[Changelog] February 3rd, 2023

I haven't actually published a changelog yet this year, so today's update includes pretty much all of January as well as these first few days of February.

In case you're curious, this year's wishlist is officially under way.

Media

• Ari Herstand published a 1+ hour conversation where we get into all sorts of fun topics
• Dylan and I did a livestream walkthrough of what to look for when submitting to Spotify Playlisters. We're gonna do more of these soon!

Hot or Not

• When I announced the Verified Reviewers program, one of the rules was that you have to regularly check in to rate tracks (at least once every 2 weeks). This is now enforced by a bit of code that a) sends you a reminder to check in if you've been inactive; b) automatically removes the "verified" badge if you're still inactive a week after that reminder. Folks can reapply when they're ready
• The list of your tracks can now be sorted by in various ways
• English translations now show up inline when someone leaves you feedback in another language

Marketplace

For those who don't know, in a month or two we'll be launching the SubmitHub Marketplace, which is kinda like Fiverr, but for the SubmitHub community (and with better quality control). Right now it's a closed beta, and there isn't much actual functionality.

• I've made the landing page look prettier
• I've added the ability to filter from the sidebar

Next steps include opening up the beta to allow more people to sign up and offer services. From there, I need to code a way for people to actually request those services. I hope to have all of this done by the end of February.

Curators

• You can now request coypright permission for Mixcloud
• Your away message now shows the exact time of return
• We have a new Spanish-only chatroom

Miscellaneous

• Added support for Disco.ac links
• Folks get a welcome email when they sign up (7 years of running and I hadn't done this... d'oh!)
• Songs that have been scheduled for 30+ days without the curator being online are automatically refunded (to avoid this, the curator doesn't have to be active, they just need to log into the website)
• When pasting in the HTML editor, CSS styling is stripped. This solves a problem where people using night mode would paste white text, which then became invisible in day mode. D'oh.
• We're limiting new influencer referrals to "tier 1" countries, eg: USA, UK, and a handful of others
• English translations now show up inline when you're viewing feedback that was written in another language
• These are also included in the emails that go out when your song is declined
• You can easily preview someone's feedback from the notes section of their profile (previously accessible from the 3 dots to the right of a profile, but I think most people missed that)

Engagement scores

We're continuing our move toward emphasis genre-specific scores, rather than overall scores. This change began ~6 months ago, and I suppose you could say it was "finalized" this week. You can read the in-depth article, but here's a summary:

• The "Engagement Score" is a measure of how active a curator's audience is relative to all their peers within the genre you're currently viewing
• It is based on where they share songs for that specific genre, and includes shout-outs (songs not good enough for a proper share, but instead shared on a small playlist or on social media)
• If you're a playlister, one of the easiest ways to get an understanding of what's being factored into your score is to a) filter the curators feed by a genre; b) look at which playlists you've been sharing that genre to, and how many listeners they have
• Up until earlier this week, each curator profile showed an overall engagement score that did not factor the variation across genres, and did not consider shout-outs
• This metric often caused confusion because it was vastly different from the genre-specific scores which did include shout-outs
• Curator profiles no longer show an overall rating. Instead, they now show a link:
• Clicking that link opens a popup showing a curator's genre-by-genre breakdown:
• An "overall engagement score" of sorts still exists on the backend as a weighted average of your genre-specific scores
• The only time this matters is in the context of requesting an increase to your price