Changelog

All notable changes to HeavyMusicGuide (heavyguide.no).

Format loosely based on Keep a Changelog.

Versioning is roughly semantic — a minor bump per feature batch, patch

for fixes. The current version is shown in the site footer.

Reconstructed 2026-05-30 from the full git history. Public launch was 1.0.0 on 2026-05-14; everything before that was iterative pre-launch development (see the appendix). Pre-launch commits carried informal "Versjon 1.x–3.x" tags — those were dev iterations and were reset to a clean 1.0.0 at launch.

[1.47.0] — 2026-08-30

Added

• On a band page, the album named under "Featured track" is now a link to that album on Spotify — the same link the catalogue cards have always had.
• Both the featured track and its album can now be added to a local playlist with the "+" button, the same way tracks in a discography already could. The album button appears only where the release is in the curated discography and actually has Spotify tracks, so it never promises more than it adds.

[1.46.1] — 2026-08-30

Fixed

• The "Fetch from MusicBrainz" button in the band form no longer reports "no band matches" when MusicBrainz never answered. MusicBrainz turns requests away when its own servers are busy — measured from two separate networks, this happens regardless of how often you ask, so it hits the very first click as readily as the fifth. The button now retries a few times on its own, and says plainly that MusicBrainz is busy when it still will not answer.
• Five lookups in the band form treated a failed request as an empty result. They now report the actual error.

[1.46.0] — 2026-08-30

Changed

• The forum front page no longer leads with statistics that only measure how little has happened. While the forum is still new, it shows the number of members and the number of open threads, and says plainly that every thread is waiting for its first reply — instead of listing posts in the last 24 hours and people logged in right now, both of which are zero on a forum nobody has replied in yet. The full statistics come back on their own the moment a thread gets a reply or a second person posts. Nothing to switch on.

[1.45.2] — 2026-08-30

Fixed

• On phones and tablets, the little arrow that opens the submenu under Account, Register and Releases sat on a line of its own, detached from the row it belonged to — it looked like a stray button. It now sits at the right edge of its own row, and the menu is shorter for it.

[1.45.1] — 2026-08-30

Fixed

• The Listen & Buy page title showed a literal "&" in the browser tab and in link previews. It now reads "Listen & Buy" everywhere.

[1.45.0] — 2026-08-29

Added

• Listen & Buy. A new page under Releases lists every release of the current year that we have a Bandcamp link for, with pre-orders first and the rest newest-first. Each row carries a full player — press play to hear the album, and buy or pre-order it straight from the band in the same place. Bandcamp is where the money actually reaches the artist.
• The Releases entry in the main menu is now a menu of its own. It still opens the release tracker in one click.

Changed

• The player on the Listen & Buy page is the larger Bandcamp one, which carries its own buy and share links and shows the track, the elapsed time and a progress bar. Release cards in the tracker keep the compact player — the larger one does not fit a card without breaking.

[1.44.1] — 2026-08-29

Fixes and refinements that followed the 1.44.0 release the same day.

Fixed

• The share buttons in the site footer now share the page you are on. They previously always shared the front page — which mattered most on the pages that have no share button of their own, such as the Saga timeline, musician profiles and the release tracker.
• Items in the Saga RSS feed keep a stable identity. A renamed band could previously make a feed reader show old entries again as if they were new.
• The blog index now advertises the site's RSS feeds to feed readers, the same way the other sections already did.
• A playlist of albums no longer describes itself as a number of "tracks".

Changed

• Internal links to the catalogue now use the same address a page publishes as its own. Genre links — from band pages, the genre index and the explore page — previously used a longer but equivalent address that search engines had to reconcile against the canonical one; they now point straight at it. The same applies to the site logo and the HOME link, which appear on every page.
• Date and time columns across the database now use one consistent type, so a timestamp reads the same regardless of which connection reads it. No stored value changed.

[1.44.0] — 2026-08-29

Added

• Save a band without an account. Every band page now has a ★ Save button next to Follow. Saved bands appear in a "Your bands" row on the front page. The list lives in your own browser only: no sign-up, no e-mail, and nothing stored on the server — but also no syncing between devices, and no release alerts. Following a band is still what gets you those.
• "Bands you follow" page. Signed-in visitors get a dedicated page listing every band they follow, each with its latest or upcoming release, reachable from the account menu and the quick-nav drawer. Following bands previously built a collection you could not see anywhere.
• Shareable playlist links. A link to a playlist you have built now previews as the playlist itself — its name, cover and size — instead of showing the generic playlist editor. No account is needed at either end, and nothing about the list is stored on the server; the link carries it.
• Genre-and-country combinations with enough bands (for example Black Metal from Norway) are now listed in the sitemap, so search engines can find them as landing pages in their own right.

Changed

• The "Save" button now tells you when it could not save, instead of appearing to succeed, and says so when a very long saved list drops its oldest entry.

[1.43.0] — 2026-08-28

Changed

• Stylesheets are now split per page. The site previously loaded one large global stylesheet on every page; page-specific styling has been separated into dedicated sheets that load only where they are used. The shared core shrank by roughly 30 %.
• Practical effect for visitors: less unused CSS per page view, and an edit to one section's styling no longer invalidates the cached stylesheet for every other page.

Fixed

• Removed a redundant responsive rule that had been superseded and no longer had any effect.

[1.42.12] — 2026-08-27

Fixed

• Admin audit-log entries now display boolean detail values explicitly ("true"/"false") — a false used to render as an empty value, and a true as "1".
• Repeated identical cache warnings within one request are now logged once, cutting log noise from a harmless concurrency quirk in the development environment.

[1.42.11] — 2026-08-27

Fixed

• The band-logo editor's background selector now applies when the logo is saved, not only in the preview. Logos that reach into the corners of their image were guessed wrong and came out as a solid coloured block instead of just the lettering — and no other option in the form could correct it.

