Külföldi torrent oldalak What.cd | WCD A Place Of Quality

What.CD - A Place of Quality

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Five years ago, I sat in my room, hacking away at those first few lines of code. Thousands of miles away, a couple of other programmers were sitting in their rooms, hacking away at the same codebase. One guy was figuring out how we could safely handle donations. A handful of people were helping others in the forums and on IRC, and another handful of people were moderating torrents and already starting to enforce our now famously strict quality standards.

We all had dreams of what we were creating. We shared them with each other, and while the details differed, the general theme did not. We wanted to create a quality place where quality people could come together and share music. Quality music.

Little did we know, that dream would almost create itself.

What.CD has always had quality people. Seeded with refugees from the greatest tracker of its age - OiNK’s Pink Palace - What.CD has never hurt for talented rippers, dedicated seeders, and a bustling community. Our forums are one of the most welcoming that I know of, we have an incredibly well curated music database, and a wiki filled with an absolutely ridiculous amount of information.

The quality people couldn’t help but bring the quality music with them. Over a thousand torrents have been uploaded per day, every day since we opened. I always thought this would slow down once we hit some undetermined milestone, but after five years, the rate actually seems to be accelerating. We now have almost ten times as many torrents as we do users - and somehow, you guys manage to keep a collection of that size seeded. That’s goddamn astounding.

In fact, the only difficult part of realizing our dream was making What.CD a quality place. It is unfortunately not enough to bring a bunch of amazing people together and hope for everlasting excellence - quality people demand quality surroundings, and we’ve always known that if our users don’t feel safe, welcome, challenged, and appreciated, they’ll find somewhere else to go.

It sounds so simple, but the key to making What.CD a quality place was keeping a quality staff. For five years, incredibly dedicated users have - for no discernible reason other than personal satisfaction - volunteered unhealthy amounts of their time and energy to making the site a quality place.

I’ve been gone from the staff for a couple of years now, and whenever I pop back in, I see a lot of unfamiliar faces. But even though the people are different, the staff always feels the same - because what never changes is that all-pervading, almost fanatic devotion to quality. The torrent mods grind through hundreds of reports per day, to keep our music collection perfect. The community mods handle everyone from bad trolls to borderline stalkers, to make sure the forums and IRC remain a welcoming place. The cheater mods stare at tables of numbers for hours on end, to ensure that everybody plays fair. The badguy mods endure people lying to them for ridiculous amounts of time, on the off chance that one of them is telling the truth. The coders rewrote the entire site, continuously develop feature after feature, and keep an incredibly full-featured website running on a shoestring budget. The administrators keep all these teams united.

We’ve had a lot of staff members come and go in the past five years, but they’ve all left their mark. Whether their contribution is drafting a rule, building a feature, banning a cheater, making a positive impression on a user, or doing one of the other hundreds of things the staff do to make What.CD great, this site is a quality place because it is the product of this vast number of positive contributions from many staff members.

After I left, I watched from the sidelines when the sysop position was removed. I noticed that some users displayed a bit of skepticism. How could What.CD survive without the vision of one person steering it?

The truth is, What.CD never had the vision of one person steering it. What.CD has always been, and always will be, steered by the vision of a hundred and fifty thousand people and their collective devotion - towards a quality place, where quality people can come together and share music. Quality music.

I’m damn proud of it, and I sincerely hope that every last one of you feel the same.


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