Since they are reborn, they must be supported by the school beauties.

Chapter 218 The beginning of the collapse of heaven
The atmosphere was lively. Chen Cheng raised a beer bottle and called out to everyone, "Come on, let's celebrate! The alumni directory went bust as soon as it launched!"

The crowd was in high spirits and cheered in response.

They raised their beers high and drank heartily.

This class is really awesome.

The benefits and perks are exceptionally good.

Working for a boss like that would make you smile from ear to ear every day.

So, a group of tech geeks ate crayfish and drank beer at their respective workstations, waiting enthusiastically for midnight to arrive.

Even though it's someone else's product that's about to launch, everyone seems more excited than the other team.

Finally, at midnight, QQ sent another pop-up in the lower right corner, announcing that the alumni directory was officially open for access and registration.

Everyone put down their beers and immediately opened the link to register an account.

Currently, QQ does not have a one-click login function. Everyone enters their QQ number and password and then activates their alumni directory.

Chen Cheng also tried out the process. After logging in with his QQ number, he was greeted with a message: "Hello XXX, would you like to activate the alumni directory? Activation will grant you a one-month QQ membership."

XXX is my QQ nickname. Once you click to activate, a prompt will immediately pop up: "Congratulations on your successful activation. One month of QQ membership has been credited to your account. Please continue to complete your information to receive the next round of rewards."

At that moment, Chen Cheng heard two coughs in his earphones; a QQ system message had arrived.

"Congratulations on successfully activating your QQ Alumni Directory. Your one-month membership has been automatically activated."

Checking the status again, sure enough, the user was now in the red.

Chen Cheng then entered the page to complete his information, filling in his name, age, and school as agreed upon by everyone.

The moment I submitted, a notification popped up: "Information completed successfully. One month of QQ membership has been credited to your account. Please add fifty friends to receive the next round of rewards."

QQ sent another system message: another month of membership has been credited to your account.

Then, Chen Cheng received a string of in-app messages from alumni: "Ma Ling'er has followed you, go check it out!"

"Ma Sanwu has followed you, go check it out!"

"Ma Erba has followed you, go check it out!"

"Ma Wuwu has followed you..."

Chen Cheng followed back to each of them. When he had fifty mutual friends, the system sent another notification: "Congratulations on receiving the third round of rewards. Your three-month QQ membership has been credited to your account. We hope you have fun on the alumni website!"

Chen Cheng smiled and went back to check the product features of the alumni directory. It was basically still the architecture of the first-generation campus network, with nothing new and no fishponds. He estimated that similar features would have to wait for the next version iteration.

After studying the alumni directory's features, Chen Cheng closed the alumni directory page.

One employee laughed and said, "Damn, all thirty-odd of my QQ friends who are online have gradually become members!"

Chen Cheng was not surprised at all.

Who would refuse to take advantage of a good deal?

He might not be interested in giving young people eggs, but he'd be scrambling to grab WeChat red envelopes worth one cent per person.

Not to mention a three-month QQ membership.

However, he suddenly realized a problem.

Many QQ members who had previously recharged their accounts might feel disappointed when suddenly faced with so many fake members.
I paid to have my account highlighted to feel superior, but now that everyone has a highlighted account, how can I stand out?
At this moment, the Tencent Alumni team was also stunned by the backend data.

I thought it would take an hour to break five million, but it actually took only ten minutes.

The entire team cheered, their excitement overflowing. Mr. Ma was pleased, but he simply smiled calmly and said, "The alumni directory is a success! We made five million in just ten minutes. How can Renren.com compete?"

Then, somewhat excitedly, he said, "We might be able to break through ten million registered users in an hour!"

The number of users continues to grow rapidly.

Six million, seven million, eight million, nine million.

At 00:55, we officially broke the 10 million mark!

Mr. Ma exclaimed, "Our alumni directory reached over ten million users in just fifty-five minutes after its launch! That's a miracle!"

At this moment, an employee frowned and muttered, "It seems like my classmates filled out fake information!"

One person responded, "It seems like most of my classmates filled in the answers randomly too."

"Me too."

Mr. Ma frowned and asked, "What do you mean? Filling out the forms randomly?"

"Correct!"

The person who first discovered the problem said, "Almost all the classmates I know in real life and my QQ friends filled out false information. Look, we all graduated from Shenzhen University, but these guys are just writing nonsense. Some even wrote that they were from Tsinghua University, and they didn't even write their real names. His name is Zhao Peng, but he wrote Peng Ge."

Mr. Ma was puzzled: "If they write such nonsense, how will their former classmates be able to find them in the alumni directory?"

Someone suddenly asked, "Could it be that everyone is deliberately writing nonsense?" "But why would they?"

Mr. Ma's face was extremely grim.

He knew what it meant that everyone was writing up information haphazardly.

This means they never intended to use an alumni directory!

