Hey, i'm just curious about the history of this website and i'd be interested in hearing from some of the members and admins who have been here from the beginning.

First of all when did this site officially launch? Somewhere around 2004 i surmise.

Did you build the site before it was launched or was a team recruited on the site and then it simply grew?

Why did there used to be a top 500 album page but now only 250?

Are these things changeable? Like could we make a top 1000 album list for example?

Would be cool to get some stories about the trials and tribulations of building such an amazing database.

I've heard a story here and there but thought an actual thread would be interesting.

Yeah...not too many around from those really old days at this point. 

I can only guess at your first question (I believe the site started in 2003 and the forum came into existence in 2004) which doesn't really add much which is why I didn't say anything. I believe 'dude' was the first official member (beyond the founders, obviously). 

Upon further thinking, I can add that Heavy Prog, Eclectic Prog, and Crossover Prog were added when it was deemed 'Art rock' was getting too unwieldy (although I wasn't a collab at the time so I don't really know the particulars). Same deal with the three metal subgenres. IIRC, Phillipe wanted the Indo Prog/Raga Rock sub, again for a reason I don't know. There was some contentious debate about changing Italian Symphonic Prog to RPI, but clearly that change went through. (I think there was also contentious debate about ISP being a separate category at all, but that was well before my time.) Prog Related and Proto-Prog I believe also had some firm detractors, but I think the tightening of the reigns of admittance helped there. 

I remember a radical forum redesign at some point with separate subforums for each subgenre, which then changed to what we have now. It's sometimes fun to go through the waybackmachine and look at the site in it's infancy and various stages of growth. 

Another thing I recall is when you entered an album's page the band's discography would appear in the right side which was very useful, to bad this feature was dropped.

I did not feel addressed since I signed up in 2008 (though my first acquiaintance with this site was in September or October 2004). I think PA's start was on 29 January 2004 (at least this was the day when forum member #1 (M@X) signed up and some more well known collabs and admins followed soon after.

PA was founded by ProgLucky and M@X. maani is entitled "Founding Moderator" but started, according to his own words, "as a visitor".

we've had this discussion a few times before, including recently (with PeePee participating)

No time right now to recapitulate, but maybe I will if no-one has before I do find the time (it's my coffee break right now).

Just know that M@X and ProgLucky actually bought this site from two Floridians back in 2003 (I think it was just a DB, then with a very inadapted forum) and set it up in the actual "forum+DB" in late Jan 2004 (the 29th), and I chanced upon it when googling up Harmonium.

Unlike what Ken implies, I never had a hand in the design or ownership (I just drew upon their Legal Notice, for free, copied and adapted from somewhere else), but  M@X (previously a Metal Head) and I did spend a few dozens to one hundred of hours communicating by e-mail about which groups should be in or not. If my first reviews date from Febr 4 (just a couple of lines), I didn't actually join the forum until Sept or Oct 04, but was a lurker from the start.

Hi,

I imagine that a "database" is not about a history at all ... it's just stuff and more stuff and more stuff, and then someone makes sure that this stuff is listed somewhere so it can be found.

It's not about "history" per se since no one is keeping tabs, although someone might be able to tell us when it started on a small hard drive on a 286, and finally became a behemoth ... and the number of bands, like the first bands added in and then the rest.

I think PA as it is today is cool, however, I'm starting to think that too many bands are being added because they sound like, and I'm not sure that they are being spun and heard properly to make a good definition, and then, the worse ... their next album is somewhere else because the previous one did not do so well, so progressive becomes metal ... or otherwise.

I think that if we had an alternative selection, instead of top of the pops, things might be more interesting ... like the admins/collaborators top 100 choices for "progressive" and these would be BANDS ... not albums, because too many bands have too many different things that would not even be considered at PA in general ... but they are here because that band had one album ... tatatata .... that kind of "duplication" is what I would like to see gone, however, a database is about DATA ... not people ... and therein lies the problem ... everyone's preference is in accordance with the database's simplest code possible, and not about anything else up to and including possibilities ... as such, databases are going to be interesting in a couple of years, when there is way too much nothing in them to be useful ... sort of like the Encyclopedia Britannica (or any other Encyclopedia) that ended up making itself useless because not only there was so much, it was only organized in one way that mixed everything and made it harder for you and I to find conclusive details about something or other. The same uselessness will befall a database, because the ability to lead it into a better organized process is not there.

In this sense, I guess that WIKI is doing this better, but PA is 10 years behind the time, I think when it comes to putting together useful and more complete information. I find it really sad that I can find more information about a band in WIKI than I can on PA ... because we're either lazy, or PA has not the better choice of Admins to help along. Admins that spend more time posting insults instead of cohesive and creative commentary, just shows the kind of "geek" that is not going to help PA grow very far ... and the database continues adding band after band, that does not help the "progressive" definition anything since most of them are just another cookie cutting band ... with very little originality done with it ... and it reminds me of Ian Anderson's comment on the interview with RW ... "everything that can be done in rock'n'roll has been done!" ... and here we are ... not knowing where to go and what to do ... as the man once said ... we've lost our father!

This was indeed an excellent feature. 

Yes, very handy indeed , but now you have to back up to fetch another album.

I understand this was taken out, because it slowed down considerably the loading speeds (it was the case)

I found the forum very welcoming, discovered a lot of new music. 

Even if you turned the 'show the covers' off (and just had a link to each album)? I don't remember it being that bad loading, but this was many moons ago.

siLLy puPPy wrote: So when is that tired ass pic of Arjen Lucassen gonna change on the front page? Nothing against him. I love Ayreon. It's just time for a new photo of either him or someone else! How about a prog artist of the week wearing that totally fashionable T-shirt?

 

We have to get to them first. Is that shirt even still being made anymore? 

another part of the secret PA's history few know that some of us do know... this site was the sh*t back in the day. A movie really should be made about it...

we had one collab who really lost his sh*t about that picture and its semi permanence.. and this was years ago so that says just how long that goddamned picture has been up on the site.

well..he got himself a T shirt.. and took a picture and sent it to M@x and perhaps one of the only good things f**king M@X has done here was ..

not change the picture.. seems  the collab who was a few cans short of a six pic took that picture..  wearingthe shirt..a pair of crocs.. and nothing else 

so moral to the story..  I wouldn't bitch about the geeky retro prog guy..  it could have been worse.

^

Now THAT'S the kind of story i was hoping to get out of somebody.

Thanks for sharing that hilarious archival tale!~!

Yeah, I didn't understand why , because I was not frustrated at all... AAMOF, I tend to think Internet was "quicker" in those days than it is now (less traffic, I guess), especially since the appearance of Windows 10.

But M@X was/is a performance guy... at the bottom of every page on forum PA you load there is a place (at the very bottom) where it says how quick the page was loaded.

Not sure whether it was the covers that took time or the url links that took time to load, though.

Blacksword wrote: I joined in 2004, and to be honest I don't remember it being much different, apart from the lack of adverts in those days. I guess if I could see how the forum looked back then, it would look quite different. The same old polls and threads, and an army of Dream Theater fan boys, and ELP detractors. There were some 'colourful' members, with 'strong' personalities, shall we say.

Esthetically there isn't much difference (aesthically, it's a different matter)

The DB page has only seen one renovation that I remember: the album artwork headband.

The rest has been +/- the same, though over the years the top tabs have changed.

For the forum, I'd say the PA logo atop changed, but the actual multiplication of sub-forums (a big mistake IMHO) would put to shame the biblical dude in the middle of the desert. At one point, it became impossible to follow all the threads (I haven't even tried since 2008 or so)