For weeks the alumni network had a working title: The Parliament. It was a placeholder, and placeholders have a way of hardening into permanence if you let them. Today I finally didn't let it — the whole thing became NNAWCA, its real name, everywhere it appears. A rename sounds trivial until you go looking for every place a name hides: page titles, emails, the sender address, the copy on the login screen, the little seal next to a verified member. It's spread through a product like roots through soil.
But the rename wasn't really the story. It was the excuse to look hard at everything the name touches, and the thing I kept circling back to was trust — specifically, how a community decides who to believe.
The product has a karma system: a running score of how much a member has contributed. The naive version of that is a slot machine. Points for posting, points for reactions, and within a week the loudest person wins and the thoughtful person quits. So today I spent real time making it harder to game. Contribution now has guardrails and a weighting that resists the obvious trick of spinning up fake accounts to upvote yourself. And — the decision I feel most strongly about — I made sure paying for a membership can't buy you karma. Money can unlock features. It cannot buy standing. The moment those two things blur, the score stops meaning anything, and a meaningless score is worse than no score at all.
Alongside that, I rebuilt onboarding into a proper five-screen wizard that saves as you go and shows you a live preview of your profile taking shape — the same lesson from earlier in the week, applied again: the first five minutes are the whole relationship. And I fixed a genuinely humbling bug: new members couldn't verify their email because the app was sending from an address it didn't actually own, so the messages bounced before anyone saw them. People had been stuck at the front door, and the door was mine.
There's also a small thing I'm oddly pleased with: the network now carries an honest little ad for my booking product inside the feed. Not a banner farm — one tasteful, clearly-marked placement. My projects are starting to introduce each other. A neighbourhood of products, each sending a little traffic to the next.
The rename gave the day a headline. What it was really about was quieter: a community is only as good as its sense of who to trust, and you build that sense one un-gameable rule at a time.
Onwards.