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The primary chat platform for MetaBrainz moves from IRC to Matrix, with IRC and Discord bridges, in a grand multi-platform project called ChatBrainz.
We move all our translations from Transifex to Weblate, a more modern platform providing a lot more help for translators and making things a bit easier for developers.
Ansh Goyal joins the MetaBrainz team as a React developer, mostly focusing on ListenBrainz and BookBrainz.
Users are now able to modify or remove their recent edit notes, as long as nobody else has answered yet. Admins get the ability to modify or remove any note.
The MusicBrainz relationship editors, completely rewritten in React and sharing a lot more code than before to make them consistent with each other, are officially released after a long period of beta testing.
The MusicBrainz-provided search server is switched off to external users, since the option to install a local search server has become a lot simpler to use.
CritiqueBrainz reviews become more integrated into MusicBrainz, with reviews (and ratings) for all entities that support them moving to their own Reviews tab.
The barebones genre system introduced in 2018 expands to turn genres into a more complete entity type, using the edit system and supporting relationships, annotations and (soon after) aliases.
Editors marked as spammers are no longer counted as valid editors, influencing statistic numbers.
Simon Hartman (aerozol) joins the MetaBrainz team as a part-time designer.
With the AcousticBrainz project deemed to not have fulfilled its original goals, the MetaBrainz Foundation decides to stop work on it, with a view to shut down the site in 2023.
Adam James (atj) joins the MetaBrainz team pro-bono as a system administrator (thanks to Transitiv Technologies).
After unexpected upheaval on Freenode, MetaBrainz moves all official channels to Libera.Chat instead.
Collections can now be merged, in case an editor wants to consolidate several of their collections into one. Additionally, it is now possible to create series of artists, and to rate places (the only entity that could be reviewed on CritiqueBrainz but not rated on MusicBrainz).
1200px thumbnails are added to the Cover Art Archive, providing users with a very large image with a consistent size that avoids having to use the original uploads directly.
Pagination was added for two very long lists that sometimes couldn't be loaded in full because of timeouts: user tags and entity relationships.
Kartik Ohri joins the MetaBrainz team to work on ListenBrainz, AcousticBrainz and CritiqueBrainz, plus the Android app, which he had already significantly rewritten as a volunteer.
The Italian translation, mostly worked on by salo.rock, is officially released. Adding the first IPI and/or ISNI code for an entity becomes an autoedit, unless the same code is already in use for another.
Some instrument pages start displaying instrument illustrations by IROM. Additionally, a first release date starts being calculated and displayed for recordings based on the releases they appear on.
MBBE_Bot is created to make fixes that are too time-consuming to do by hand, but should still leave a trace in edit history. This usually involves removing URLs from problematic domains, marking URLs from domains that have been closed as ended, and other similar batch-editing jobs.
Since the Virtual Machine project tended to just lag way behind current data because of the time required to always push new versions, it is dropped and users are suggested to just run their own Docker setup for MusicBrainz (which the Virtual Machine already did behind the scenes).
The edit history for entities is made visible even when logged out, to make it easier to understand how each entity has changed (edit notes are kept hidden to preserve some privacy).
A new "Voting suggestions" page is released, containing predefined edit searches to help editors find interesting and/or important edits to review and vote on.
Collection owners are now able to allow other editors to also add/remove entities from any of their collections.
After a lot of behind-the-scenes drama, MetaBrainz wins a legal battle against a copyright troll who tried to sue because of the use of Wikimedia Commons images. Commons images are still dropped from MusicBrainz sites to avoid further issues until Wikimedia makes changes that make image reuse more safe.
Version 1 of the web service (already deprecated since 2011) is finally taken down for good (more than a year after announcing it would happen in six months!).
Genres are added as a new entity, although still tightly tied to folksonomy tags.
After several years as a community-driven only project, BookBrainz is adopted as an official project and given an actual developer position with the hiring of Monkey.
Sambhav Kothari leaves MetaBrainz after a lot of hard work getting the SOLR server ready. Nicolás Tamargo (reosarevok) joins as a programmer part-time in addition to his style and support positions, to work on MusicBrainz.
A major update for the Picard tagger is released, with a huge amount of bugfixes and improvements.
Our old search server gets a significant upgrade with its move to Solr, including almost-instant index updates.
Rather than having to notice any errors during a fairly brief 1 hour period, editors now have 24 hours to correct errors in the data they have added without needing a vote.
Roman Tsukanov decides not to renew his contract. Sambhav Kothari and Param Singh are hired as replacements to work on search and Picard and on ListenBrainz, respectively.
As part of a long term move towards more fidelity to the original data, we stop standardizing "featuring" and all its variants to "feat.", and ask editors to use whatever is printed instead.
Yvanzo joins the development team as a second dedicated MusicBrainz developer.
After many years at Digital West in California, the MetaBrainz project moves all servers to a much larger dedicated provider in Germany, Hetzner.
CatQuest officially takes over from reosarevok as the main person for adding new instruments to MusicBrainz, with the newly created Instrument Inserter position.
A Discourse forum platform is added to replace both the old-school forums and the (by now dead) mailing lists and unify community communication in one place.
MusicBrainz itself gets a new design to better match the rest of the *Brainz family.
A new banner message now notifies users whenever they receive a new edit note.
Edits made by editors to their own release additions within 1 hour of adding them are now auto-edits, as are "Add recording" and "Remove alias" edits.
More edit types are made auto-edits for everyone: "Add relationship" and "Add release"; and "Add", "Edit" and "Remove release label". Additionally, the German, French and Dutch translations are available on the main server.
