Personally, I don't need a Battle to tell me if my work is whether good or not.
I simply read the comments and see what people thinks about my songs, and what should I improve.
I honestly think you are giving so much importance to something it doesn't deserve it. I can say, and I'm almost sure of that, that this site was created to make musicians share their work, share their experiences, improve their music, learn from others, but to make all of us compete to win a 1st place by the end of the month.
If you want to compete for prizes, I can bet you will find many contest where you live, or in the Internet itself.
And anyway, if you make a Battle, Taka would win it every month, so don't bother    . Nah, just kidding.
Well, but, if you all care so much about getting ratings, I'm sure it's not that hard making a voting system.

           > Iszil

We don't have to necessarily make it a verification thing, just put a section maybe that is listed as explicit, therefore people know not to got here when young ones are about..  That's all... Music is creativity, and hindering creativity by not allowing it at all can be bad, but, at the same time, it isn't always necessary to make a song good to add a bunch of nasty lyrics..  That being said, as the site stands now, we have to limit the type of lyrical content because there is no place to seperate it, and you can accidently hear something you shouldn't...  know what I mean? so yeah, and explicit tab would be nice.. in the lyric review, there should also be an explicit tab, so that folks now not to look at those lyrics when young ones might read them.. that's all..  easy to do, and better for the family aspect of the site.. Agree? I hope so..  Anyway, I know it wont stop dome young kid from listening if s/he wants to. but it should help keep accidental views down, and keep us family friendly, which is the main thing I think we need to do.. This is an anomaly in the world wide web, it is place that has remained friendly, when dealing with music.. we have managed to keep from getting overrun with low class lyrics about ho's and pimpin and such.. That is amazing..

    Let's hope we stay that way..

                JimK

Hmm poke in the eye...
Good idea!

When a person listens to a song and attempts to leave the page make a popup kindof like one of the animations in messenger popup. Have it a finger that jabs at the screen and then a large explosion animation kinda like what happens in the batman comics witht he word VOTE in the middle. The screen would then scroll to the voting bar.

Seriously though. Some of the problems can be fixed with a simple language change.
What do you relate voting with? Me?... I'm not really sure.
What do I relate rating with? STARS

eg. -4 star restaurant/hotel
-the movie was 4/5 stars

So how about ditching the word VOTE and replace it with RATE. Really when you listen to a song, it should be subjective unto itself. When you rate it gives it a definate assesment that should not rely on other songs (for the most part).
Also, right above the stars put another heading  'Rating'
I would suggest making another set of stars replace the old ones once they have rated that show the average rating so far.

-I'm goooooneeeee!
Oh wait...Do I need to say that here?
Best be safe with Ralph around!! :P

I agree Jim , I am not for censorship of any kind. An adults section would allow us to upload some of the more explicit stuff that we have written. I have some comical (but dirty) songs that could be uploaded into an adult or explicit song area...... if we had one.

And I don't mean to hider anybody's creativity, I just want to make sure that it's something set well enough aside from the "general" content.

Issues that would be raised would be...  do such "explicit" songs participate in battles as well?  If so, and if such a song were to score a ranking in the top 3/5/whatever songs for the battle, we would have to make sure that it's clearly labeled as "explicit" so that no casual wanderer mistakes it for just another song on the AMP.

On the other hand, to have a separate contest/battle for explicit media would also be a little odd, as participation would surely be less intense than the general battles.

It just seems to me that there are some technicalities with the way that its inner workings should operate, and those things should be clarified.



Izil-- as I tried to say in my post above, I think that if a person doesn't want to participate in battles, then don't   Whether it's because you only care about comments, or ratings, or the community, that's great.  Not everybody needs the battles.  And those who want them certainly don't *NEED* them in order to feel good about themselves.  It's just a bit of friendly competition.  I don't need condoms, but (about) every gas station in North America has them for sale in the bathrooms.  Just because something is offered says nothing about your NEED for it.

I'd like to have the new bandamp operational before the battle works.  That way, people can continue with their normal stuff, and they don't have to be held up by someone coding the battle system.

