Ten years ago, before broadband was the standard home connection, before YouTube was even conceivable as a concept, and before Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had even graduated high school, a little website launched in a small corner of the internet whose aim was to bring the best of the underground drum and bass scene to the masses. In late 2005, the site unofficially closed, finally shutting its doors for good sometime in 2006 when the hosting lapsed. But now it's back, and I think it's everything it was supposed to be all those years ago. Better late than never.

This is not the place for a history lesson or trip down memory lane. This is a new era for dnbscene, and whilst the principles that drive the site are the same as they were in 2000, the service will be on a completely different level from now on.

So what's dnbscene all about? Here are the main points:

• A place to host your drum and bass tracks. We use Soundcloud's software to provide hosting, but you can set up a drum and bass-specific profile on dnbscene with your own URL that you can promote.
• A weighted, community-based ratings system. This was always the heartbeat of our site, and now it's more central than ever. Every track hosted on this site can be reviewed and rated by other members, with the average rating for each track being determined by the credibility of the individual rating it.
• Weekly charts. This is a new feature for dnbscene and one that I hope will prove popular. Every week, the system will perform various complex calculations to determine the best 20 tracks in the last week, and put them into a chart like the Billboard Chart or UK Top 40. Rankings are based on a combination of things, not just popularity or rating, and artists get rewarded for achieving a high ranking.
• Last but not least, the message forums. If track reviews were the heartbeat of the old dnbscene, the forums were the lungs that oxygenated it. This is a site for artists to support each other, exchange ideas and generate followings; the forums are a great place to meet your peers.

Please be aware that the site is still in beta mode, which means firstly that you might well run into the occasional bug while using the site. If so, please report it in our official bug reporting thread, providing as much detail as possible. Secondly, it means that you will see changes on a fairly regular basis throughout the site, be it small layout tweaks or completely new features, as they get added. There is another thread where these changes are documented, and where you can make suggestions and requests of your own. Anything major will always be announced on the site's front page though.

With that I will now leave you to go and explore the site. Look around, listen to some tracks, write some reviews, and if you're an artist yourself then get yourself signed up quicksmart.

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Marc Crouch is the owner of dnbscene.com and a key member of the team that made it successful in the early 2000s. He first ran the site between 2002 and 2005, and is responsible for all the coding, design and administration of the site you are using today.