There are many ways:

Forum reports
If someone violates site policies, if a new topic is utterly stupid and pointless, if something is generally wrong with a topic - use the Report to Mods button. The forum is huge, and Moderators can't possibly check every thread and every message. This would help us to keep the forum clean.

Edit bands and albums
You can edit details of the featured bands, add and edit albums, lyrics, videos, trivia and other related stuff. Go to the band pages and you should find the links easily. You have to be logged in to do that.

Add news and events
You can submit news and metal-related events, such as concerts, tours and festivals.

Write reviews, articles and concert reviews
You can now submit reviews for any featured album, by going to the album page and clicking 'Add review'. To submit an article or a concert review, go here.

However, please never contact a band or a label on behalf of Metal Storm if you haven't got Jeff's approval. For instance, we won't accept unapproved interviews, and you could get into serious trouble if you do so.


If you have a great idea for the site improvement, you can post it on General website forum, or send an e-mail/PM to Ivan.

We welcome any submissions. You can help us expand the site and keep the featured information correct and up-to-date.

Rules:

- The review must be originally written by you. If you copy a review from some other site or magazine, not only will it not be accepted, you will also be banned.

- Reviews must be written exclusively for Metal Storm. If you post the review on some other site as well, it will be removed from Metal Storm and you might face some penalty.

- Guest reviewers are not allowed to review fresh releases. Please wait for at least 3 months after the album has been released before submitting a review. It won't be accepted otherwise.

- Guest reviewers are only allowed to review the releases of Featured Bands

- Please use the new MSv3 rating system.

- "Song-By-Song" reviews are not allowed on Metal Storm.

- The Metal Storm staff has the right of not posting your review without telling you the reason. Be aware that your review might not be posted at all.

- The Metal Storm staff also has the right to proofread/edit your review in order to make it more acceptable by our standards.

- Guest reviews do not appear on the front page of Metal Storm. This is because we have a responsibility towards the bands and labels that send us material to be reviewed and these releases have priority to appear on the front page.

- All those who contact bands and labels under the name of Metal Storm to write a review of one of their albums will be banned. Please understand that it is the job of the official reviewers and not yours.


Guidelines:

- Usually, the optimal length for a review is 250-500 words. Please don't go below or over this length unless absolutely necessary.

- A review is an opinion but make sure you explain yourself succinctly.

- Don't give ridiculous ratings. Very few albums actually deserve a 10 or a 2. Be reasonable. (We will be strict and will remove without any mercy the reviews with ridiculous ratings).

- Follow the rules of conventional writing: include an introduction, clearly state your opinion, support it in the body and make a conclusion.

- If you are not sure about the spelling of a word, check it on dictionary.com or infoplease.com

- Don't abuse profanity and never use racist language. Just be reasonable and write seriously. Even if you don't like an album, respect the band.

- Don't forget to save your review to your computer or other memory device! It's always good to keep a copy of your work somewhere, because if you submit your review and it gets rejected then it will be deleted. If you haven't saved it anywhere, it can't be retrieved. It is the user's responsibility to save their reviews.


For more information, contact Jupitreas

At Metal Storm we have the following review formatting rules:

-Band names need to go in [band] tags. ie. [band] Black Sabbath [/band] (without spaces) becomes Black Sabbath
-Album titles are in italics [ i] tags ie. [ i] Painkiller [ /i] (without spaces) becomes Painkiller
-Song titles are in quotation marks. ie. "Iron Man"
-Lyrics are also in quotation marks.

Please make sure you apply the correct format to all the reviews you submit to us. Our proof-readers will not waste their time fixing formatting for you and will ask you to re-submit instead.

There are several cases when you can upload an image with your edit/submission. These are pictures for albums, musicians and videos. I hope you understand that we can only accept images with a certain level of quality, so here are a few pointers for you:

1. For the love of God, never use Paint for working with images! Your best choice would be Adobe PhotoShop, and in case you don't have it, there's a little free program called Irfanview, which produces quite satisfactory results.

2. Make sure there are no borders on the sides of the image. Crop all unnecessary stuff. Make sure the contrast level is right, and the image is not too pale or too bright. Make sure there are no compression artefacts visible. Seriously, just make sure it looks perfect before submitting it.

3. If you use PhotoShop, save images with the 'Save for web' option - it produces images with much lower file sizes. Keep the compression level at 50-60.

4. For videos, choose the most recognizable and memorable image from the video. Make sure it's not too messy and one can actually recognize what's on the picture. Try to keep the proportions - it's always better to crop the image than distort the proportions too much. Crop out channel logos and other redundant stuff as well.

If you feel you can't fulfill these requirements, it's better to submit an edit without an image, than with one that is poor quality.

Band name / former names / also known as
Make sure the band name is spelled the 'official way'. If there are alternative spellings, put them in the "Also known as" box (ex. Mötley Crüe / Motley Crue). All former names also go there. If there are two bands with the same name, the 'bigger' one should have the normal name, but the other one should get it's country attached in upper-case, in square brackets: (Autumn / Autumn [RUS] )

Picture
Add a picture, in which all the band members can be seen well; avoid distortion and pics with other people in them. If you can't find a promo picture, use a live one instead.

Years
Make sure the "formed in" date equals the one mentioned in the biography. In the process of the migration to MSv3, many founding years have been changed to the year of the first release, which of course is wrong most of the time.

