What shipping a community site taught me about pre-launch weeks (build log)

Two weeks ago I wrote about TIER EVERYTHING — the site where you rank anything from GOATED to Cooked and then argue about it (https://dev.to/afunnyrat).

This is the build log of the week before the Product Hunt launch (Oct 21). Numbers are real, from /api/stats: 89 boards, 935 items, 140k tracked page views — and exactly 6 votes and 95 comments. That ratio is the whole story.

Three things I shipped this week and what they taught me:

1. One CORS header was silently eating every page view. sendBeacon sends with credentials: include, and a wildcard Access-Control-Allow-Origin is illegal on credentialed requests — browsers drop the beacon with no console error you would notice in a hurry. The fix is origin echo + Vary: Origin + allow-credentials, restricted to our own origin. Lesson: two-worker splits break same-origin assumptions you did not know you had.

2. Starter content vs fabricated engagement. Earlier seed passes wrote comments and vote counts so boards would not look empty. This week's pass ships 9 new boards with honest zeros — the placements are editorial, every number belongs to a real visitor. Launch traffic is about to be measurable; I would rather see the true shape of the curve.

3. Structured data for community opinion. Item pages now carry AggregateRating (the median on a 1–5 ladder where 5 is GOATED) and a no-JS summary for crawlers. Google needs the JS version too, but the noscript block means the argument exists even for a reader who never runs scripts.

The uncomfortable observation from the research: readers arrive for the verdict and leave without arguing. The share-card and per-item loops are built for arguing; the missing step has been what makes someone stop — real controversy and a reason to come back. That is the thing launch week is for.

Try it: any board at https://tier.fcthq.com — drag to your heart's content, no account needed to rate.

— afunnyrat