API Adjustments for Ratings & Mail Update

News

This week was relatively light on station work, but we did have a couple things to work through including an API change to accommodate the upcoming app as well as an update to our mail system. For more details, read on!

For a long while now, we’ve hinted at a feature update for the ratings system. One might think there’s not a whole lot else to do… “push button, add rating” right? The website’s current system is supposed to inform the user of what they’ve rated a song in the past, but the current implementation is inconsistent (and app v1 ratings aren’t currently supported at all due to the switch to Icecast some time ago).

For app v2, we wanted to reiterate on this feature and add a new type of indicator. Now, when a signed-in user views station info, the ratings bar will populate with the user’s most recent rating for that song. Additionally, if a song had been rated prior to the current year, the ratings bar will indicate that the rating is older by using a different, dimmer color (and perhaps a year indicator). The purpose of this change is to indicate to users whether a rating will apply to the current year’s Top 100 list. For those unaware, the Top 100 list is calculated based on user-submitted song ratings for each year, and we publish this information via YouTube and a shared spreadsheet document. If the ratings bar indicates that the user rated the song in a different year, the user can simply re-submit the rating and it will be applied to the current year’s list.

On the mail front, one of our users pointed out earlier in the week that mail was being rejected by our server due to having a “very low karma” score. I’m sure this sounds arbitrary to most folks, but basically, our mail server uses a system of checks to determine how likely incoming mail is to be spam. Somewhere in the system, those checks stopped working correctly which ended up giving all incoming mail a very low score. A quick update later and we’re back to normal, so if you’ve been trying to send us something since around July 20th or later, give it another go.

That’s all for this week, stay tuned for more updates, and thanks for listening!

[Knowledge #128]

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