For my friends at Plurk
 
Between the bump on a song and the points added to a listener’s account, some statistical and logical calculation needs to be made. The numbers used and the formula’s processed are well kept secrets and thus form a challenge to the code breaking part of the T61 community. Some parameters are obvious. Think of listener level, artist level, number of bumps already received, popularity of a genre etc. But overall the process between bumping and point gain is far from transparent - some would say it is unfair. Even a look under the hood of different T61 pages won’t change that, but the information beneath the surface of what’s visible is still very interesting. Interesting enough to have a look at it.
 
Valuable information is available in a piece of code on every page. To study the code you need to view the page in the source viewer of the browser. In Firefox you choose Page source in the View menu. In Internet Explorer 7 you find it behind the Page button in the toolbar. If you don’t know how to find it in your browser, just read the manual. The code to look for is at the bottom of the page. After you’ve opened any T61 page in the source viewer, scroll down the 2000 or so lines of code, until you arrive at either on of the next two lines:
 

<script id="global.js" type="text/javascript">

 
or
 

<script id="custom.js" type="text/javascript">

 
If the source viewer has a search function (<ctrl-f>) use that in stead of scrolling!

What’s the address?

Now which of the codes you need to further investigate depends on where you are in the site. Take a look at the page url in the address bar of your browser. Is it something like this…
 

http://www.thesixtyone.com/Evonity/#/browse/recently_uploaded/

 
… than look at the parameters under the <script id=”global.js”> part. There’s a list of parameters which the script called global.js uses for I don’t know what. Some of the information you can find here:

• Your level and the ammount of points on your account
• Current level up XP requirements
• Number of users online
• Common bump cost (5)
• Common discovery cost (50)
• Bumps needed for publishing
• Publish cost offset
• Multibumps allowed per level
• Song artist fame cost penalty (mine =.06)
• Song artist fame first users affected

Obviously it would help if I could tell you what this exactly means, but I can’t. I don’t do math (don’t know how) But I’m hoping some of you do and than tell me what it all means.

What about custom.js

Imho the parameters given to custom.js are much more interesting. But before they become visible, you first need to change the page url. Just as an example, change something like this…
 

http://www.thesixtyone.com/Evonity/#/browse/recently_uploaded/

 
in something like this…
 

http://www.thesixtyone.com/browse/recently_uploaded/

 
In other words: get rid of the username and the hash. Then dive under the surface again by opening the source viewer. Go to the bottom again, but this time have a look at the parameters under custom.js. You’ll find a line that starts with:
 

t61.song.data

 
It’s the beginning of a long line of information about every song on the page. When at the Browse Recently Uploaded page, you might want to know how many people bumped a certain song already. Scroll sideways until you find the phrase beginning with bumpers_count. To the right of that phrase you find the number of bumpers and to the left you find the name of the song. THIS IS EVEN TRUE WHEN YOUR USING T61 IN THE BETA HEARTS / REPUTATION MODE!
 
It gets even better when you visit an artist’s profile page (don’t forget to cut out any other username and # from the page url). If you do all the things I described above, you might eventually find the posting or revive date and time of successful songs.

Bonus: song id

Some of you may have noticed that the code for T61’s embedded player, that you can copy and paste in your own blog, uses a song id. I don’t know for how long, but the embedded player still shows the bump count for any song, including the recently uploaded ones. It’s such a pity that you need to create a web page to embed the player and then change the ID to whatever song you want to inquire.
Well, not anymore. Just visit this simple page I just created and fill in any song id you like (did you know that new song id’s are handed out sequentially?)

Some remarks

• Diving into the code to find bumps count or other meta data isn’t cheating.
• It’s not my intention to take the discussion about hearts and reputation in any direction, nor do I want to promote it or sabotage it.