[1.42.10] — 2026-08-27

Fixed

• Release-tracker entries whose artist or album name arrives with typographic quotes (’ “ ”) are now normalized to plain ASCII, so they match the band catalog. One upcoming release was invisible on its band page and would never have reached followers; existing entries were cleaned up, and a duplicate created by the same mismatch was merged.

[1.42.9] — 2026-08-26

Changed

• Reordering releases or videos in the admin encyclopedia now saves once per pause instead of once per keystroke — arrow-key sorting no longer floods the activity log, and rapid moves can no longer finish out of order.

[1.42.8] — 2026-08-26

Fixed

• The duplicate detector for musician names and aliases now treats typographic ligatures (fi, fl, ff …) the same way the database does. A name pasted from typeset text — a PDF, a press kit — could previously slip past validation and fail with a confusing error at save time.
• A handful of files from the recent review round had not made it to the live site; they are now in sync, including a small guard that prevents a double-click on "delete" from writing a duplicate entry in the admin activity log.

[1.42.7] — 2026-08-26

**Housekeeping: the automated checks that guard this site got checked

themselves.**

Nothing here changes what you see on the page. It is the last round of a long

review, and the subject was the review machinery: the scripts that run before

every change ships. Three of them turned out to be reporting "all clear" about

things they were not actually looking at — the software equivalent of a smoke

alarm with the battery in, but the sensor pointing at a wall.

They now test themselves before they test anything else, and they say out loud

how much of the site they cover rather than implying they cover all of it.

Fixed

• Deleting a blog post now removes everything attached to it. Likes and a couple of internal bookkeeping rows used to be left behind — invisible on the site, but they accumulated.
• Removed a leftover administrative page that had been unreachable since it was moved in a reorganisation, along with the stylesheet only it used.

Changed

• Several counts and figures in the internal documentation were out of date and have been remeasured, with the method written down next to each number so the next reader can check it rather than take it on faith.

[1.42.6] — 2026-08-26

A review pass over the site's JavaScript, and two new automated checks.

The most visible fix is in the quick-search box in the header. When the site

asked you to slow down after a burst of searches, the suggestions list simply

closed with no explanation — indistinguishable from "no matches". It now tells

you what happened, and says the same for any other server hiccup.

Fixed

• Quick search now explains itself when it is temporarily unavailable, instead of going quiet.
• The playlist panel and editor no longer disappear if the page address has been mangled in transit (a truncated link from a chat app, for example).
• Voting in a poll twice in quick succession no longer shows a spurious "session expired" warning on top of your counted vote.
• Deleting or reordering a local playlist now reports honestly when the browser refuses to save, rather than claiming success.
• A band biography that fails to load once will now load on the next try, instead of staying blank until the page is reloaded.
• Small text across the site — badges, chips, counters — now respects a minimum readable size. 29 places were below it.
• Disabled buttons are easier to see.
• Better contrast for the "now playing" row in the video queue.

Changed

• Links that look relative but resolve off-site are now rejected by the shared URL checks, both for navigation and for images.

Internal

• Two new automated checks run before every release: one lints JavaScript that lives inside page templates (previously unchecked), and one enforces the minimum text size. Both carry self-tests, so a passing result is a proven result rather than an empty one.

[1.42.5] — 2026-08-25

**A follow-up readability pass, from a line-by-line review of the main

stylesheet.** The headline fix: the delete buttons for local playlists were

hard to read while hovered in every theme — on the parchment theme the label

was close to invisible. The "Friday Metal Drop" badge had the same problem on

the dark and cyber themes; it now sits on a solid accent surface and is a

touch larger.

Also fixed:

• A handful of pages looked different from their siblings — the forum thread, private-message and post-editing views, plus the review editor, were the only pages without the site's longship background. They now match, and jumping to a musician on a band page no longer lands with a large empty gap above it.
• The date and genre filter rows on the releases and year pages lost an unintended grey box around their dropdowns.
• Assorted housekeeping in the stylesheet: a few stale explanatory notes were corrected and some unused leftovers removed, so future checks measure the site as it actually is.

[1.42.4] — 2026-08-25

**Some text was too faint to read, and in two themes it was very nearly

invisible.** On the Genres page, any tag or genre card without its own assigned

colour fell back to a shade that worked on the dark theme and almost nowhere

else — worst of all on the parchment and black-metal themes, where the label

sat at roughly the contrast of ink on ink. Seven of the twenty tag cards were

affected, in every visit. All of them are legible now, in all four themes.

Also fixed:

• Alt./Nu-Metal has its own colour. It was the one genre card without one, which is why it was among the hard-to-read ones.
• Three faint spots in the forum — the site badge in the footer, the "last post" labels, and the collapsed privacy note — were dimmed by a transparency effect that made their readability depend on whatever happened to be behind them. They now use a fixed muted tone instead, so they read the same everywhere.
• The Tidal button now responds visibly to hover. Its icon is dark, and the effect used for the other three services had no effect on it at all.

Behind the scenes, this release is mostly about the checks themselves. Our

automated contrast testing turned out to have been quietly skipping one of the

four themes, and a second check was skipping two — which is why the problems

above went unseen. Both are fixed, both now refuse to run if a theme fails to

load, and the tests were expanded to cover the forum and admin areas as well as

the pages that carry gradient backgrounds. Several documentation checks were

widened in the same way, after we found that a little over half of what they

claimed to verify was never being looked at.

[1.42.3] — 2026-08-25

Sign-ups were broken, and now they work again. Creating an account had been

failing since 14 August — the form looked normal, but submitting it returned a

blank error page and no account was ever made. If you tried to join in that

window and gave up, please try again; it goes through now.

We are sorry. The failure produced no visible message and left no trace in the

place we watch for problems, so it went unnoticed far longer than it should

have. Two changes came out of that: the site now checks this exact path

automatically before every release, and our error reporting now covers the blind

spot that hid it.

Also in this release:

• The contact form no longer thanks you for a message it did not send. If you fixed a validation error and resubmitted quickly, an anti-spam timer could quietly discard the message while still showing a success note.
• Better protection against automated abuse on search and a few other public endpoints, without affecting normal use.
• The "Explore" page's statistics are now built in a way that cannot fail silently on the live database — the same fault had blanked that section once before.

