[x] XBandsx

do we have a policy of how we show bands who frame their names with Xs? there might be a little inconsistency at the moment...

looks ok to me:
xAble To Actx
xBuffalo Valvex

weird capitalisation? maybe could be all lowercase:
xBiSHOPx
xLOOKING FORWARDx

there's also Xbrainiax, whom i believe might be written as such as the second 'x' is actually pronounced and isn't just a framing character. but not sure about 'Xmarsx', where the leader of the band is a guy called Mars.

i bring this up as there is also X One Way X in the queue awaiting verification. are all these Xs actually necessary? most of the time they are framing characters that are not pronounced. in terms of the search function, i think people are just as likely to look up 'Looking Forward' without the Xs. but i also understand that the Xs may be there to differentiate them from other similarly named bands and are consistent on all their releases (or until a drummer starts hitting the bongs and breaks edge).
what if we had a convention where:

Band Name||xBand Namex

terrible idea?

I think we need to take these x-based band names at face value to avoid guesswork.

I was a member of one of those bands and I always dropped the "x"s when speaking, as if the "x"s were silent. In contrast, one of my bandmates always made sure to say them. Although we differed on pronunciation, we agreed on the proper way to write the band name--it always included the "x"s. There was no doubt about that.

Your aliasing idea is a neat way to deal with the ambiguity in pronunciation, but I think that it may have the negative side effect of introducing information that isn't necessarily correct. So I think we should limit our analysis to what's on the album packaging.

fair call. i also had a friend who i would invariably refer to as Ex-Shaun-Ex.

while we're on the subject though...
[fourfa.info] http://fourfa.info/index.php?title=Albums:Slamdek_Merry_Christmas_1989
[www.slamdek.com] http://www.slamdek.com/releases/2589-xms89.html
suggest the band name on the compilation is X Able To Act X and this is the band's only recording.

[www.amazon.com] http://www.amazon.com/Drugs-Bishop/dp/B001EPAZGO
[www.merchline.com] http://www.merchline.com/deadtruth/categorydisplay.4122.c.htm
xBiSHOPx seem to be just BiSHOP on these later releases, and now go as BI$HOP A.C. or some such. do we think this was a non-trivial name change from 'Drugs' onwards (pun intended)?

not sure about xLOOKING FORWARDx and how it relates to the capital punishment rule. if the band name didn't have the Xs, it would be Looking Forward. also sometimes the Xs are lowercase and sometimes uppercase as on their first album:
[todosmiscdshardcore.blogspot.com] http://todosmiscdshardcore.blogspot.com/2009/09/xlooking-forwardx-ahoy-crew-memb...
going by the first album, they should technically be Xlooking Forwardx but that looks ridiculous. how do we resolve these?

You've made some good points. I really don't like making special case rules, but this one might be worth it. What if we treated framing "x" characters in band names, whether upper or lower case, as punctuation subject to the Punctuation Fluctuation rule?

not a bad idea but i'm not sure how it solves all of the issues. would it mean that we treated xBiSHOPx as the same band as BiSHOP?
how might it resolve the Capital Punishment problems?

In these cases, the framing characters would be treated as punctuation. They would be included or not based on the circumstances subject to Punctuation Fluctuation. Capital Punishment would apply to the rest of the text as usual.

BiSHOP and xBiSHOPx would be the same name because the framing x characters would be optional punctuation. The framing characters could be band-aliased back in as appropriate on an album-by-album basis (as we do with "The" and other trivial changes).

xLOOKING FORWARDx would resolve to xLooking Forwardx because the framing characters would not be considered as letters for purposes of Capital Punishment.

For this rule adjustment to make sense, I think the framing characters would have to be identical, which means that the rule would not apply to Xbrainiax.

A slight adjustment to the "I've Been Framed" rule (see #4) addresses some of this. It ignores identical framing characters in band names when applying the "Capital Punishment" rule. This means that xLOOKING FORWARDx will resolve to xLooking Forwardx. Xbrainiax does not have identical framing characters.

The adjustment doesn't go as far as the changes I suggested in my prior post, which means that xBiSHOPx and BiSHOP will go in as two separate bands (just like Thin Lizzy and Thin Lizzie).

To address the other situation you describe, Kevin will adjust the search algorithm so that searches for Band will also propose xBandx as a possible match.

Does this work?

the rule looks pretty straightforward and i think it should clear up the problems. i also agree that the change from xBiSHOPx to BiSHOP was probably non-trivial so this can be 2 separate bands.