I'll be perfectly honest, segregating the DB or implementing portals is a stupid idea, in my opinion. People use this site for more than just "VGM" now. It's a database that people can use to explore their favorite artist, series, or label. It's also a database that a significant amount of users use as their collection list and limiting what they can and can't put in their collection will drive them away. It's also a marketplace for people to buy, sell, and trade their stuff, though admittedly I don't know how well received this is (I use it sometimes).
I think at this point the site has become a huge database and resource for primarily English-speaking people looking for information on their favorite <insert Japanese fandom> which has always been and will continue to be scarce simply because of the language barrier. Whether it's VGM, Anime, Doujin, TV, Drama, or movie -- to me, doesn't really matter. We have a great number of really good Trusted Editors and Staff who do a really good job and I'd hate to lose that, especially if we start culling the database or segregating it into different sections.
I wholeheartedly agree that we don't really need to be adding Western-related stuff, unless it is directly related to a reprint / alternate printing of something Japanese (US and/or French Ghibli albums come to mind). We don't need to have Michael Giacchino's entire catalog in VGMDB. There are infinite numbers of English resources for that information -- discogs, his discography on his homepage, wikipedia, or just googling. Just because he's done 2 VGM albums doesn't mean we need his entire catalog. This is vastly different from Eastern stuff, especially Eastern artists, because there really just aren't comprehensive databases for theses artists' works, and it's difficult information to find for non-native speakers. Or if there is a database, it's wildly inaccurate and not up to date.
All in all, this entire thread and all the pros/cons/arguments that come out of it mean nothing without development work. I say this in the nicest way possible, but there are more important things that the site administrators and developers need to worry about compared to this argument. How about fixing the database so it doesn't go down every other day? How about fixing the database so it doesn't take 3 minutes to update a tracklist? How about adding new features that we've talked about for 10+ years that just never go anywhere? I've asked for at least 5 years to have decent filters available to hide stuff I don't care about *everywhere*. I don't want to see (most) doujin, let me hide it *everywhere*, not just searches. I don't want to see it on the calendar. I don't want to see it on Artist pages.
We need a better change log for edits on albums, the current version is vastly lacking. We need a way to lock albums from all edits from *all* editors (including Trusted and Staff) so we don't have see-saw changes being made to albums, especially old albums. We don't have enough Trusted Editors/Staff. The ones we do have don't always moderate the same way. We have wildly inconsistent standards documented all over the place on the ways things should and should not be done, and those are also inconsistently applied to edits. We need more staff, more trusted editors, more clearly documented standards, a better database design/implementation, and the ability to make consistent, frequent changes with some kind of changelog for anything to matter.
At the end of the day, if we don't have any developers willing to make the changes (or developers capable of making the change), all of this goes nowhere. I realize we don't pay for this, and ad-revenue probably doesn't cover even a fraction of what it probably costs, and that this is all just a hobby for most of us, but hobby or not we are all pretty passionate about it. I fully expect this conversation to go nowhere and honestly your best option is to just ignore the entries you don't care about.
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