Laurent Monin, better known as Zas, joins the team as a dedicated systems administrator, to make sure the servers run properly and help transition to a new community discussion system.
The alpha version of ListenBrainz, an open source and open data alternative to Last.fm®, goes live.
The increasingly controversial "Do Not Cluster" guideline, which forbid relationship clusters such as linking every Jackson sibling to each other, is dropped - avoiding duplicate data becomes a task for relationship designers, not users entering the data.
Former GSoC student Roman Tsukanov begins working for MetaBrainz part-time.
Freso becomes the first MetaBrainz Community Manager, tasked with helping resolve conflicts in the community and keeping an eye on their needs.
A change is introduced that allows voting for and against existing folksonomy tags, rather than only adding your own.
An update is released that allows specifying a credit for artists in a relationship, if not the same as the artist name.
Aliases are added to the three entity types that were still missing them: recordings, releases and release groups. This allows storing aliases for, for example, English names of Asian release groups.
The new MetaBrainz website, featuring an all-new design and online sign-up for commercial users, is launched, replacing the one designed in the year 2000!
In order to make it easier to fix a lot of cases where featured artists are still part of the track / release titles rather than the artists, guess feat. buttons are added that greatly simplify the process.
Releases can now be added without any mediums, for cases where the only information available is, for example, a title + date + label + catalog number entry in a catalog. Additionally, any destructive edits such as entity merges and removals no longer close immediately once they get 3 Yes votes, but they remain open for at least 48 hours to ensure people who oppose them have time to see them.
AcousticBrainz, which aims to crowd source acoustic information for music, is announced in cooperation with the Music Technology Group at Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
The style process is updated again. Rather than requiring long, often angry community debate until something is passed by community consensus without a veto, decisions are taken by a BDFL who consults the community when needed. Nicolás Tamargo (reosarevok) is "promoted" from style leader to style BDFL.
Event support is added to MusicBrainz, allowing storing information about concerts and festivals. Also part of this schema change release is a proper way to indicate the content of data tracks in release tracklists, and the extension of tagging to areas, instruments and series.
Two new entity types are added to MusicBrainz: instruments and series. Series of recordings, releases, release groups and works are supported.
Works get their first attributes (such as keys) allowing us to store data that doesn't make sense as relationships but deserves more than an annotation entry.
The diminishing quality of the PUID fingerprinting service and the continued availability of an open source alternative in AcoustID leads to the decision of dropping PUIDs from MusicBrainz and supporting only AcoustID.
A new AJAX coverart uploader is released, making it easier to add cover art to releases.
The voting period for edits that get a No vote is extended to give users more time to react to the issues.
A very substantial schema change release adds a new entity type (areas), support for ISNI codes for artists and labels, and the possibility to have more than one release event on one release.
In an effort to reduce the size of the open edit queue and force less waiting for changes, the length of time edits stay open before expiration is reduced from 14 to 7 days.
The relationship editor, for bulk-editing relationships for a release, is released to production.
After a successful Summer of Code, Ian McEwen joins the MusicBrainz team.
Empty labels, release groups and works are now auto-removed after 24 hours of being unused, in the same way artists already were before.
The first full-version release of the Picard tagger comes out, with a lot of changes and improvements.
Nicolás Tamargo (reosarevok) becomes the MusicBrainz style leader, and a new, more official style process using Jira is established.
The open source fingerprinting solution AcoustID (developed by friend of MusicBrainz Lukáš Lalinský) starts being used alongside PUID on MusicBrainz fingerprint pages.
After a lot of debate, relationship data starts being displayed on release pages, making it a lot more visible.
The first version of the MusicBrainz Android app, a Google Summer of Code project by Jamie McDonald, is made officially available.
In preparation for NGS, editors are encouraged to avoid editing until release unless entirely necessary.
Oliver Charles begins working for MusicBrainz full-time.
MusicBrainz Server source code moved to Git from Subversion.
Kuno Woudt begins working for MusicBrainz full-time.
Imported the metadata from the CD Baby catalog into our CD Stubs collection.
Release groups, ISRC support, CDStub searching and search fixes released.
Oliver Charles becomes employee #1 of MetaBrainz Foundation.
BBC launches the dynamic artist pages based on MusicBrainz data.
Editor ojnkpjg runs a script setting track times from DiscID values, creating a huge spike in edits.
Folksonomy tagging and editor subscriptions are released. Additionally, it's now possible to batch-add relationships to multiple tracks on a release.
The BBC becomes a MetaBrainz customer and starts using MusicBrainz data.
Linkara Musica becomes first commercial customer of MetaBrainz.
MusicBrainz partners with MusicIP and starts using MusicDNS's PUID acoustic fingerprints. Picard becomes the official MusicBrainz tagger with PUID support, which causes edit activity to decrease.
Style Guideline 5 workaround introduced and unused TRMs pruned from the database.
Top menu navigation improved, duplicate artists, album edit all, track time editing features released.
Album languages, guess case improvements and revamps edit forms released.
The MetaBrainz Foundation, the legal home for MusicBrainz is announced to the public.
Advanced relationships that allow users to connect basic data entities is relased and unused TRMs pruned from the database. Inline editing is turned off by default, causing a drop in voting activity.
Artist subscriptions made public and various smaller user centric improvements are released.
FreeDB auto import feature turned off and autoeditor elections released. Unused TRMs pruned from the database.
Edit display improvements, turned off RDF dumps, new install scripts released.
Edit notes can now be added when creating an edit, making it much easier for editors to explain their changes.