The rest is internal: an audit pass over the public pages and API, and several

new automated checks so this class of mistake is caught by a machine next time

rather than by someone reading the code.

[1.42.2] — 2026-08-23

Forum: the title field counts again. When you start a new thread, the little

"0 / 200" counter under the title box had stopped following along — it sat at

zero no matter how much you typed, while the counter under the post body worked

fine. Both now behave the same way.

The rest of this release is internal: an audit pass over how every page decides

who is allowed in, plus new automated checks so the same class of mistake gets

caught by a machine next time instead of by a person reading the code.

[1.42.1] — 2026-08-23

Parchment theme: the streaming panel is readable again. Filter the catalogue

by anything and a "Save this playlist" panel appears under the results, with a

card for Spotify, Tidal and Apple Music. In the light theme two of those three

headings, and all three service logos, were sitting somewhere between faint and

invisible — the brand colours are chosen for a dark background, and the light

theme turns that background into parchment. Three of our six service colours had

already been adjusted for it; the remaining three now are too, and the logos

follow whichever theme you are reading in instead of being painted a fixed

colour.

Nothing changed in the dark, cyber or raven themes.

Also: a catalogue address naming a genre we do not have yet still shows the

"nothing here yet" message, but no longer asks search engines to index it.

1.42.02026-08-22Buy it where the band gets paid

Releases now carry a Bandcamp button, and where we have it, a small player

you can listen through without leaving the page. Before a record is out the

button says Pre-order and afterwards it says Bandcamp — that is Bandcamp's own

wording, not ours, so it changes on release day by itself.

The player only loads when you ask for it. Nothing is fetched from Bandcamp

until you press Listen, and it takes on the colours of whichever theme you are

reading in.

Links are never guessed onto the page. Every one is checked against Bandcamp

first, and an album we cannot confirm simply gets no button — a dead shop link

is worse than none. Coverage depends on the band being in our catalogue with a

Bandcamp address on file, so it will grow as that does.

[1.41.1] — 2026-08-22

The Quick nav tab on the left edge now catches your eye once, on your first

visit, and then never again. It has always been there in full colour, but colour

is not what the corner of your eye is good at — movement is, which is why a

bright strip at the screen edge quietly turns into furniture. One brief glow

fixes that, and repeating it would only teach you to ignore the tab, so it

happens exactly once.

If you have asked your system for reduced motion, nothing moves.

1.41.02026-08-22Names that had a page, but no way in

A band on the video page, a tag on a catalogue card, the band a

recommendation list is built around — all of them had a page of their own,

and none of them said so. They were just words. Every one of those names is

now a link to the page it always had.

Tags got the bigger change. Clicking one used to filter the playlist, and

that was the only thing it could do — so the tag's own page, which lists the

bands and the tags that tend to travel with it, was somewhere you could

only reach by typing the address. Tags now open that page, and it carries a

link straight into the filtered playlist, so the thing the click used to do

is still one step away.

None of this was broken, exactly, which is why it lasted so long: the pages

loaded, nothing errored, and the missing links were invisible unless you went

looking. There is now a check that goes looking on every change.

[1.40.2] — 2026-08-22

Record labels are links now. On the releases tracker, every card already showed

which label put a record out, but the name just sat there as text — the label's

own page existed, and nothing on the page pointed at it. Clicking a label name

now opens that page, which gathers everything we have on the label across the

whole catalogue, not just the records currently on screen. The same goes for the

label shown on a band's upcoming and recent releases.

[1.40.1] — 2026-08-21

The small LYRICS tag next to a song is readable now. It was drawn faded, and

a faded element borrows whatever is behind it — so the same tag was comfortably

legible in one place and barely there in another. It keeps its quiet, secondary

look, but the dimming is now part of its colour rather than a transparency, so

it reads the same wherever it appears. In the light theme it also went a shade

darker, since the album colour on a band page darkens the paper behind it.

The view counter on a band page got a small nudge in the same direction.

1.40.02026-08-21Band pages take on the colour of the record

The top of a band page now picks up the dominant colour of the album cover and

washes it across the full width of the screen, fading down into the page. It was

already doing this, but so faintly that most covers barely registered — the tint

was confined to the width of the content column, so it could never be turned up

without its own rectangular edges showing.

Colours are now also levelled against each other. A bright yellow cover and a

deep red one used to arrive at very different intensities, because "bright" was

measured in a way that says nothing about how bright a colour actually looks. A

cover's colour is now toned to a common perceived brightness, so every band gets

the same treatment rather than one page shouting and the next whispering.

On phones the glow sits below the cover instead of behind it, where it reads as

light falling onto the band name.

The small print above and beside the cover — the breadcrumb trail and the

band's origin, genre and year — is a shade stronger on pages that have a

colour, so it stays legible against it. All four themes were measured.

[1.39.1] — 2026-08-18

Fixed an empty box that appeared under "Your playlists" — a hidden form was

rendering as a small blank panel. The button for saving a shared playlist no

longer stretches across the full width of the page.

1.39.02026-08-18Send a playlist to someone

Playlists can now be shared. Hitting Share gives you a link that carries the

list itself — open it anywhere and you see what's in it, with real band and track

names, before deciding whether to keep a copy. No account is needed at either

end, and nothing about the list is stored on the server: the link is the

playlist. Nothing is saved into your own lists without you asking for it.

Because the link carries references rather than a frozen copy, a shared list

picks up corrections made to the catalog afterwards, the same way your own lists

do. If an entry has since been removed, the preview says so rather than quietly

handing over a shorter list.

Working with several lists got easier too: you can now start an empty list and

fill it later instead of having to add a track first, lists are ordered by the

one you touched most recently, and the panel shows what you have in total.

1.38.02026-08-18Playlists reach the discographies

The + buttons now sit where the deep catalog actually lives: on band pages,

next to every track in a discography, and once more per release for taking the

whole thing at once. Adding a release stores it as a single entry that expands

into its tracks when you save the playlist — so if a tracklist gets filled in

later, the list you built today quietly gets better.

