Debate Dev Log · Sep 28

The thing that ate most of my day: giving Debate's tag system a proper cleanup. Tags used to be free-form — some questions got "#深夜哲学", others "#food", each written in whichever language the builder felt like, and switching locales made the mess obvious. New hard rule today: every tag must be a bound zh/en pair, and no translation means broken data. Following that rule I swept out 15 bad tags and remapped 229 legacy questions that had no tags at all. While I was in there, I rebuilt the arcade zone page into a two-column layout, made the recommendation strip rotate, and moved the whole site to WebP images — everything feels noticeably lighter now.

Then an embarrassing one: auditing seed comments turned up 894 hard failures out of 2,259 — verbatim duplicates, repeated openers, leaked markdown. All fallout from my sloppy early generation pipeline. Deleted them all, rebuilt the pipeline, and comments now follow the viewer's language: Chinese readers get Chinese comments, English readers get English ones, and switching language refetches on the spot.

The ranking machines keep rolling into round three: vinyl records are auditionable now, PK rounds award prestige, and nominations are decoupled from voting — nominating no longer quietly casts a vote for you. Also added board search and an "already ranked" pre-check, so you don't grind through a nomination form just to find out it was pointless.