The Separation of the Rock and Metal Forum
 

I don't intend to sound like that trve kvlt metal elitist, but I really think the stylistic differences between rock and metal are ultimately vast enough to be separated into their own forums. What would be even better would be to define the genres further (this has already been implemented into rock with the 'classic' and 'prog' sections and so forth), so to include subgenres like death metal, black metal, thrash metal, doom metal, power metal, to name a few, but I suppose to some that might appear a little pedantic.

Again, sorry if this has been said a million times over (I'm new here), but I thought it would be worth mentioning.

I don't see a problem with it honestly. There'd be way too many forums and sub forums if the layout was to accommodate every single genre in existence.

I agree with you, and I'm sure many others do too, but the truth is that very narrowly focused forums generally don't get enough traffic here to warrant standing on their own. That's why we ended up with "Country, Folk & World Music" as a single forum. The good new is that "Rock & Metal" pretty much is a metal forum anyway. There aren't all that many threads in there that aren't metal-related in some way.

Welcome aboard by the way! It's always nice to have another metal fan around. :)

...I ultimately disagree that the two are sufficiently divorced to warrant their serperation. The fanbases might ultimately warrant that, but from a musical perspective, there's actually not much that can be said to be distinct between the two, other than things metal simply takes to greater extremes, like guitar technique and sheer distortion level. Almost all of the fundamental compositional technique in metal is found in rock music.

Or, put more succinctly - The only people who think rock and metal are too different to talk about together, are people who are too invested in one of the two, to talk about either on a musical, as opposed to solely aesthetic, level.

I've always wondered why metal doesn't have it's own subforum, while punk and as its own forum and a hardcore/emo subforum. I personally think "punk/hardcore" and "metal" should be subforums of Rock.

It's all about demand.
There was demand for it when it was created. When I first joined here the Hardcore/Emo forum was THE most active forum on the site.

As for splitting them into Rock and Metal I say no. There are too many sub categories as it is. I don't want this place to have about 40 different forums for every little subgenre and have only about 10 of them be active. If It was up to me I'd half the number of forums this place has.

Plus if you want to go through 8 years of threads and decide 'That's a rock thread' or 'That's a metal thread' and then move them to the appropriate forum ... be my guest.

That's true. I remember it being a lot more active when I joined too, but I think there has been enough of a shift in the tastes of this forum that metal deserves its own section now too. The punk and hardcore forums get about a dozen posts a week and usually in the same threads.

I don't see the point. The Rock/Metal forum doesn't get enough traffic to warrant them being separated. Does anyone currently have trouble sorting through rock threads to get to the metal threads?

I just use the search function, or if the thread is tagged, I search the tag "metal" or "heavy metal"

It certainly gets more traffic than the punk forum, let alone the hardcore & emo forum.