Tracks that aren't on Spotify keep their button, greyed out, with the reason on

hover. Hiding them would have been tidier and less honest: it also explains why

"Add all" sometimes counts fewer tracks than the tracklist shows.

Your lists are now reachable from every page through "My playlists" in the quick

navigation panel — building a list on a band page and then having no way back to

it was a gap worth closing.

1.37.02026-08-18Build your own playlists

Until now, saving a playlist meant taking a whole filter in one go — everything

matching "Black Metal from Norway", say. That's still there. New is the layer

underneath: a + button next to every track in the catalog lets you pick songs

one by one while you browse, collect them into named lists, and send a list to

your Spotify account when you're happy with it.

No account needed — the lists live in your browser, which also means they stay on

this device and disappear if you clear browsing data. The site says so up front

rather than letting you find out the hard way. A "Your playlists" panel on the

front page shows what you've built, and a dedicated editing page lets you

reorder, rename and remove tracks before saving.

The save step is honest about what it does: tracks that aren't on Spotify are

skipped and counted, the same song added twice becomes one, and lists cap at 500

tracks. Saving to Spotify is one click; Tidal and Apple Music remain the

copy-the-IDs-and-import-manually route they've always been.

1.36.62026-08-17Straight to the band, and who else plays there

Two small things that had drifted out of step with the rest of the site.

Picking a band from the quick search at the top of the page now always takes you

to that band's page. It used to depend on where you were standing: from anywhere

else on the site you got the band page, but from the front page the same click

quietly filled the comparison panel instead — a shortcut from back when there was

no band page to go to. Comparing up to five bands side by side is still there; it

just starts from the comparison panel's own fields now, where you actually mean it.

Discography line-ups say more about the people on them. A musician credited on a

record has always linked to their main band when they were a guest or a session

player — but if they were a full member, the link was hidden, on the reasoning

that a member belongs to the band you are already looking at. In metal that is

rarely the whole story: members hold down two and three bands at once. Those

links are now shown too, and they say also in rather than from, because a

member of both is not a visitor. On Immortal's page alone this took the number of

connections from two to eleven.

Behind the scenes, filter combinations that match nothing are no longer offered

to search engines as pages worth keeping, and the admin side got a tidier band

search, a cover image field that accepts a pasted link, and an AI lookup that no

longer suggests the band you asked about as something to compare it to.

1.36.52026-08-16The tag cards keep themselves honest

"Browse by Tag" on the genres page was a fixed list of twenty cards written by

hand. After a round of tidying up the tag vocabulary, nine of those twenty no

longer matched anything and sat there claiming "0 tracks" — Psychedelic Rock had

become Psychedelic, Groove Metal had become Groove, and nothing announced it.

The section now builds itself from the catalog: the twenty most-used tags, in

order, with their real counts. Every tag in the catalog has a description

waiting, so one that climbs into the top twenty arrives with its text and its

colour already in place — and renaming a tag now carries its description along

instead of leaving it behind. Descriptions are editable alongside the tags

themselves, so the list can no longer drift away from the catalog.

1.36.42026-08-16Keyboard and screen-reader polish

A pass over the details that only matter if you browse without a mouse, or

with a screen reader — and that nothing in the existing checks could catch.

The tag filter on the catalog had no name on desktop, so a screen reader

announced it as just "all tags"; it says what it filters now, and the mobile

version answers to the label you can actually see. The little info button on

each band row used to open its panel in the top-left corner of the page when

you pressed Enter — far off screen if you had scrolled — and there was no way

to close it without a mouse. It now opens beside the button, Escape closes it,

and focus goes back where you were.

The view switcher, the theme picker and the discography filter all announced

themselves as controls they weren't quite behaving like. The theme picker now

moves with the arrow keys as its role promises, the view switcher presents

itself honestly as two links, and the discography filter is a complete set of

tabs. Decorative artwork placeholders no longer get read aloud, and short

confirmations — including "your vote was counted" on the poll — are now

announced instead of appearing silently.

None of this changes how the site looks or behaves with a mouse.

1.36.32026-08-15All the musicians, and a keyboard that behaves

The musicians index was showing 200 people and calling that the full list —

there are 430. It is now paginated, the count at the top is the real total,

and the release-credit tally covers everything rather than just the first

page. You can page through to the end of the alphabet.

For anyone navigating by keyboard: the closed side panel and the four player

dialogs were leaving around two dozen invisible stops in the tab order, so

pressing Tab could move focus to something you could not see. They are now

properly out of the way when closed, and still open and take focus exactly as

before. The Norwegian metal timeline also had two nested main landmarks,

which made screen-reader landmark navigation ambiguous; there is now one.

Behind the scenes: editing or deleting a band now refreshes everything that

was derived from it straight away — the playlist lists, the related-bands

boxes on other bands' pages and the album ranking could previously keep

showing the old picture for up to an hour. Deleting an album no longer leaves

its ratings behind counting towards averages. The search suggestions in the

top menu no longer queue up behind each other while you type, and the

release-tracker's nightly matching job got a great deal faster.

1.36.22026-08-15Readable again after saving a playlist

The page you land on after saving a filtered view to Spotify had turned almost

unreadable: the confirmation line, the track count and the whole track listing

were rendering in black on a near-black background. Everything worked — the

playlist really was created — but you could barely see the receipt. All of it

is legible again, and comfortably above the accessibility contrast standard.

The error page for that same flow had the same fault and got the same fix.

1.36.12026-08-15Sturdier under the hood

A hardening round on how pages read from the database. A handful of spots —

among them the band page's release lists, the tag pages, forum threads and a

few admin views — could in rare edge cases fail outright if a value was

unexpectedly missing from the data. They now render without the missing bit

instead. Nothing changes on screen day to day; the failure mode just got a

lot friendlier.

