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User Content 2.0 Live

By Keith Cross on May 19, 2008

Flying Lab has officially proclaimed the user content system as live, after the original system was taken offline a few weeks ago for revamping.

It’s been just shy of a week since we turned on the new user content system in a “live, but testing” mode, and we’re now ready to call the system just plain “live”.

Why “but testing”?—because we knew there would be quite a bit of tuning to ensure that items were moving through the system in exactly the way we wanted to, we started out with somewhat conservative values. We weren’t exactly sure how people would respond to the voting process, after all—especially in terms of volume. Would people vote just enough times to get a posting credit, then post their item; or would they vote like crazed madmen? The thresholds at which items get moved through the system are quite different depending on where actual usage patterns fell.

On the other (“but live”) hand, we wanted to test the system with real data. Items that were rejected for not meeting the various voting thresholds should be true rejections. Items that made it through the voting process to the review process should be ready for review. Above all else, we needed to ensure that the process was moving items through it as quickly as we intended them to.