The Legal Centre, and the end of invented numbers

Two things shipped on the same day and they belong in one entry, because they are the same decision applied to different parts of the product.

The first is the Legal Centre: sixteen documents covering the agreement, your content and ours, privacy, copyright, safety, conduct and enforcement — published in full, versioned, dated, with a change history, and downloadable as a watermarked controlled copy. Most platforms of this size publish a terms page and a privacy page and stop. We had been linking to our parent company’s policies, which describe a different company doing different things with different data. If a student uploads their coursework here, the rules that apply to it should be written down, here, with a date on them.

The second is that every invented number came off the site. There had been statistics on the homepage and the about page that were not measured from anything — round, confident figures about students reached and notes shared, plus two hardcoded personal ranks on the leaderboard. They were removed, and the counts that remain are read from the database. Some of them are small. A small number that is true is worth more than a large one that is not, and a student who downloads the app on the strength of a figure that turns out to be fiction does not come back.

The upload bug fixed the same day was the most expensive one we have found. Uploads were succeeding and then reporting failure to the person who made them — the file was saved, the screen said it had not been. People did what anyone would do and uploaded again. Several notes exist in the library twice because of it, which is a mess we are still cleaning up, and an unknown number of people concluded the app was broken and never tried a second time.