1.36.02026-08-09Ways in, and a reason to come back

Search is visible on phones again. Below 1200px the search box only lived

inside the menu, with nothing on screen to suggest it existed. There's now a

search button in the top bar: tap it and the field opens with the cursor already

in it.

The front page gained two ways in. A row of genre chips sits under the

buttons, so you can start browsing without opening the filter drawer, and

Play something opens a random music video — the quickest way to hear what

this place actually is. Surprise me has moved down to the catalogue, where

it now respects whatever filter you have active: a random band *from your

current view* rather than from everything.

The Friday drop no longer disappears for five days. Between one Friday and

the next you'll see how many releases landed last time and when the next batch

is due, with a link straight to them.

The statistics panel at the bottom now counts the archive — bands, curated

releases, videos, musicians, articles — instead of mixing in membership

numbers that said little about what's here.

Smaller things: the banner now adapts to the height of your browser window, not

just its width, so the headline and buttons stay in view on laptops; and the

front page makes one less background request when there's no poll running.

1.35.02026-08-09A clearer front door

The front page now says what it is before you scroll. The banner is shorter, so

the headline, the description and the buttons all sit in view when the page

opens — on a laptop, on a phone, and on a large screen. Nothing was removed to

make room: the filters, the sorting, the saved filters and the catalogue table

are all exactly where they were.

The description itself has been rewritten to lead with what makes this site

different — Norwegian metal covered in depth, with full discographies, videos

and lineups, alongside hand-picked bands from across the globe. The catalogue is

also called the same thing everywhere now: the button, the heading and the menu

item all say catalog, and the table finally explains its own rule — one song

per band, the one that makes the case for them.

Join the Conversation reads as an invitation while the forum is young,

rather than as a list of threads nobody has replied to yet. It goes back to

showing full activity on its own the moment a thread gets its first reply or a

second person joins in. Counters that were stuck at zero have been replaced with

something worth reading.

New visitors get a pointer to the visitor guide straight from the top of the

page, instead of only from the footer.

Behind the scenes: genre pages are now listed in the sitemap so search engines

can find them directly, the site's structured data describes the site properly

and offers a search box to search engines, and a shared ?search= link now

runs its search even when you open it in a background tab.

1.34.02026-08-08Every video, where you'd look for it

Bands with a catalogued discography often have more videos than the single one

featured at the top of their page — official videos, lyric videos and

visualizers tied to individual songs. Those have only ever lived on the band's

own page. They're now reachable from Videos as well: a band with more to

show carries a Play all N videos button on its card, opening the whole set

in the same player the Play All button uses, queue and all. The grid itself

is unchanged — still one band per card, so a handful of thoroughly documented

bands can't crowd out everyone else.

Random Video now draws from every video on the site rather than one per

band, so the deeper cuts surface too.

On a band's page, the video chosen to represent the band now also appears as a

Play official video link beside that song in the Discography tab. It was

already there for videos linked to a specific release; the band's own featured

video was the one case that never got a button, even when it was plainly the

same song.

1.33.12026-07-30Small repairs across the site

A round of fixes to things that weren't behaving. The statistics panel on the

Explore page is showing again — it had quietly stopped rendering. In the

forum, the emoji picker and the edit-post editor work once more. Your

notification list now keeps outdated release alerts out of the way and shows

dates in one consistent format, and the bell in the header no longer briefly

claims you have nothing waiting when you do. The Save to Spotify screens

speak English again, and are legible instead of near-invisible. Error pages,

on the rare occasion you meet one, are properly styled.

Behind the scenes: a long stretch of reliability work — the site is now much

better at noticing when something is wrong, and saying so.

1.33.02026-07-19The saga, drawn as a timeline

Norwegian bands now carry the town that raised them. On a band's page you'll see

where it was formed — "Bergen, Norway", "Kolbotn, Norway" — right beside

the flag, marking the spot where the story began (not necessarily where the band

lives today).

Those hometowns come together on a brand-new page: **The Saga of Norwegian

Metal, under Discover → Saga Timeline (or at /saga**). It's a scrollable,

four-decade timeline — from the first sparks of 1984 to the bands forming today —

with every band placed in its scene: Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim, Kristiansand,

Sogndal, and everywhere else. Bands are coloured by genre, era markers name the

chapters of the story, and hovering a band reveals its debut album. Click a scene

to trace its bands across the years — and, like the rest of the site, it feels at

home in all four themes.

1.32.02026-07-19A warm welcome, and announcements that reach everyone

First time on HeavyMusicGuide? There's now a friendly, plain-language

visitor guide that walks you through the whole site — creating an account,

finding your way around, and taking part — one step at a time, and you can read

it in English or Norwegian. Every page carries a "New here?" link in the

footer, and the welcome message new members receive points straight to it.

The forum learned to carry an announcement. When there's something everyone

should see, it now rides at the very top of every board and category — and lands

first in the homepage's Latest forum threads — so site-wide news finds you

wherever you are. On the forum's front page, category and board names also line

up cleanly on the left.

1.31.02026-07-17Visualizers join the video wall

A band's videos can now flag official visualizer videos as their own kind,

alongside music videos and lyric videos. On the band's Videos tab — and next

to the matching track in the discography — a visualizer carries its own violet

VISUALIZER badge, so at a glance you know whether you're about to watch the

full video, follow the lyrics, or let the album art move.

1.30.02026-07-17Four themes, no rough edges

Pick a genre and the page now says so: "Black Metal bands" headlines the

listing instead of the generic site title, so where you clicked and where you

landed finally agree. The Latest Additions strip gained a **"View all

newest" link, and the footer now points straight to Labels, Musicians,

Videos and Explore** — the whole catalogue is a click closer from any page.

Under the surface, a sweep across all four themes — dark, parchment, the

cyberpunk Berserker and the black-metal Ravendark — smoothed out a pile of

rough edges. Buttons no longer wash out when you hover them, text that was hard

to read in some themes now meets contrast targets, and keyboard focus is

visible again on every field and control. The site now respects your system's

reduce-motion and high-contrast settings, tap targets on phones are

bigger, and the musician collaboration graph's country legend no longer

paints two countries the same colour.

