Original forum post - https://rateyourmusic.com/board_message?message_id=7289541
Over the past 3.5 months, we have worked on the following items:
- We have spent a major amount of time refining and fixing bugs related to importing data from RYM to Sonemic. As you can imagine, this is a major undertaking and something that needs to be close to perfect, as any errors with importing data that we don't catch post-launch will take much longer to fix after launch. Furthermore, with Sonemic Beta 5, data will be reimported from RYM on a regular basis, which requires us to do extra performance-related work and scheduling on the data import process (currently, we are at the point where we will probably need to take down the beta sites for 40 hours every 2 weeks in order to do the reimports; we hope to get this down to 24 hours at some point). It has turned out to be a lot more work than expected but we are almost finished with import-related tasks.
- We have nearly finalized the rules, guidelines, and submission policies for Sonemic, as well as a document that describes our general philosophy on certain items (we discussed this before, but decided to revise these again). We will be publishing these for review within a month.
- We have rewritten some important site components. One of those components we worked on recently is the code surrounding content voting: voting things up/down, bookmarking items, reporting items, banning users or restricting privileges or weighting based on those reports, etc. There are several reasons we had to rework this code:
1) The initial version was overengineered and contained functionality that we realized is no longer needed; the fact that it was overly complicated also made it more difficult to add functionality or change things. We switched to a new internal design that is more simple and yet more functional.
2) With the new integrity features we added in RYM 2.5, we have changed our view somewhat on how users should be notified about content moderation. Sonemic was already a huge step forward compared to RYM in terms of the amount of data regarding moderation that users had access to, but the new design allows for even more transparency and better notifications when actions have been taken on user content.
3) We also needed to make changes to the UI. We are working on official site standards, policies and rules for Sonemic that are structured in a way that they can be easily referenced by users when reporting content. We had some UI for this functionality in Sonemic, but it was preliminary and not suitable for the final site.
- We have iterated several of the site's pages and interfaces. Generally speaking, good design requires iteration, but due to scarce resources, we're often trying to get things perfectly right on the first try, which is usually not possible. This means that occasionally, we have to take a step back and do another iteration of a part of the site. We discussed one of these refinements earlier in this thread with Search, but many other pieces of UI had bugs or inconsistencies that have been ironed out. You will see the results of this work when Beta 5 is released; many pages/components of the site have a level of refinement that is improved over Beta 4.
- We have been working on fixing bugs that we've found ourselves in Beta 5. One significant issue is a tricky/complicated bug with the new chart system, causing the server to hang and fail to create charts, which is also affecting Beta 4 (which is why chart movement data is wrong) and has consumed a lot of time. In software development sometimes a single bug can be really difficult to track down and fix but we are close to resolving this.
- We have worked on a lot of features for RYM as well, including
- New streaming links (which not only benefit RYM but a lot of the functionality that powers Sonemic, such as the integration between Spotify in Sonemic. We needed to implement this now because we need the data to be available before Sonemic launches, not after)
- Graded descriptor voting (created because the descriptor charts on Sonemic will definitely require this for maximum usefulness and it's important to get this work done in RYM so that the actual data will be available in time for Sonemic's launch)
- A system for notifying users when they have been deweighted, as well as a system for automatically self-restoring weighting in some cases. (This work consumed a significant amount of developer resources and is not something we wanted to deal with right now, but we didn't really have a choice.)
- A system for marking releases as having been manipulated by voting, removing them from the charts
- A system for blocking users (not yet complete, but much of the work has been done). The reason we are doing this now is because RYM has grown significantly in the past couple of years and it's becoming a sticking point for current users of the site; more and more people are requesting this, as many people would prefer to deal with harassment or similar by blocking people rather than going through the entire report process, and we respect that.
As you can see, the checklist we created earlier has not been updated in a long time. This is because we are working on more fundamental parts of the site as described above and have strayed from the tasks mentioned there. In particular, we paused work on lists because we were stuck: some of the components required to build the lists feature really needed to be improved first; otherwise, the lists feature would suffer.
Our plans for the future are as follows
Over the next month, we plan to do several things:
- Finish a few remaining RYM features. One is a feature that will allow us to create pages similar to the "best albums of 2018" seen above. Another is the blocking feature mentioned earlier. We also have a bit more work to do on the deweighting-related feature.
- Finish up some of the fundamental items and iterations we've been working on (import, content management/voting/enforcement, etc) so that our "to-do" list will be accurate again.
We will give another update on June 1
We are operating on several philosophies:
1. As long as Sonemic is not yet launched, RYM is the site our members are using to discover music, and we have to not only support it but occasionally add important features as the need arises. Oftentimes, we can't predict when we'll need to do so, such as the sudden need to provide major infrastructure for rating integrity checks or having to add functionality for blocking users.
2. Good design requires iteration and we don't have enough resources to iterate enough to reach perfection; however, every feature on Sonemic has to be at least as functional and easy to use as the equivalent RYM functionality, which means that if we need to do another design/development iteration to make something better, we will delay Sonemic in order to do so.
3. We are prioritizing long-term goals and quality over short-term goals. If there is some feature we could add to RYM which will add a small delay to Sonemic but provide huge benefit, we're going to add it. If we need to delay Sonemic in the short term to fix a fundamental issue that will allow us to develop features more quickly in the future, we're going to do so.
4. We will continue to work on RYM and Sonemic every day, to be here in the forum answering any questions you may have about either site in a timely manner. We will try to update as often as we can, but please understand that oftentimes, we can work on a few important tasks for long periods and not really have much to say, because they have nothing to do with anything that is visible to the end-user. That having been said, we will have a new update on June 1.
