VGMdb wishes all its users a happy new year!

After months of work, it's finally time to unveil the new album submission page. Most of the changes are behind-the-scenes so you won't notice anything too different about the interface, but it suffices to say that the programmers will have a much easier time creating and manipulating album objects. This paves the way for new, powerful features down the road.

A few important things to note: Release type has been separated into two new fields: Publisher type (commercial, doujin/indie, bootleg) and Distribution type. Release status replaces the Cancelled release checkbox, and Category allows users to specify product associations beyond gaming franchises. In preparation for the extension of scope, users will eventually be able to filter album listings using a combination of these fields. More details will be available soon.

Additional media fields are available for editing as well -- disc ID (for freedb matching), copy control, and individual classification. Note that media editing will eventually be moved over to the tracklist submission system.

The URLs have also changed to a friendlier format:

http://vgmdb.net/album/1234/edit (to edit album #1234)
http://vgmdb.net/album/new (to submit a new album)

Feel free to submit information as per usual; the system monitors submissions for errors and automatically notifies administrators with debug information. Ain't that cool?

One thing we've been lacking is a convenient way to give inexperienced users some feedback on their rejected submissions. To remedy this, we've given staff the ability to log a short informative message when rejecting a submission. Additionally, a rejected submission now automatically triggers a Private Message, which is sent to the submitter and contains the staff feedback, as well as some further options.

This feature is now implemented for the most commonly rejected submissions - new albums, album edits, new tracklists, trackilst edits, artist edits, and new websites. In time, I'll get this added to the remaining submission modalities and also incorporate the staff comment into the edit histories.

As always, if you find a bug in the process, or have some suggestions, please don't hesitate to post here.