Smooth User Experience

After taking a short break, Lu Zhou organized his thoughts and resumed working.

With the login and follow-up modules he developed in the morning, the subsequent development of the repost and comment functions came naturally, as most function calls were similar.

Moreover, with Lu Zhou's rich development experience from his previous life, implementing them posed no major problems.

A few hours later, Lu Zhou completed the automated operation program.

Seeing that there was nothing else to do and Fang Qiang had not finished his work yet, Lu Zhou opened Ali Mall and registered a seller account.

Then he compared the prices of other Weibo fan merchants on the platform and directly listed several items: 100 fans priced at 10 yuan, 100 reposts for 10 yuan, 100 comments for 40 yuan, and a promotional package titled "1,500 Sina Weibo fans + 500 reposts + 100 comments" priced at 198 yuan.

As someone who came from 2018, Lu Zhou thought the prices of these items were slightly expensive, and he wouldn't buy them himself.

But in the current year of 2010, Weibo was extremely popular, and most people's friends and classmates were using it, creating a virtual social circle.

With a huge number of Weibo users, there would always be people or marketing Weibo accounts willing to pay for fans.

The sellers in Ali Mall who engaged in fan trading were all manually registered small workshops, and both the costs and prices were much higher than Lu Zhou's. The prices in Lu Zhou's store seemed more affordable.

After thinking about it, Lu Zhou felt slightly reassured. After all, every era had its own characteristics.

Of course, he didn't expect these prices to last long. As long as he made money in the first few months, it would be like winning the jackpot.

When more people started automating the registration process in the following months, he could gradually lower the prices and still make a profit.

As for the Weibo real-name system that would truly impact this business, it would be implemented two years later. In fact, based on the future development, this business could be done for another two years.

Lu Zhou naturally didn't expect this business to last for two years. Currently, he urgently needed to solve the difficulties at home, so the sooner he made money, the better. He could start another project once he had the startup capital.

"Ah, it's a helpless move. If only I could remember some lottery numbers, the financial market trends in 2010 wouldn't be so difficult. I do remember that several large Chinese and American internet companies' stocks soared multiple times until 2018, but I didn't have the capital for it. Long-term investment is fine, but short-term is really uncertain. Such a laborious life!" Lu Zhou couldn't help but sigh.

Afterward, Lu Zhou walked out of the room to check Fang Qiang's progress and found that he was writing code intermittently and a bit slowly.

In the end, unable to bear watching him struggle, Lu Zhou helped Fang Qiang complete some corresponding functional modules and explained the code implementation details saved in the code repository.

Lu Zhou focused on explaining to Fang Qiang, "For example, in this functional module, your approach executes tasks linearly, submitting data for registration step by step. Here, you can create multiple threads to register simultaneously, which would improve program efficiency. Of course, in practice..."

After explaining a part of it, Lu Zhou took a sip of water and continued, "Alternatively, you can try a different approach. For instance, use multiple elastic cloud servers to distribute IP proxies, which would greatly improve the efficiency of automated registration. However, in the case of multiple servers...

"Furthermore, in the case of multi-threading, under each automatic registration, the random number generated based on the timestamp may not be unique, which may result in duplicate registered accounts. If your program doesn't include a check, it will throw an exception...

...

Fang Qiang absorbed Luo Zhou's programming ideas attentively while continuously calling out 'Brother Luo v587.' It was like those future fans who observe god-level operations behind the experts while shouting '666.'

Trends change, catchphrases change, and so does the era.

The code displayed on the editor reached its final part. Luo Zhou pointed at the relevant code on the screen, and after finishing the last part, he felt a dry throat, so he drank a glass of water.

Fang Qiang, on the other hand, was struck with enlightenment. He looked as dumbfounded as a young apprentice who had just absorbed decades of skills, saying, 'Wow, Luo, I feel like you're even more amazing than when you explained the project to me last time.'

Luo Zhou had to come up with an excuse and said, 'Maybe it's because of the influence of the team leader. I've had some breakthroughs recently. Anyway, do more work and think more. Oh, and stop daydreaming so much!'

Fang Qiang, feeling out of words, replied, 'Alright, alright, Big Brother Luo, it's been a while, and you've aged a few more years. Your way of speaking sounds even more old-fashioned. If you want to take revenge for my slip of the tongue at noon, I have nothing to say.'

Luo Zhou shook his head speechlessly. Was he really such a petty person?

They didn't dwell on these small issues for long and patted Fang Qiang's shoulder, saying, 'Alright, finish the testing and submit it to the code repository. If there are no issues, I'll run the automatic registration on the server directly. After all, this project is not technology-driven. We'll only know if it works when it's up and running. As long as there are no major problems, minor fixes will do.'

