Top Hundred Albums - Historical?

As you all know, ProgArchives has a very nice Top Albums list generator.  It's filterable and generates the data on the fly.

Well it is relatively stable, with a rough top 50 staying put, albeit the places of individual albums shift frequently. I remember Selling England by the Pound was #1 for nearly a year until there was an influx of 3- and 4-star ratings, and it was pushed from #1 to #2 and then to #3. I think Close to the Edge, Thick as a Brick, and SEBTP have been in the top 3 for a while, though.

Most of the notable changes in the general albums top happened because of changes in the weighting algorithm, not because of evolutions in taste. The one evolution in taste that actually happened and influenced the charts was the success of modern bands. After the first years when the main concern was establishing the "canon" of the classic era and showing your tastes by the way you rate the classics, modern albums from more recent genres started accumulating ratings and creeping into the top 100. 

There were several changes of the chart algorhythms in the long and windy history of PA. Some represented M@x's perpetual quest for a balanced and representative chart, some were made for the purpose of battling rating manipulations, and some were so daring that had to be changed back or severely adjusted - there was once an algorithm that tried to put emphasis on unknown gems, bringing many such albums to the foreground (especially those with cult following, i.e. not many ratings but all very high). The self-proclaimed "open-minded" community surprisingly (or maybe not) retaliated. One victim of this turmoil was Phoenix's Canatafabule, which suddenly appeared in the overall chart at #30 or #33, I don't remember exactly, leading to furious inquiries "who the hell is Phoenix"? It looks like the many retaliation one-star ratings are now deleted, but the algorithm had to be restored to put "order" back in place (and Phoenix out of the top 250). 

  Archive.org has a limited number of crawls, but I think Max never bothered to save any of that himself.  

Edited by Henry Plainview - August 19 2011 at 11:14

topographicbroadways wrote: Henry Plainview wrote:   Archive.org has a limited number of crawls, but I think Max never bothered to save any of that himself.   Old PA banner looks better

 

Marlon wrote: I'm just guessing here. But I do think that the site has some kind of periodic backup of the database with the ratings. So, theoretically, you're able to restore all the available backups and to create an historical view of the data.

There are back-ups: we had to roll back 12 hours to one when the site was severely compromised a few years ago. But I would guess they're rolling and the ones from a long time ago were deleted.