Redacted (RED) News - Redacted Turns Two

Redacted Turns Two!

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Redacted Turns Two! - Day One

Happy second birthday, Redacted! This time of the year (November, 2018) is an especially important time to consider what came before Redacted. What.CD will always remain close to our hearts and we will remain forever thankful for the foundations of the Gazelle project. Before titan What.CD passed, a jaw-dropping 2,678,446 torrents were uploaded and curated by passionate users in many ways. Without fail, we will remain thankful yearly for hard work of users and staff alike at What.CD.

Days later, on November 23rd, 2016, Redacted was born from former ashes of what was. With this process came many important decisions about the future of Redacted: a music tracker erected from scratch to ensure quality logical processes, staff dedicated to helping users, and a passionate user-base were ready to contribute and build a new community. Of course, during the time building anew, it has never been out of the question to discover a new artist or one hundred of them based off musical tastes of similar quality users.

The Redacted community truly would not exist if it was not for the passion of the user-base and attention to detail when curating content daily via uploading, helping out on the forums, or ensuring data are as correct as possible. Thank you for the overwhelming positive support and feedback as we charter into new territories at the start of a new year for Redacted!

Second Birthday Statistics & The Road Ahead

Statistics (time of writing: 23 November 2018) are always important to retrospectively view the past and present in context:

Maximum users: 35,000
Enabled users: 32,669
Users active today: 8,611 (26.36%)
Users active this week: 18,817 (57.60%)
Users active this month: 26,941 (82.47%)
Torrents: 1,528,753
Releases: 775,548
Artists: 681,805
"Perfect" FLACs: 792,399
Collages: 14,102
Requests: 97,674 (70.53% filled)
Snatches: 12,513,549
Peers: 6,971,431
Seeders: 6,928,798
Leechers: 42,644
Seeder/leecher ratio: 162.52

The 1.5 million torrent milestone was passed with flying colors not too long ago; we must sincerely thank every user who has ever uploaded a torrent, or helped a friend feel more comfortable with the uploading process for a legendary milestone that would not be met without the high quality attention to detail and diligent care of the user-base.

A passionate 32,648 users have uploaded 1,528,034 torrents to Redacted, a truly impressive milestone. At almost an average of 47 torrents per user, 46.8 to be specific, it is clear as shimmering clear skies that Redacted's user-base is extraordinary. The amount of inspiring work that you have contributed to Redacted over the past two years is purely inspiring. The numbers stand for themselves: 774,005 releases, spanning 681,625 artists around the world with 792,292 perfect FLACs. How about a Random Torrent or a Random Artist to aid your music discovery?

792,292 perfect FLAC uploads is quite an achievement, but Redacted is edging ever so closely and consistently to a gigantic seven digit milestone. We would love to see 1,000,000 perfect FLAC uploads and beyond... When our dedicated community shares goals, it is abundantly clear that any milestone can be hurdled over and beyond with ease...

The Past Year in Development

Over the past year, many user-facing changes have been made to the site code, resulting in a multitude of new features and changes. This would not have been possible without the hard work of Redacted's past and present developers: Aurora, bowtie, danger, Dazzle, StarLord, Saturn, and Ulmo. We hope that you find a good use for the new features that have been implemented.

All changes made to the site can be found in the Site Changelog. If you wish to be notified for new entries in the changelog, enable notifications for Changelog updates in your Notification Settings.

In case you missed any of the new features and changes made in the past year, here are some notable ones:

Reverse personal collage sorting
Profile albums (Elite+ perk)
Page to view voted on torrent groups
Page to view submitted torrent reports
RED Dark and RED Light stylesheets
Ability to view non-seeding uploads and snatches
PMs upon deletion of a snatched or seeding torrent
Top 10 category for Perfect FLAC uploads
The site changelog
Stat Graphs Part 1 (Power User+ perk)
Pop up confirmation for large request creations and votes
Page to view uploaded labels
Remove request tax
Page to view unread forum topics
Add to collage box on torrent groups (Member+ privilege)
Button to download all non-seeding uploads or snatches
Resolve internal URLs to titles of respective pages
[user][/user] mentions and notifications
Profile album history page (Power User+ perk)
Show buffer after snatch on torrents
Progress to next class box on user profile

Merit Tokens

We love Freeleech Tokens. As our vehicle of choice for an economy stimulant and user gift, we've given out quite a few since the start of the site and intend to give out many more. Historically, Freeleech Tokens have not been earnable for significant milestones; the only way to get them was to be an enabled user at the start of an event that involved tokens.

