Champ213

That's great news! Also, I totally missed that although I'm pretty sure I follow them on FB.

I can't really tell you why this is happening, but my best guess would be it's because it's an old thread that was made before we changed to IPB3, which changed the format of all thread URLs, so maybe something went wrong when the pages were indexed during the move, I dunno. Either that ot it's the weird formatting of the name Sel'm at the end of the URL. Or maybe a combination of both. It can be fixed though by removing the search/highlight variable from the URL-ending: The first page of the thread: http://www.monochrome-heaven.com/topic/14423-album-selm-illegal-other-side-20120502/ The second page: http://www.monochrome-heaven.com/topic/14423-album-selm-illegal-other-side-20120502/page-2

I can honestly say that I don't know a single one of those artists, lol. I don't think that I even heard of any of the names, let alone a song. 1. 犬神サーカス団 - 鎮魂歌～レクイエム～ 2. Ween - Mutilated Lips 3. 世武裕子 - 風船とばす 4. Farin Urlaub - OK 5. The Rocky Horror Picture SHow - I'm going home 6. comaneci - you're liars 7. MALICE MIZER - S-CONSCIOUS 8. Devin Townsend Project - Hold on 9. La'Mule - Ice age 10. Amon Amarth - Risen from the Sea I choose Farin Urlaub, because he's hilarious. XD

You probably didn't use the proper tag for embedding videos. Click the "Special BBCode" box (Top, third from left) and choose "Media".

@ fitear: I can honestly say I don't know most of these, except of Montreal, DIV and サウイフモノ. And I should probably listen to more サウイフモノ because they totally look like Psycho le Cemu reincarnated, and I loved Psycho le Cemu! I just threw my ENTIRE mp3 collection onto Winamp for this, including the emberassing stuff, and things I probably haven't heard myself so far. 1. Ensiferum - Into Battle 2. Schmelz Cure - 溺愛の空 3. Roxette - Listen to You Heart 4. Borknagar - Universal 5. 新興宗教楽団NoGoD - 宗教音楽 6. 倉橋ヨエコ - 感謝的生活 7. SYNDROME - Sad Mask 8. Spiritual Front - Ragged Bed 9. The Moon And The Nightspirit - Földanya Sóhaja 10. Ancient VVisdom - Here is the Grave Gotta go with Ensiferum here, since it's my favourite song from them, and I credit that band and song for getting me into folk metal.

I like your avatar! Welcome to MH!

This might complicate things a bit too much, but I will consider it. I would also like to add that this year we already introduced seperate categories for Indies and Major to mix up results a bit. So I don't think this is a Major vs. Indies thing. Both Indies and Major bands have a chance of winning, because they don't compete against each other in the most prominent categories. We could split up even more categories between Indies/major, but it would make the poll very long. Alternatively, we could experiment with seperate categories for vk and non-vk, if people would like that. And yeah, just to give some examples on how EVERY VOTE counts, here are some actual results from the poll: Best Album (Major) 1. Buck-Tick - Yume miru uchuu (4 votes) 2. The Gazette - Division (3 Votes) ONE VOTE decided the victory of Buck-Tick over the ever-favored Gazette. Best Overall Artist (Major): 1. Plastic Tree & Dir en grey (both 5 votes) If ONE MORE PERSON had voted for Plastic Tree, they would have been single winner over DeG, a huge favourite because they usually win this category.

It would be a bit more work, but not that much. It would also help to get better results, so I will definetely consider that. I also might start the contest a few weeks later and have it run a bit longer to give people more time to catch up with music from the previous year.

Actually we (and by "we" I mean "Kai", lol) were working on something like this before we changed forum software. However, with the new forum and the new, decent tagging system, I don't think this is his top priority anymore, especially since he has other projects, like the opening of the DS artist database that are more important right now. That system definetely isn't possible with the current tag mod though. Of course we could extend the tagging system and let people include the release year as tag, for example. The code is (media) >link< (/media) (with [ instead). In the posting form, click the "Special BB code" button (top row, third from left) and it gives you a couple of options, including the "media" one. It doesn't work for all sites, but I know it does work for Youtube and Vimeo for example. If I'm not mistaken, the old system only worked for Youtube, so it's actually better then what we had before.

I'd be interested in hearing from those people that didn't vote why they decided not to. I can think of several explanations: - I didn't know it was happening. I thought it was advertised well enough, but I guess a possible solution would be to send a PM to every user, informing them about the contest. - I didn't vote because I don't think my vote makes a difference. As I explained, this just isn't true. The margings are so small, one vote can and DOES make a difference. Even with more people participating, each vote would still carry a lot of weight. - I didn't have enough time to listen to all I wanted to listen. I guess I could extend the deadline. Shouldn't be too long though, so it would still be relevant. - The contest is too long/too many categories. We could shorten things, remove some categories. But then again, you can always keep them empty in the first place. - I'm just not interested in the poll at all. That's fine. But is there anything we can do to change that? Would you participate if you had the chance of winning, say, a shopping coupon? Or if we changed the format/categories/way of voting/something else? - I don't really listen to japanese music anymore, I just stay around for the community. Fair enough. But yeah, let me know what you think, so we can maybe improve the contest.

