Now's Your Chance To Prove You're The Ultimate Petrolhead With Scores On Discuss

One month ago we launched our new user platform, appropriately called Discuss. Since its inception, the Car Throttle community has created 2500 posts and commented over 18,000 times.

But behind the scenes, our Product team has been hard at work bug-fixing and feature-building. We’ve experimented with topics (like Paris Motor Show 2014), added a fancy image uploader (with progress bar, woohoo!) and have made numerous other stability improvements to keep the platform alive and breathing without too many respiratory issues.

Today sees the launch of Scores on Discuss. Many platforms use a single metric to derive user engagement and popularity. On Facebook, it’s friends. On Twitter, it’s followers. Our metric, Score, is based on the number of upvotes a user gets on their Discuss posts. Obviously you need to have created an account on Car Throttle in order to see your score, but as a reference, I’m personally about to hit the 1500 upvotes mark. No big deal.

For you page reloaders, be warned that you won’t be able to see your score increase with every pageview… we update scores every 20 minutes to prevent our dusty servers from melting. But this time lag is likely to fall as we continue to optimise.

We’ve also introduced a new navigation dropdown for logged in users. Simply hover on your username, or tap if you’re on mobile, for quick links to your account, account settings and post creation. There’s also a sign out button too… but we’re still not sure why you’d want to use it…

There’s no leaderboard for the time being either, but there have already been “Post your score” Discuss threads, so feel free to share your numbers there.

What’s next for Discuss?

I’m glad you asked! We’re attacking profile pages next and giving them a much-needed lick of paint. We’ll also be looking at bringing in more homepage editorial into the Discuss feed to make your browsing experience more concise and to put everything in one place. And of course, you’ll be able to start showing off your score in comments and across the site.

And finally, before you ask, no we haven’t forgotten about an iPhone app!

What’s your current score? Post a screenshot in the comments below.