By now many of you will have noticed that there's a new section entitled "Available at" on the album pages. This was in fact partially motivated by a desire to create an unobtrusive way to recoup some of the site's monthly expenses. VGMdb has enrolled in affiliate programs with both PlayAsia and CDJapan, and will probably look to add a couple more. This means that we earn a small commission when a sale is made to someone who follows the links from our site. I don't expect it'll cover our whole monthly bill, but it will help. You can help support VGMdb by using these links when you purchase albums.

We are more interested in providing useful information than in generating revenue, so this section isn't going to be restricted to just affiliates. We're also using this box to indicate when there are copies for sale by users in our Marketplace. This is something that didn't seem to fit (philosophically) on our album pages until now.

We will soon be opening up public submission of these links (moderated of course). This is really aimed at the some of the smaller sources, and will provide a good way for us to help support the remix community.

By that last sentence, does this also mean we could use this as a place to provide links to download free* albums?

*As determined by the artist/publisher, of course.

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hi~

Yes, that's another one of the intended uses for this space.

Example:
http://vgmdb.net/album/5357

Yay? Nay?

I think with this in place, we could get rid of the standard "Websites" link though.

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hi~

Yeah, that's exactly what i mean. I agree that we can drop the websites link now that we have the other one.

I'll try to roll out public submission tonight.

I was just adding it in for this album:
http://vgmdb.net/album/5356

It made me think that perhaps it would be better to list the "Websites" somewhere lower down, like above or below the Covers section. I believe most of the current official album links will be for free albums, which will be moved to the "Available" section. Also, a lot of the commercial links (if not all) will be moved there as well. So, most of what is left will be reviews and reference, and that doesn't seem like it's important enough to be above the "Available" section.

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hi~

Yeah, perhaps they should get their own section a little lower down. I think we're also planning on organizing them by type.

This is a good feature to implement. I can now see my sale list linked on the particular albums I want to sell. This will make it easier to connect buyer and sellers. Thanks.

These links are now open to public submission/editing. You can find the submission form in Edit Album / Links, just below the web link submission.

I'll probably add some guidelines later on, once we've firmly established the best way to use this.

I added a few links to YesAsia and Otaku.com and noticed some issues.

Both YesAsia and Otaku.com display a generic icon in the links area. However both sites feature an icon that could be used. Maybe someone could update the parsing code or whatever does select the appropriate icon.

I also don't really like how Amazon.co.jp links are handled, which appear as "amazon.co.jp" in the links section. I think something like "Amazon Japan" would better. I already added "Amazon Japan" to the link description, but the system seems to always fall back to the standard naming, so it can't override it this way.

Yeah, it doesn't automatically grab the icons from anywhere; we have to upload them and add code to handle it. I will add the code and icon for YesAsia though, and probably Otaku.

I didn't allow for an override for the biggies, because it didn't seem useful. I wasn't a fan of "Amazon.co.jp" either, but it appears to be the official international name for that division, so we went with it.

Do you need any help breaking out the old Website list into a new section? Do you have ideas of how you'd like to do this? I can make a mock up of my idea if you'd like, but basically I'd just make a section between the "Available at" and "Covers" section called "Websites" and I'd have stuff listed like the following:

Official
OverClocked ReMix

Reference
OC ReMix Offers Free SF2 HD Soundtrack Download

Review
OSV's Review

"Commercial" could probably go away completely, since any commercial site would likely be actually providing the album for sale, thus putting it in the realm of the "Available at" section. In the rare cases where a commercial site does not have the album for sale, and the info is relevant, it could be listed as a "Reference", don't you think?

"Official" can stay since official album sites don't always have the album for sale directly there, such as the album pages on http://www.inti.co.jp/

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I like the idea, though I'd put the links section below the covers. Also, we'll have to figure out what header color fits into our style.

You are probably right about "Commercial". We should just remove that type.

That sounds good. Also, about header colors, I think we could just use the same colors as the Album Stats section. Unless you're referring to something else.

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Well, in your example you used "Blue", so I thought that was part of the proposal.

Anyway, take a gander at what we've got so far:

http://vgmdb.net/album/11103

Also, maybe it should go above covers, since some pages have a long list of covers....

That's what I considered initially. However, there could be a long list of websites, and the album art is going to be more relevant than any website links. Basically, I could go either way, and I think it looks perfect as you have it now.

EDIT:
Actually I'll go ahead and say I simply prefer how you made it currently, since the "Available at" and "Websites" sections kinda fit together nicely. Also, even with all of the sections we have on the right, it's still not overly long.

(http://vgmdb.net/album/14700) A perfect balance.

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So,how about we give the sections the ability to collapse?
That may solve the "long list" problem.

I've modified the artist pages to use this new method of link sorting.

http://vgmdb.net/artist/1020

Eventually, all of the info on the right will be moved into a box on the top, which will make the discographies look better on smaller monitors.