*shrugs*
Tim

Creation is free, in all the meanings of the word.
I don't think we should have any section for "high explicit content", cause then you are dividing our music, our art in two different concepts that are not proper. In that case we then should have a Romantic section, a Satanic section, a Emotive section, Sex section and whatever that you can come up with, and that's not right, cause, in the end, it's all music, all that is our work, what we do in our free or full time, what moves our lives, and so, because of that, it all should be in the same section.
I honestly think the forums sections of BandAMP as it is now are perfect. If you are going to upload something with explicit content, then make as Dark and make all of us aware of that by highlighting it in your post.
I think all this discussion is distorting, the whole BandAMP feeling is distorting as well, and I'm kinda sad about it.
I miss the BandAMP old times, 2 years ago. But times changes, and I guess I have to adapt myself to that.
I just hope none takes this in a wrong way. It's just what I feel, what I think. I know you all do this for a good goal, with a good intention, but may be I don't like some changes.

          > Iszil

While you can make a way that you can't oblige people who don't want to participate in the battle to do it, then it's all fine. I'm not saying that I don't want to, but it's just that I think many people here is giving so much importance to something that, in my humble opinion, don't deserves it.
Anyway, good luck with all the improvements you want to do.

          > Iszil

but to be fair, that logic also destroys the want for genre classifications.  should we get rid of that concept too?  should the whole music industry get rid of genres and just sell everything as plain-old music?

my random thoughts.. I feel if I want to be considered a member of this site with credibility, I should be willing to give every song that I can get to (I miss some but not on purpose) a   listen and a vote. Unfortunately with my job and bandsm, I don't have as much time as I used to, so I don't get on the computer as much.  I will make an effort to listen and vote on the battles cause these people have decided to put their songs to the test.  I will try to get to all the songs but I feel that is impossible task for me at this time. If you have a song you want me to hear pm with the link or name.

We used to have a list on the bottom of one's profile page, with all the songs in the current battle that you hadn't voted to yet in it. That list was so annoying, the only way to get rid of it was by voting to every song in it.

Why not put that list back?

... that regarding the battles. I vote to every song I listen to. But I don't listen to every song! I have time restrictions aswell. If I had a obvious way of telling which songs were in the battle or not (I know there is a "current battle" page but I access threads via Audio Review.......) it would be easier to decide which songs to listen to or not. Although I don't need a battle to tell me which songs are good or not, it's a nice feature of this site and I do wish to see it working better. Even cooler if there was something to win. Now I'm ready to sponsor simple prizes (T shirts or so) every few months or so (quarterly finals?) certainly not every month, and the spirit of the battles have to be upped quite a bit for sure.


OK next .. language.

Let's keep it decent OK? I'm certainly not for an age restricted part of the forum, like if you are old enough it's OK to spew filthy language all the time? That is just ridiculous. People who spew filthy language are immature and haven't balanced out their social behaviour yet. So, people who do spew filthy language need to be addressed for their output in the hope they'll understand to tone themselves down. If not, they can go in the cornfield

I am for "explicit content" warnings or flags or tags or whatnot. Some option that members can check to threads they visit: "mark as explicit" and admins get an automated warning so they can check out themselves and decide what to do (mostly put up "explicit content" in the thread header or something similar). That should be enough IMO.

Ofcourse, in the now hidden empty song thread, the use of the f-word had taken quite a flight. But in that particular case, there was a philosophical and artistic use behind it - it was the topic of discussion itself. That is entirely different from the casual use of the f-word, something actually being discussed over in the thread. So if people still took offense, I have to say that those people didn't understand the discussion at all and needed to have read it better. Obviously the thread was moved out of public sight because we did realise that their may me more fragile minded people coming across this site (ie. children) and we don't want to give off a bad example (the use of the f-word alone does trigger a series of emotional responses, and any casual passer by may be triggered into thinkin that this forum allows filthy language without any restriction at all). But for insiders, there was no reason to feel offended whatsoever.

Hmm did I miss something? Probably.. I didn't read this entire thread, just skipped over it quickly. So I'm just sharing my thoughts on the topics I noticed flashing by.. Cheers!

pup sounds good to me. an explicits tag on the upload would work fine..