I'm just here to get a membership!
So he angrily questioned, "Even if you're just trying to scam a membership, shouldn't you at least have some basic ethics?! Couldn't you get a membership by properly completing your profile?"

Someone raised their hand and said, "Mr. Ma, actually... I've been using QQ for over two years, and my friends list is quite diverse. Besides friends in real life, most of them are people I met in games, and some are members of the opposite sex I searched for when I was bored. When I chat with these people, I haven't revealed my real information. If you asked me to reveal my name and school to all my QQ friends, I'd be a little reluctant..."

"what?"

Mr. Ma exclaimed in surprise, "You mean you don't want most of your QQ friends to know your real identity?"

"correct."

The employee nodded and said, "Nobody knows anyone, so it's fine to chat randomly without any pressure. But if they all knew who I was, it would feel like I'd been stripped naked..."

The others nodded in agreement.

Everyone experiences this at some point.

Actually, if you think about it from another perspective, QQ creating an alumni directory and linking it to and reminding other QQ friends is essentially no different from someone posting their ID photo directly on their WeChat Moments and setting it to be visible to everyone.

Of course, there are some people who are thick-skinned and don't care, but the vast majority of people will definitely still reject it.

Mr. Ma felt a wave of dizziness. He then realized that taking the shortcut had led him down a dead end!

If I had known QQ friends were against real-name registration, I would never have bothered with the alumni directory!
Let's put it another way!

If I had known they were against real-name registration, I wouldn't have linked all my QQ friends!
Now look what's happened! It's already a mess right from the start. Out of ten million users, nine out of ten are fake profiles. This isn't just one bad apple spoiling the whole bunch; it's like using bad apples to cook soup!

His face was ashen as he said, "The problem is quite serious. With this start, our alumni directory has become stagnant. We need to find a way to salvage it immediately!"

Everyone looked at each other for a moment.

The situation has been like this since it started, and it's probably very, very difficult to remedy it now.

Someone suggested, "Why don't we remove the QQ friend relationship and just create an alumni directory?"

Someone asked: "It's possible to remove QQ friend relationships, but when we write the program, each person's homepage address is xiaoyou.qq.com with a slash followed by their QQ number. If we want to know whose alumni homepage, we just need to replace their QQ number with it."

"Change it! Change it immediately!"

Without hesitation, Mr. Ma said, "Change all the system IDs of alumni users to a different logic, and stop using QQ numbers!"

"In addition, we immediately worked overtime to sever his QQ friend relationships. He can log in with his QQ account, but we will no longer push his personal homepage to other QQ friends."

The technician said, "We added an alumni directory tag to QQ, which allows users to access their alumni homepage by clicking it. Are you going to remove this feature as well?"

"Kill them! They must be killed!"

Mr. Ma stated firmly, "We will no longer use any QQ friend relationships, nor will we allow anyone to search for the other party's alumni homepage through their QQ number!"

Another technician said, "The module I was responsible for developing that is shared by Alumni Show and QQ Show was originally designed so that users could sync their purchases to the other platform for one-tenth of the price, no matter which platform they purchased from. Should this feature continue to be developed?"

Mr. Ma thought for a moment and said, "Let's continue developing! This is a common underlying technology, as long as it's not reflected on the front end. The two cartoon characters can communicate with each other, as long as the users don't communicate with each other."

At this point, he pushed up his glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose, and said dejectedly, "These changes are a bit troublesome, but they can all be solved through technical means. The core problem we need to solve now is how to get these people back to using the alumni directory properly after we've severed the connection between the two. Right now, it seems like they're filling out the information haphazardly, they have no intention of actually using it. They just got the membership and don't care about anything else. This mentality is very troublesome. How do we get them back on track?"

For a moment, no one could think of a good solution.

Everyone here is an experienced employee and knows how deeply ingrained user habits are.

Users weren't prepared to play from the start. You can change the product, but you can't change their first impression.

At this point, someone suggested, "If that doesn't work, let's give them another reward. For those who have improved their information, we'll reward them with a month's membership."

Mr. Ma immediately asked him, "What if he changes it again? We have no way of verifying his real identity anyway. He has already been a member for three months. If we launch this activity, he can easily do the same thing again!"

Everyone fell silent.

This situation has left us stuck on both ends.

If you don't offer users even the smallest benefit, they're unlikely to come back to modify their information.
Giving him a pittance is only a small favor; the real fear is that he'll come back, take the benefit, and leave again.

The key issue is that Tencent has no way of verifying whether the information provided by the other party is genuine.

At this point, someone suggested, "Why don't we implement a reporting mechanism? If our friends can clearly identify that someone is using fake information, they can click to report it. If someone receives a lot of reports, we can give them two options: either change their information back or refund their membership!"

Mr. Ma said angrily, "Isn't this just messing around? If you can fill out the forms randomly, why can't you just click on the complaint button randomly?"

The team fell silent again.

What started as a stroke of luck has now turned into a catastrophe.

That's so embarrassing!

(End of this chapter)