Biography
Check the band's website for an updated biography. If the new biography concentrates too much on the newest releases and doesn't talk about the older stuff, find other sources (e.g. All Music Guide) or write one yourself. Please always specify the source in the end.

Label
Check the band's or label's website to go sure that the band still is on the same label as mentioned.

Visibility
Bands should only be made visible after their profile is completed - general info, biography, styles, lineup, albums, videos, band image. If it's done, contact a Staff member to make the band visible.

Styles
If you have any suggestions regarding the style/styles played by the band please report them in the Featured bands - report mistakes thread or send a PM to a Staff member.

Make sure the artist isn't already featured, before adding a new one! Multiple profiles for the same artist are a pain in the ass.

If a musician has been in the band for more than one period of time (departed and then came back), please add him twice, for both periods.

If there was a lineup change and a long break until a spot was filled, read up on old news whether guests or tour musicians jumped in during studio sessions (guests) or gigs (tour musicians).

If in doubt whether a musician was a 'session' or 'guest' one, Guest musicians are usually rather famous persons (most often, vocalists) from other bands, brought in for a couple of songs. Session musicians usually play on all/most album songs, and fill in for a missing instrument.

Nicknames and pseudonyms should be entered in this way - Alexi "Wildchild" Laiho.

Additional information can be submitted in artist profiles - picture, biography, website, birth date.

If the musician has other bands or projects as well, don't hesitate to add those - go his profile and click 'Add bands'. If you don't know when exactly he joined or left those, put 0000 as the year.

What can be added
Only official album releases are accepted, no bootlegs please. We don't feature re-releases and remasters either - however, you can mention them in the 'Additional info' box of the original album. Leaving a comment with reasons for adding/modifying album information (and providing a source) greatly increases the chance of your edit being accepted by the Staff.


Release type
Most of them are self-explanatory, however, there are a few tricky ones.

- Single - usually very short, containing 1-4 songs. Most commonly has the same name as the main song. Besides 1 or 2 main songs it usually contains unreleased tracks, covers, demos, live and alternative versions.

- EP - normally has the same content as a studio album would, differs mostly in length (longer than a single but not enough for a regular album). In a lot of cases contains new material, not available anywhere else, sometimes with a few bonuses thrown in (live tracks, alternative versions). Most split CDs should be classified as EPs.

- VA - Various Artists. Compilation CDs with over 4 different artists on them. Artists should be then listed in the tracklist, ex: "# Iron Maiden - The Trooper".


Release date
Although albums can have several release dates for different parts of the world, we use only the very first one. Other dates can be added in the "Additional info" box.


Splits and VA
Some CDs have more than one artist on them. Use the bands dropdown to add all featured bands to the album - the album will then appear in each one's discography. In the tracklist, either break songs intro groups (if each artist has several songs) with artist name and tracks listed below, or put artist name before each song (if each has only one song) - ex: "# Iron Maiden - The Trooper". Splits can be Singles, EPs, Studio albums or VA, depending on their length and content.


Pics
Make sure that all releases have proper pics. Some approved album covers are very poor in quality, i.e. grainy, with borders or whatever; please update those. If you take album covers from Amazon, don't forget that most of them have a white border (which is probably the reason why so many of the submitted album covers have those borders).


Tracklist
Tracklists are tricky, so please pay close attention! First of all, make sure you've seen and understood the tracklist code (if you haven't, click on "Tracklist code and instructions" below the tracklist box). Use the preview button to see the end result. Here are some of the most common mistakes:

- In English song titles, Every Word Should Be Capitalized.

- All brackets in song titles must be round (). All tags and any additional information should use square brackets [].

- Information in square brackets should be in lower case, except names and titles.

- For multi-CD releases, make sure that the [disc] tag is used properly. If there's a bonus CD on the limited edition, also put the [disc] tag in front of the original CD, otherwise it will designate the bonus CD as CD 1.

- Don't use such tags as [instrumental] or [non-album track]. However, if it's the instrumental version of a song, use the [v: instrumental] tag.

- Don't add track length.

- Use '+' instead of '#' to mark additonal multimedia content - video track on an audio CD, wallpapers, images galleries and so on.

We feature promo videos only, which means no live sound! There are, however, videos with live footage and studio sound - those are OK. Only official video releases are accepted. There's a lot of custom-made videos floating around, usually with anime footage. Learn to distinguish between them.

If there are several significantly different versions of the video, add them all, the first one without anything additional, the others with (... version) added to the title.

Finding band videos
Check the media section of the bands whether they have videos. If yes, add those. You can also try to find information on fan sites. Most of the time you won't find many videos on the band's site. Check out YouTube.com then, enter the band's name and find the official videos. Most singles are usually accompanied by videos.

Screenie
Google Video normally has good enough quality to take a proper screenshot (PrtScn button on your keyboard). If you can download the video somewhere, follow this short guide: http://www.videohelp.com/faq#screenshot. Youtube should only be your last option, since their quality is rather poor.
Please take a screenshot that is representative for the video. Full view of the band isn't representative, every music video has that. Best is if you take a shot of a scene, which is crucial for the plot of the video.

Year
This is the year the video was released, not the album! If there's no way to find out - oh well, put the album year here...

Director
The toughest part. If you have trouble finding the director, browse through the archives of Blabbermouth or Brave Words and/or google interviews with the bands from that period. ("band name" "song name" video interview) as search query should do the trick.