A few smaller repairs: forum search shrugs off odd input instead of erroring,

several pages load a little faster, and the front-page poll works in Safari's

private mode.

1.29.02026-07-15Labels join the search, and a shuffle worth sharing

The quick-search box now finds record labels, not just bands, musicians, blog

posts and forum threads. Start typing a label name and it appears under its own

heading with a Label badge and a quick count of how many releases and bands

it carries — one click and you're on the label's page. Search also copes better

with odd input: unusual punctuation no longer trips it up.

The Videos page gained a shareable shuffle. ?random=1 on the URL opens a

random video the moment the page loads, and it respects whatever genre filter is

active — so a link to a random black metal video is just a link. The page itself

also loads noticeably faster. Opening a video now moves keyboard focus into the

player dialog, where it belongs.

Two smaller things: when you suggest a band, the form now tells you **how many

suggestions you have left today** before you fill it in, rather than after you

press send. And a fresh album rating shows up on Top Albums right away

instead of lagging behind.

1.28.12026-07-14Following the threads between musicians

The musician pages get better at connecting people. Every frequent collaborator

now carries a Trace path link that drops you into the six-degrees finder with

both names already filled in, so you can see exactly how two musicians are linked —

and a Copy link button on the result lets you share the chain you found. The

collaboration network graph explains itself better too: a legend now shows which

colour belongs to which country. Smaller touches: the prompt to sign in and rate an

album now appears on albums that already have ratings, and the From the Saga feed

is picked up automatically by feed readers.

1.28.02026-07-14Account menu, and a fully English site

When you're signed in, the top navigation now shows an Account menu with your

username and a Log out link, instead of the sign-up prompt that used to sit

there — so signing out no longer means hunting through the forum or the side menu.

Each record label's page gains a small releases-by-year chart you can click to

jump straight to a given year. The site also completes its move to English

throughout — the last few Norwegian labels, tooltips and messages are now

translated — and installs a little more cleanly as an app, with shortcuts to

Releases and the Forum.

1.27.02026-07-12Subscribe to the release calendar

Upcoming releases are now a calendar feed you can subscribe to in Google

Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook. Each upcoming album appears as an all-day

event on its release date and updates automatically as new releases are tracked

— look for the 📅 Calendar link on the releases page.

1.26.52026-07-11Discography labels are clickable

The record label under each album in a band's discography now links to that

label's page, so you can jump from an album straight to everything else the

label has released.

1.26.42026-07-11Share button gets a fill

The Share button on a band page now carries a soft accent-tinted background, so

it reads as a proper button next to Follow instead of looking empty.

1.26.32026-07-11Band logos take the theme's accent

A band's themed hero logo now renders in the theme's accent colour — orange,

gold, cyan or red — instead of plain white, staying crisp and readable in every

theme (including the light parchment theme).

1.26.22026-07-10Play All on band pages

The Play All queue — a band's music videos playing back-to-back, auto-advancing

and skippable — is now on every band's Videos tab, not just the site-wide Videos page.

1.26.12026-07-10Play All plays the whole genre

On the Videos page, Play All now queues the whole selected genre — not just

the dozen videos on the current page — so filtering to a genre and pressing Play

All turns it into an auto-advancing genre radio.

1.26.02026-07-10Share cards for every band

Share a band on social media and the link now unfurls into a custom-designed

preview card — the band's cover art, name and genre laid out on a backdrop tinted

to match the artwork — instead of a generic thumbnail. Every share becomes a

small poster, so a link dropped in a chat, a forum, or a feed looks the part.

The cards are generated automatically for every band and refresh themselves

whenever a band's artwork or details change. Each band page now also carries a

Share button: on a phone it opens your device's native share sheet, and on a

desktop a small menu to post the band straight to Facebook, X or Reddit — where

the new card unfurls — or copy the link.

1.25.02026-07-10Every band its own colour

Open any band and the page now takes on a colour drawn straight from that band's

cover art — a soft wash behind the header that makes each dossier feel tailored

to the band, the way Spotify and Apple Music colour their artist pages. It adapts

to whichever theme you're using, and bands with black-and-white covers keep the

classic flat header. Behind the scenes, the release tracker now warns an editor

when a release looks like one that has already been added, so the same album

doesn't slip in twice.

1.24.02026-07-09Browse by record label

Every record label in the catalog now has its own home. A new Labels

directory (under the Discover menu) lists every imprint — from tiny underground

labels to the big names — showing how many releases and bands each one has and

the span of years it has been active. Open any label to see its full roster and

browse its releases, filtered and sorted by year: finding everything a label

put out in a given year is now a single click. The directory itself is

searchable by name and can be sorted by size.

1.23.12026-07-08Bigger band logos on the dossier

Band logos in the page header were rendering small next to the square cover art —

they now sit noticeably larger and more present, giving each band's own logotype

the prominence it deserves, while still staying clearly secondary to the cover.

1.23.02026-07-08Album covers that fly

Navigating the site now animates: pages cross-fade smoothly instead of snapping,

and when you open a band from a cover in the catalog, that cover art flies and

grows into the band page's hero image. It's built on the browser's View

Transitions feature as pure polish — browsers that don't support it (and

anyone who prefers reduced motion) simply get the same instant navigation as

before, unchanged.

1.22.02026-07-08A calmer homepage

The homepage now leads with a single focal point — the catalog and its live

search keep the one bold, runic banner — while the sections below it (latest

additions, the blog, the community feed, the saga and site stats) step back into

quiet, understated headings. The result is a clear reading order and far less

competing noise, so the browsing tools take centre stage. Purely visual: nothing

moved or changed what it does.

1.21.32026-07-08Lighter first load of the catalog

The catalog now shows 50 bands per page by default instead of 100 for first-time

visitors, which roughly halves the amount of markup the homepage builds on that

first load — noticeably lighter on phones and slower machines — with no change for

anyone who has already picked a page size. You can still choose 100 or 200 per page

from the selector at any time.

