Though the first day of our birthday festivities has passed, don't fret - there's plenty more to come! We have quite a few surprises in store for you as we kick off the second day of celebration. Scroll down to explore the update.

Today's offerings include an amazing new album voting feature designed and coded by Changles, a very special announcement regarding a new partnership, more from irredentia's statistics visualization project, another special gift and a round of picks from both our Build Team and Forum Moderators. Enjoy!

We're pleased to announce a new album voting system. You'll now notice a 'Favorite Album Votes' section on each torrent group page. The system is simple: you can upvote or downvote a given torrent group, and you can vote on as many torrent groups as you like.

With this comes a host of new, related features. For one thing, you'll find a new Top 10 page based on the torrents deemed most popular by votes. Another feature we're very excited about is recommending new music based on votes. On every torrent page, you'll soon see a box of listing the 10 most popular albums among people who upvoted that torrent, and plans for recommending users with similar taste are in the works. We're also quite excited about how we're calculating the rankings. Rather than just counting upvotes (which prioritizes better-known but perhaps less loved albums) or the ratio of upvotes to downvotes (which is unreliable for albums with few votes), we're using binomial confidence intervals to handle our ranking like Reddit handles theirs (more information here). Please discuss our new ranking system in this update's discussion thread, as we'd love to hear your thoughts. We also welcome you to visit the running tally of fifth birthday features being documented on this wiki page.

Given What.CD's focus on access and organization, it's no surprise that we would attract the attention of other archival organizations. One such organization is the phenomenal Internet Archive, which shares our vision of universal access to art, culture and knowledge.

So, for the past several months, we have been quietly collaborating with the Internet Archive team, helping them to back up as much of our vast accumulation of metadata as possible. We hope that this collaboration will both improve the state of music organization in the present and benefit other archivist organizations one day when this site is gone. For the official announcement of this collaboration, we would like to share a message from Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle:

Brewster Kahle wrote:

The achievements of the What.CD community are astonishing, and the site's superb metadata can significantly help open-source projects such as MusicBrainz.org and acoustid.org to make a catalog of all recordings.

To that end, the What.CD archive project is a continuation of the Internet Archive's goal of preserving the cultural zeitgeist of the world through time. Along with our book scanning projects and web archival projects, this well curated repository assists us in our mission of obtaining an archival quality copy of every piece of culturally-relevant information. We attempt to make all material as accessible as possible and appropriate.

Please let us know what you think the Archive should do to serve the goals of preservation and access.

We at the What.CD staff are immensely proud to work with the Internet Archive team, and we hope our work here will eventually benefit music fans all over the internet.

And of course, we want to thank you, the users. Our dedicated uploaders and editors ensure that our 276 terabytes of content is well-tagged and well-organized for the benefit of others, and of course our entire userbase helps to keep this content available. You guys make the Internet Archive's work possible, and we are working hard to bring tangible benefits back to you, the users. We are very excited for the possibilities this collaboration will bring! Stay tuned.

irredentia's stats overdrive project bursts into our day two announcement with a special list of the Top 100 Releases by Collages as of September 2012. This is a list of the top albums as ranked by their presence in all collages. We'd love it if you gave the list a look and shared your thoughts. Our sultan of stats is just getting warmed up, so expect even more interesting statistical visualizations in the days ahead.

Here's five more Freeleech Tokens to spend at your leisure! Remember: FL Tokens are intended to help you snatch albums you can't afford, so use them wisely. Every user has been awarded Five (5) additional Freeleech Tokens. Please read the token wiki to educate yourself about how the token system works.