    I disagree with  your  idea on the thread that was removed.. the Fbomb was used originally in a statement about the thread itself, the discussion about if it was artistic/or a good word, or  nothing wrong with it (and in the thread itself it was not artistic).  you can have a discussion about it to explain away a certain sentence or statement, but that does not make it so.  It was not used in an artistic manner. If it was in lyrical manner then I would agree. The points of discussion could have been made without it.

 Explicit tags would work fine, I will say this I appreciate the attention the Mods did on this.  The site has been kept clear of this kind of problem.. I would hate to come onto this site and it be like other sites loaded with trolls and inflammatory comments.

Thanks for keeping our bandamp community the way it is.

If you ask me
Its the community
That holds the key

Everyone is always here
They just appear
At different times of the year

Sorry I just felt a song coming on......

TLS can bA have a voting system (prominently on the page) that moves songs through the battle system AND a rating system that ..... shows up on the forum content page ?? Either one or both (and other statistics) could contribute to an 'overall' best of the amp.

I think the idea of a 'NAGGING' reminder that songs have not been voted on is a good one, because the more you force, demand and restrict people the quicker they'll walk away!

I've come to see that this place is about the community, the chats, the discussions, the 'problems', the concerns, the ideas, the answers, the points of views, the oddities, the spammers etc, that's what keeps this place together.
The Audio review and battles are secondary functions to the main community, places where members fight it out and give 'nice' 'non-confrontational' personal opinions of each other.
The real 'characters' come out when there's something else going on.

Flyer, I also get a bit of a prang sometimes inside if I start to think how many songs I've reviewed and how many of those people take the time to listen (simply listen, not vote) to even some of my stuff.
But that's what it's all about, people come and think you have all the time in the world for them, they need to think that because they have just created some masterpiece or other, so to keep the 'community' alive we keep on reviewing, you cant say 'your not reviewing my stuff so I wont do yours' that's childish.
You know you find the most amazing tunes in the audio review
And if you notice the trend, a new member comes in , gets excited about the closeness of the community then leaves for a while and then comes back, maybe, for a while.
Take Ninjaguy as an example, I wouldn't want to see him here too often, he has school to concentrate on.
Yet he makes an appearance sometimes. As with all of us we have SOO many other things to do, being the creative and artistic people that we are.

BTW,
Nothing in life is a circle, or a straight line,
You wont get back to the same place, no matter how much you pine
As you always will have taken, so many steps forward in time !!          

True, the original use of the word in that thread wasn't artistic, but I was talking about the eventual flight the use of the word took later on in the thread. There was a certain playfulness going on eventually, and there's nothing wrong with that, it does not equal foul-mouthedness (although the first use in the thread obviously was), but again for passers-by the thread and who knows the entire forum could appear to be foul mouthed all the way. So, thread removed (although I wasn't the one who removed the thread you'd have to ask jimk about his *true* reasons )

So we should keep it clean.. all the way, even in regards to playful use of the word - or have explicit warnings added to threads. I know I use bad language in some songs... So I'm going to see if I have put warnings in there...

Hmm well , ... thats all I can say about that.

well.

Explicit tags are a good idea.  Letting the users flag media as such (in the event that the author him/herself(s) failed to flag it themselves) is a great idea too.  That is easy enough to implement, and I can likely have it done rather soon.

I'm working on a system that should easily allow people to vote on songs that they have not currently rated, which could effectively take the place of that list that PX mentioned, which showed you songs you haven't rated yet, which are participating in the current battle.

I want to see the battle-system ratings with the comments that people leave, so that you *must* rate it if you are commenting.  I don't think that it's perfectly fair to force a person to rate if they just stopped in to listen.  Rating should be an easy, easy task once you've listened, but I don't want to prevent the person from leaving alive if they haven't voted.

TLS I agree.. forced voting is one of the major problems with other music upload site ( I won't mention names). because they are forced to vote. lots of comments and votes are very negative, derogatory, and just plain stupid or useless.