Because their fans don't vote for them. Simple as that. We have enough listeners of non-vk around here that they could influence the results. Sure, they wouldn't sweep all the first places, but they could enter more rankings than they do. But year after year, the regular non-vk-fans on here decide to abstain from voting. Don't blame the vk fans for actually being the ones to make an effort by sitting down and subitting their votes. Sure, we could pre-pick some bands, only the most popular, best-selling bands and evenly distribute them between vk and non-vk. But I have a feeling that it will mostly be the vk fans that actually take the time to vote for their favourite bands again.

I think we have this already in the normal DL section, but I will check the settings. (Sometimes old threads get bumped up without Prefix, but all new threads should have one.) Also, I think the distinction between live Limited/Distributed might be too specific for our needs. If anything we can rename it to "Live Limited" for anything sold/given away at lives only, and anything that can be aquired via a normal shop, may it be for money or for free, is just a regular single. I think we want to avoid having too many different categories, as it will just make the section look messy. That's why there is a "Other" category, for all those fringe categories that appear so rarely that they don't really warrant a prefix of their own, like "privilege" Cds. But yeah, we do need to bring back the prefixes for the other DL forums like Video and Discography, we just didn't really get to this so far. Also, I'm not sure what you mean about "full-fledged form similar to ID tags". But I'm willing to guess it's not part of the mod, because we pretty much use it to its full ability already. We would have to buy another mod (if that even exists), or code something ourselves, and even if that was possible, it most likely wouldn't be a priority for us.

To be honest, I am a bit surprised at this. I would have thought that people are mostly unhappy that less popular bands don't have a chance of winning, and not the other way around, that the winning bands don't really deserve it because they are not popular enough. And they can only be found in the top ranks of the Oricon charts? I don't think so. Anyway, end of the year I will bring this up again and see if people want to keep this format or maybe scrap the contest alltogether.

I suppose we could do that, but I feel that people would complain that we don't give a chance to smaller, lesser-known bands. And bands like "The Gazette, Dir en Grey, Mucc, D, A and MEJIBRAY" ARE bands that rank high in the Oricon charts, so I'm not sure if that would change anything. I'll see if there are any other opinions/suggestions, but I'll consider having pre-picked bands the next time. But the idea is not to manipulate the results to the point that they aren't representative of the forum users anymore. If people don't vote for "Acid Black Cherry" because they don't like "Acid Black Cherry" then that's the way it is, and there's no point in trying to artifically get them into the results. And if people like Acid Black Cherry, but choose not to vote - then they only have themselves to blame.

It's funny that people don't vote and then complain about their favourite bands not winning. I can only repeat what I said last time: The margins in this poll are extremely small. That happens when a small number of people vote on a large number of bands. In the majority of cases it's only one vote that lies between winner and second place. In some cases, two votes overall were enough to make it into the ranks. So don't say "I don't vote because my vote doesn't change anything" - it does a lot in this poll. That being said, there is another thing I wanted to discuss: Participation in the voting has decreased from year to year. And it's not like there aren't enough people around. Which makes me think that the majority of people aren't particulary interested in this voting anymore. I'd surely be interested in running it again next year, but I wonder if it's worth the work. Plus, if it has even less participants, it will be hard to get any solid results at all. So I'd to ask: Is there anything we should change about the voting? Should we make it shorter or change some categories? Should the staff maybe pre-pick some artist for each category and then let you vote on it instead of having free categories? Should we raffle out some price to a random voter to encourage participation? Any other ideas to make more people interested in this again? Or should we just scrap the whole voting alltogether?

Strange, for some reason I thought they already were inactive. Ah well, I used to like them back in the day, but it seems like they were going nowhere.

Haven't posted any pics in quite a while, soooo.... I took some photos of with me with auto-shoot when I went hiking today. Or more like: pictures of nice landscpaes with a bit of Champ in them.

That's weird, maybe the permissions for the contest archive got messed up in the forum move. I will look into it. Edit: should work now.

Well, it makes sense insofar as Mucc has won the "Changed for the worse"-award the last two years. This year they are only second. So apparently some people thought they turned around for the better? XD Or at least became less bad then the previous years or whatever. (I wouldn't know, I haven't listened to a Mucc release in years.) It has been moved the the contest archive to make room for the MH user voting. The link at the bottom of the original post here should work though.