. That leaves prioritization as the biggest potential for optimization. AP could help with that. With the AP database I'm currently in a position to be able to list releases which a highly rated and tagged as prog (at AP and RYM, for instance), but are not listed at PA. This list could serve as an input for the genre teams to prioritize the artist backlog. For example, Whom Gods Destroy was added to PA only recently. It's a really high-profile super group of prog artists which released a reasonably good album last year. This addition could have been prioritized over other less relevant artists. 

So, I went through the exercise of suggesting two bands, and just piecing together the information took me over an hour. Part of it for me is that I need to draft on my computer and most of the time, I visit PA on my phone. 

Although the eventual need to have all the "proper" information about a band would still slow down the actual entry of a band on the data base. Would there be  any through to allow 'provisional' postings, where site members could add the needed photo or bio. With bios, if we are talking about current existing bands, I think it would be nice to reach out and have the band or their management provide an 'official' bio, rather than something a forum pulled from piecing together information on various websites.

The list itself would be complied from a number of sources, such as that list of albums not on PA that Mike exported here from Awesome Prog last September, the existing suggestions in the 'Suggest New Bands and Artists' thread that never got dealt with when they were first posted, and any quick suggestions of the type I talked about in the original post - where the poster didn't have the time or inclination to make a formal suggestion in the 'Suggest New Bands and Artists' thread in accordance with the official artist submission procedure - and instead just gave us the name of the band or artist, the suggested sub genre, some listening links, and possibly an official website in a new 'Quick Suggestion Thread for Artists Missing From PA' thread that would need to be started (since we don't really want these quick suggestions with very limited information being made in the existing 'Suggest New Bands and Artists' thread, and accelerating the speed at which the properly formulated suggestions in that thread get pushed down and off the page).

I don't know how Teramaze got rejected , they need a re-evaluation because they have released new music. 

Strangely, some bands accepted years ago would definitely be rejected today if they were suggested and some rejections from years ago got re-valuated & cleared in more recent times. Oh well...