1.21.22026-07-08Accessibility round, part three

The last of the known accessibility gaps are closed: the quick-search box in the

menu is now a proper keyboard-navigable combobox (arrow keys move through the

grouped results, Enter opens the highlighted one), the contact and registration

forms move focus to an announced error summary when a submission fails and tie

each field to its help text, the band page's Discography/Videos/Musicians tabs

now expose their panels correctly to screen readers, and the album like, rating

and "copy link" actions announce their result instead of hiding it in a tooltip.

1.21.12026-07-08Accessibility round, part two

Follow-up polish to the accessibility round: the tag filter's search box is now

fully keyboard-operable (arrow keys, Enter and Escape), pressing Escape closes

the menu and dropdowns and returns focus where you were, and the band-info popup

now keeps keyboard focus inside it and hands focus back when closed. The review

score badges and a few secondary-text tones were nudged so every colour now

clears the WCAG AA contrast bar in all four themes.

1.21.02026-07-08Accessibility round

A site-wide accessibility pass for keyboard and screen-reader users: a

"Skip to main content" link now appears on every page when tabbing, the live

band search announces its results to assistive tech, video thumbnails show a

clear keyboard-focus outline, and the decorative rune lettering is no longer

read aloud by screen readers. Several colours were fine-tuned across all four

themes so text everywhere meets the WCAG AA contrast standard — most visibly

the red tones in Ravendark and the tag/genre chips in the Light theme.

1.20.02026-07-06Ravendark: a fourth theme

A new Ravendark theme joins Dark, Light and Berserker — a purist black-metal

look in raven black and blood red, cold and high-contrast, with the viking banner

recoloured to match. Cycle to it from the theme button; your choice is remembered

across visits.

1.19.12026-07-02Faster pages, plus a password-change alert

A round of behind-the-scenes polish: several pages load noticeably faster, and you

now receive an e-mail confirmation whenever your account password is changed.

1.19.02026-07-01Forum upgrades

A batch of forum improvements: react to posts and get notified of replies and

mentions, bookmark threads to pick them up later, sort and filter search results by

author, keep server-saved drafts as you compose, and mark whole boards as read with

clear unread markers.

1.18.12026-06-28Fix: the newest releases now match their bands

The release tracker now reliably links the most recent releases to the bands in

the catalog. Previously, once a large backlog of unmatched releases had built

up, the newest entries could be passed over and never linked — so they went

missing from the affected band pages. They are now matched correctly.

1.18.02026-06-25Career timeline on musician pages

A musician's discography now reads as a vertical, year-by-year timeline rather than a

flat list — each year is marked on a rail with the releases of that year beside it, and

the band is named on every entry, so a career's arc and any moves between bands are

visible at a glance. Built entirely from existing credit data; no new admin work.

1.17.02026-06-25In memoriam pages for departed musicians

Musicians with a recorded year of death now carry an "In memoriam" banner and a

saga-styled tribute section on their profile — starting with Euronymous, Dead and

Trondr Nefas, whose biographies are written in the site's chronicle voice. Where a

freely licensed portrait exists it is shown with attribution (Trondr Nefas, via

Wikimedia Commons); the others keep the silhouette placeholder.

1.16.02026-06-23"Most prolific musicians" leaderboard

A new leaderboard ranks musicians by how many releases they have played on, with

filters for instrument role, genre and era — each filter re-ranks the list. The

top three get a podium medal. Reachable from the musicians catalog.

1.15.22026-06-23Lyric-video label on the track play button

The track-level "Play official video" button now reads "Play official lyric

video" when the linked video is a lyric video, so the two video types are

distinguishable at a glance.

1.15.12026-06-23Fix: punctuation-tolerant video/track matching

The track play button now links a video to its track even when the titles differ

only in punctuation (parentheses vs. a dash, and the like), so a handful of

videos that previously showed no button now do.

1.15.02026-06-23"Play official video" on discography tracks

A track in the Discography tab now shows a "Play official video" button when an

official video is linked to that release and matches the track. It opens the same

in-page video player used elsewhere on the band page. The link is curated in the

admin and is optional — no button without it.

1.14.02026-06-23Admin light theme + housekeeping

The admin area now follows the site's light/dark preference with its own modern

light skin (it was dark-only before) and gained an in-admin light/dark toggle.

The releases admin list is now paginated. Under the hood this was a large styling

cleanup, with no change to the public site.

1.13.12026-06-23Light-mode polish

Final theme-consistency pass over the remaining pages. The only visible change

is a review-preview banner that was hard to read in light mode; dark and

berserker are unchanged.

1.13.02026-06-22Discovery polish & cleanup

Added

• "Share this view" — with a filter active, a button copies a clean link to the current filtered catalog view to your clipboard.

Changed

• "Surprise me" is filter-aware — with a filter active it jumps to a random band matching that filter; unfiltered it still picks any band.
• Saved-filter naming uses a styled inline input instead of a browser prompt.
• "From the Saga" badges follow the theme — the NEW/UPD badges now adapt in light and berserker.
• Plus internal cleanup with no visible change.

1.12.02026-06-22Review sweep — polish & discovery extras

Added

• "Surprise me" — a hero button that jumps to a random band.
• "From the Saga" RSS feed — follow new releases, music videos and reviews for Norwegian bands in any feed reader.
• .m3u export — the "Save this playlist" card can download the filtered track list as an .m3u file.

Changed

• All themes are now fully independent — a few light/berserker colour fixes (the lyrics badge was hard to read in light mode).
• A round of performance and code cleanup across the homepage.

Fixed

• The "Donate via PayPal" button was blocked on every public page — now works.
• The Tidal/Apple "Search on" links now keep all selected genres.
• Assorted small robustness fixes (quick-search, poll widget, clipboard fallback).

Security

• Routine hardening pass (details kept private).

