cure was found. They stated the site would be taken offline because of this. 2021- The website replaced all of their band photos with cat photos. The prank wound up becoming very popular on the site and abroad with their web traffic more than doubling and led to a launch of a permanent cat version of the site. 2022- The site announced that they would be removing genres in order to simplify and avoid confusion, with them claiming that many bands genres are nearly impossible to pin down. They also mentioned that any user that uses the word "djent" would be banned from the site and forums. Accepted and excluded bands Encyclopaedia Metallum maintains a system where a user with a registered account is free to submit a band to the database that they deem to be within a heavy metal genre, but once the band page gets submitted it goes through an approval process where a moderator (or in some cases, multiple moderators) will review the band's music to determine if it's suitable for the website's classification of metal. Traditional heavy metal genres and era (such as the NWOBHM) have stringent rulings; users are warned in the rules section to consider bands submitted under these classifications as "ambiguous," in the sense that if a band is submitted with these terms as their genre, the music will be extensively reviewed by the moderators before they decide whether or not to accept the band onto the website. This is because in the past, some submissions labeled with those genres have turned out not to be metal, according to the site's guidelines. Bands or artists commonly associated with either hard rock or glam metal will only be accepted if the moderators consider their material to be at least "fully, unambiguously metal", examples being Deep Purple, Def Leppard, Mötley Crüe, Scorpions, Skid Row and Stryper, while the site will not accept certain rock or hard rock-based acts like AC/DC, Guns N' Roses, Kiss, Led Zeppelin or Poison. Additionally, there are some rare cases of non-metal bands featured on the site that are considered to be part of the metal scene despite not being metal themselves (usually dark ambient and folk bands that are side projects of already well-known established metal artists) examples being Mortiis, Elend, Nest, Of the Wand & the Moon, Autumn Tears, Stille Volk, etc. These bands were selected by the