Fang Qiang chuckled and said, 'Alright. Brother Luo, let's discuss something. Can you accommodate me tonight? I don't have any classes tomorrow, and I can learn something from you.'

Luo Zhou laughed and poured a glass of water. He walked towards the room and said, 'Afraid you'll go back to the dorm and play games again, huh? Well, since I'm alone, you can stay here. I'll serve you on the couch.'

Fang Qiang respectfully bowed and said, 'Yes, Chief!'

After returning to his room, Luo Zhou made some changes to Fang Qiang's program. He modified it to directly poll and register all the proxy IPs at once, using the initial IP for registration.

The most time-consuming part of each automatic account registration was the return time of the two verification codes, which took up to 5 seconds. Luo Zhou introduced a thread pool control and modified it to start a thread every second, using the next proxy IP for registration. Each thread would end immediately after the registration was complete to avoid burdening the server's performance.

This ensured that there were no concerns about individual IP requests being too frequent or server performance being too tight. Moreover, it allowed for registering one account per second, with approximately 2,000 IPs in one round. Completing one round took about 1 hour and 4 minutes, and the daily task could be completed in 5 and a half hours.

Once the checks were completed, Luo Zhou logged into Amazon Cloud, registered, and used a credit card to activate an AWS cloud server instance in Northern California.

Once the inspection was completed, Lu Zhou embarked on the Amazon Cloud upon landing. After registering and using a credit card, he activated an AWS cloud server instance in Northern California.

First, he had to wait for Amazon's management system to instantiate the system on AWS. Then he installed necessary runtime environments such as databases and code environments. Finally, he pushed the code repository to the server and established a persistent task, completing the whole process.

Due to the limited network conditions of AWS in Northern California, the entire deployment and code push process was slightly slow.

In this regard, Lu Zhou could only helplessly accept it.

Ali and Tencent, the tech giants in China, were not going to start providing cloud services to the outside world until next year or the year after, while Baidu Cloud Services would be even later, five years from now. By that time, Ali and Tencent would have already divided most of the market.

As for buying servers, the cost of tens of thousands of dollars per server was prohibitively high and not suitable for purchasing at the current stage.

Lu Zhou couldn't help but complain, "We can only make do with what we have. Once it's deployed, just let it run."

Then he realized that he had missed something and called out to Fang Qiang, "Qiangzi, come here for a moment."

Fang Qiang, who was outside the living room, heard Lu Zhou's call and entered the room, asking, "What's up?"

"I need to create a management backend for users to fill in relevant Weibo information by themselves. It requires calling some interfaces from Ali Mall. Are you interested in doing it?"

Fang Qiang pretended to look reluctant and said, "You're a ruthless boss. Whether I do it or not, tell me how much you'll pay."

Lu Zhou saw through Fang Qiang's appearance and said, "Wake up. If you don't do it, I can finish it in an hour after you come back from dinner. Stop with the nonsense and just practice."

After dinner, Lu Zhou guided Fang Qiang, and the two of them completed the entire management backend directly.

The main functionality was not complicated, divided into two parts: calling the Ali Mall interface and the backend logic. The UU Reading website didn't require much consideration for aesthetic design, so it didn't take much time.

In the module of the entire management backend, the program obtained the purchase information of each user from Ali Mall through the interface. Then it generated random account numbers and passwords based on the order number. After the user logged in and filled in the information, the user's submitted request form was handled by an automated operation machine to complete tasks such as following, forwarding, and commenting.

For example, if a user purchased Lu Zhou's 198 promotion package, the management backend written by Fang Qiang first obtained the order information through Ali Mall's data interface. Then it generated an account password based on the order number and sent it to the user through Ali Mall's messaging system. At the same time, the management backend automatically added 1,500 fans, 500 retweets, and 100 comments to the user's account.

Then the user only needed to log into the management backend with the account password and fill in the corresponding Weibo account or the Weibo link that needed to be commented or forwarded. The automated operation machine would execute the corresponding operations.

Lu Zhou's idea was to automate the process and give users the freedom to choose, reducing his own workload and making it more user-friendly.

Once everything was checked, Lu Zhou couldn't help but sigh, "Hmm, perfect... definitely not for show. This is called a smooth user experience."

Since both the automated registration machine and automated operation machine were done, it was easy to create an automated, not to mention that it saves time, effort and money.

After considering that the store's traffic was relatively low in the early stage, Lu Zhou decided to activate the Ali Mall's Advertising Express service and recharged it with one thousand yuan.

"Starting from tonight, I, Lu, will also become a successful person who earns money effortlessly. It's a little exciting to think about."