Site Update

New Server, Forum Retirement, and Purging of Third Party Ads and Scripts

I wanted to share a brief update about Metalunderground.com. We just moved to a new server with updated software (database, application server, etc.), so apologies if you noticed the short downtime on Friday or encountered any bugs in the near term. If you do, please feel free to report them in the comments on this post.

With this server move, I've decided to officially retire the forum/message boards. Social media was the first nail in the coffin for the message boards. Spam was the last. I have all of the data backed up in case I ever change my mind and decide to relaunch the forum.

Spam is always a problem and I turned off account creation years ago because I did not have the time and bandwidth to win this fight. User accounts were never required for commenting on our posts though, so I didn't feel the urgency to get this fixed. I have some new ideas and hope to re-open that aspect of the site, however.

On another note, advertising long ago stopped providing any meaningful income towards expenses on this site (which I now pay out of pocket to keep it running). I've disabled most of the ad networks already, but there are a few lingering ads being shown on the site. Some of them are intended to be small and unobtrusive, but Google's poor quality control lets them inject overlays all over the page. I plan to completely remove third-party ads (and social media widgets) from Metalunderground.com. Ads have become a plague on the web, creating a horrible user experience - especially on mobile devices where space is already at a premium - as well as privacy concerns. I'd rather serve up a clean site than sacrifice user experience for fractions of pennies.

We may still run some banners and background takeovers, such as the sponsored 70,000 Tons of Metal ads, but these will always be served as static images and preferably directly from my server to prevent abuse and third party disclosure.

I have so much more planned, including a full redesign, but limited time so I won't go into details. Hopefully, you'll see some modernization and more frequent site updates here in the future.

I want to thank our writers who continue to post news, reviews, interviews, and show reports and photo galleries and keep the site going day after day. And thanks to our readers who have come back often over the years for their metal news fix.