However, we are introducing a second token type, called Merit Tokens. These tokens will be earnable by users. The tokens that are given out to every enabled user on site, previously known just as Freeleech Tokens, are now called Gift Tokens. The term Freeleech Tokens now refers to the super-set of Merit Tokens and Gift Tokens.

Merit Tokens expire. The expiry time will be determined by the number of tokens you earn. If new Merit Tokens are earned while you already have Merit Tokens, the expiry time will be extended. Once you get them, be sure to spend them, lest they expire! Gift Tokens, given out to every user on site, will continue to expire in their old fashion--on a given date.

Merit Token expiry will vary depending on the awarded tokens:

1 Token - 4 days
2 Tokens - 7 days
5 Tokens - 12 days
10 Tokens - 18 days
25 Tokens - 30 days

If the expiry time is incremented and ends up shorter than a week, it will be rounded up to one week. Distributions of Gift Tokens will also increment the expiry date of Merit Tokens for all users by the lifetime of the Gift Tokens.

The expiry time for Merit Tokens is present on the user profile in the Statistics box in the sidebar. The expiry time for Gift Tokens has been added to the user profile.

When spending tokens, Gift Tokens will take priority over Merit Tokens. The site will first attempt to deduct from your Gift Tokens, and then if you have none, deduct from your Merit Tokens.

This necessitates a change in how tokens are displayed. The format has changed from # of Freeleech Tokens to # of Merit Tokens+# of Gift Tokens. If you have no Gift Tokens, the format will be Merit Tokens. If you are ever uncertain of how many tokens you have of each type, visit your profile or hover over the tokens in the header bar.

For example:

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Badges, Badges, Badges... Wait, Badges?

Finally, more incentive to sit down, upload... and do other things. As part of our birthday celebrations, we have created a new badges system, bringing new goals, achievements, and rewards to the site. Similar to achievements systems in video games, badges are awarded to users upon successful completion of a certain task or passing of a threshold. Some badges have multiple tiers--once a tier is achieved, the next tier, with an even harder threshold, becomes visible. Badges can have a max of 3 tiers: gold, platinum, and diamond. Most will have 1 or 2.

The badges system incorporates Merit Tokens into its reward scheme. Some badges come with a reward of Merit Tokens, while others come with none. Earning badges is to your economic benefit. Badges will only award Merit Tokens the first time they're earned or qualified for. New badge tiers will only award Merit Tokens the first time they're achieved.

There is much more variation among badges than just the amount of Merit Tokens they award. Some badges only exist for a user while they qualify for it. For example, only users with a ratio <1.5 have the Putting it back in badge. If a user rises above a 1.5 ratio, they lose the badge. Special badges do not have public criteria. The users who have earned them are likely just as confused as you are. And of course, no fun badges system would be incomplete without undocumented badges, which are not shown until earned. An example of an undocumented badge is contest winner badges.

Earned badges will be attributed to a user's account the next time they load a page. If the badge has Merit Token rewards, they will be distributed at this time and the expiration counter started. Page loads include automated access.

An earned badge of choice can be set to display next to their username in their settings.

One can view their available badges here: badges.php.

Thanks to flying_sausages for their amazing work on the badge icons.

Note: The uploading badges will not be automatically awarded to users who qualified for them prior to the rollout of this system. A torrent meeting the criteria of the badge will need to be uploaded for the badge to be awarded.

User Class Promotion Rewards

Merit Tokens will also be awarded upon user class promotion. Promotions to Member, Power User, Elite, and Torrent Master will award 25 Merit Tokens each.

These rewards will be dispensed retroactively. If you are currently a Power User, you will receive rewards for reaching the Member user class.

The rollout of these rewards is staggered. As of the birthday, only rewards for the Member user class are active. Rewards for the other user classes have been deferred and will be activated and given out at a later date.

You can only earn these rewards once. Dropping from and re-earning a user class will earn you no tokens.

New User Tutorial & Introduction

Many have expressed that RED is a difficult tracker to survive on, especially as a new user. We hope that many of the new birthday changes will make the site less difficult for new users. Additionally, we have created a tutorial, designed to ease a new user into the site and introduce parts of the site they may not notice until a later time in their membership.

This tutorial contains tutorial badges and serves as a jumping off point Merit Token-wise. We encourage all users on the site to read the tutorial; no matter how experienced a user is, there is always something they may not know. The tutorial badges do not apply retroactively--even if you have a thousand forum posts, the tutorial badge will not be given to you unless you make a new one.

The tutorial can be found here: badges.php?action=tutorial