1.11.02026-06-21Discovery, profiles & the Norwegian saga

Added

• Unified quick-search — one nav search across bands, musicians, blog posts and forum threads, with a "Did you mean?" suggestion.
• "From the Saga" landing page (under Discover) — a hub for the Norwegian metal encyclopedia: chronicled bands, latest albums and videos, and album verdicts.
• Richer profiles — set a quote, a "now spinning" line and three favourite albums.
• YouTube embeds in album reviews — a bare YouTube URL becomes a click-to-load player.
• Inline shoutbox moderation for admins, plus an admin e-mail on pending reviews.

Changed

• The Discover and account menus are now alphabetised.

Fixed

• "From the Saga" relative times (a timezone offset), quick-nav on the new landing page, forum quick-search layering, and profile layout alignment.

1.10.02026-06-19Code-quality pass

A back-end and front-end quality pass with no new end-user features — internal

architecture and accessibility cleanup. The visible result is a theme-correctness

sweep so light and berserker render correctly across the site, plus a featured

cover that no longer over-stretches on ultrawide screens.

1.9.02026-06-18Filter upgrades on the front page

Added

• Multi-select genre — pick several genres at once (single-genre links still work).
• Year from–to — precise year-range filtering.
• Saved filters — save the current filter set under a name and reapply it later (no login needed).
• Active-filter chips — every active filter shows as a chip with one-click removal.

Notes

• Filter state carries through pagination, sorting and the view toggle, and works without JavaScript. Theme-aware throughout.

1.8.02026-06-15Forum features, self-hosted contact & SEO

Added

• Six new forum features — emoji reactions, thread subscriptions, @-mention notifications, draft auto-save, per-board moderators, and recoverable soft-delete for replies.
• Self-hosted contact form — replaces the unreliable third-party widget, and carries a notice that messages sent before 11 June 2026 never arrived.
• "Just dropped" featured strip — the newest Feature article surfaces on the homepage for 14 days.
• YouTube embeds in blog articles, plus "View in HG" links and hover-play on release and Metal-by-year cards.

Fixed

• Several Search Console structured-data items; the interview builder now appears only on Interview posts.

Security

• Routine hardening pass (details kept private).

1.7.02026-06-08Code-quality & hardening pass

A maintenance batch with no user-facing feature changes — refactoring, robustness

and broad security hardening (kept deliberately high-level).

Fixed

• Metal-by-year no longer falls back to today's date on a malformed release date.
• Friday Drop and a few homepage modules degrade gracefully on a database hiccup.
• Pagination and assorted edge-cases tidied up.

1.6.02026-06-03Front-page polish & performance

Added

• Category nav dropdowns — Discover / Community / About.
• Mascot in the hero box on desktop, and a "Sign out" hero button when logged in.

Changed

• Latest Additions & Friday Drop are now horizontal cover-strips; the poll moved into the hero box; Share moved into the footer.

Performance

• The hero banner loads only the active theme's image, the longship background was recompressed (about 87% smaller), and fonts load without blocking render.

Fixed

• The berserker rune background is now visible; the statistics block shows the latest registered member.

1.5.02026-05-31Front-page redesign

Added

• Hero intro band — headline, tagline, two CTAs and live community stats under the banner.
• "Join the Conversation" module — latest forum threads plus a shoutbox peek.
• Horizontal desktop nav on wide screens; the hamburger stays on smaller ones.

Changed

• The catalog moved up, directly under the hero. The statistics block shows the latest member.

Fixed

• The ALERTS nav icon renders in all three themes; a consistent background at all widths.

1.4.02026-05-30Engagement & feeds

Added

• Follow bands + release alerts — follow any band and get on-site notifications when it has a new or upcoming release. (E-mail alerts deferred.)
• Profile activity — review / rating / like / following counts and the bands a user follows.
• Album cover art in every RSS feed, and an image sitemap for bands and blog posts.

Fixed

• 1–5 album ratings are now scaled to the 1–10 review scale before being merged into the overall rating.

1.3.02026-05-29SEO & hardening

Added

• RSS feeds for bands, releases and upcoming releases.
• Star-rating rich snippets on band pages (Google-eligible).
• Top-rated albums leaderboard with optional per-genre pages.
• Musician search in the nav, and a new main genre: Alt./Nu-Metal.

Security

• A codebase audit worked through over several rounds, plus a www → non-www redirect to clear Search Console warnings.

1.2.02026-05-22Discovery & curation

Added

• Record-labels admin.
• Musicians discovery — role filters, a "six degrees of metal" shortest-path game, and a collaboration-network graph.
• Correction-suggestions queue — visitors can suggest corrections.

1.1.02026-05-16Reviews

Added

• Album reviews — 1–10 rating, written body, helpful-voting, a moderation queue, rich-snippet markup and a collapsible review list on band pages.
• Homepage tag cloud.

1.0.02026-05-14Public launch 🎸

First public release. Baseline feature set:

• Catalog & search — ~560 curated bands, live nav search, three themes (dark, parchment-light, berserker).
• Band dossiers — streaming links, view counts, "recommended if you like", tags.
• Encyclopedia (Norwegian bands) — curated discography and music videos.
• Musicians — dedicated pages, cross-band linking, public catalog.
• Blog (with comments) · Forum (private messages, roles, moderation) · Release tracker · Video showcase.
• Community — polls, shoutbox, Friday Drop, From the Saga, album thumbs-up and 1–5 star ratings.
• Browse pages — tag / genre / metal-by-year / RIYL / explore (country map).
• Accounts — register, e-mail verification, login, password reset.

Appendix — Pre-1.0 development (2026-03 → 2026-05)

The site grew through about three months of iterative work before the public 1.0:

• Mar 2026 — catalog, per-genre latest, theme switching, nav search, genre tags, registration, blog and shoutbox, RIYL, forum.
• Apr 2026 — blog comments, polls, video showcase, the berserker theme, view counts, tag-landing pages, the country map, the Encyclopedia (Norwegian discography) and the Musicians feature.
• Early May 2026 — From the Saga, musician polish, Apple Music / Tidal ID lookup, a database health-check page, and adaptive cover-image encoding.