Hello!

 I'm Shez! Came over from a message from RYM and loving this site. You can tell it's had some love put behind it, but also that it's brand new and I've always wanted to be a part of helping a good community like this grow. Not sure if this is where I should ask this, but my favorite metal is Melodic Death (or Melodeath) but there was only Melodic Metalcore and Death Metal which is too bland for me. Death Metal seems to encapsulate too broad of a sound for me to join that clan for me. I went with Infitnite, Guardians, and North anyways and looking forward to seeing where this goes. 

Welcome to the Academy Shez. I'm so glad you've elected to enroll. The topic you mentioned was one that was hotly debated when we were designing the website concept. In the end it was decided that there is so much grey area between the different subgenres that we'd be better off going for primary genres only. Otherwise we'd have far too much work just keeping the subgenre tags accurate & relevant. Even if we used RYM as a guide for them, they're often inaccurate (particularly with those releases with very low rating quantities) & you often see them changing as the voting changes. We simply aren't going to be in a position to keep track of that. We did however conduct an extensive survey of metalheads to help us decide on which genres to link together & the results gave us a good guide on what the vast majority of fans would want. For example, we found that most grindcore fans also liked death metal so those two we combined in The Horde. It's all about what's most likely & if it works for the vast majority of people then we'll have achieved our goal.

Once we've got a really healthy membership it really won't matter all that much whether I'm a member of all of the clans I'd like to be as long as the overall ratings for the clans aren't tainted by ratings from people that don't like ANY of the subgenres they encapsulate & so far we believe we've achieved that. In saying that there were some subgenres that were particularly tricky to position & melodic death metal was one of the most debated along with folk metal, trance metal, industrial metal & symphonic metal. We think we've got it as close to right as we're going to get it but we're always looking to improve the site so we'll be keeping the topic open for some time yet. Please keep your feedback coming & enjoy the site. :)

I completely understand, and agree that though some of my favorite music is Melodic Death I don't even scratch the surface of most that would be included in The Horde. I personally am not a fan of Grindcore, but I see the appeal just not for me. I do think I'm personally more involved in my other 3 clans anyway. I'm enjoying the site so far and like doing what I can.