Behind the scenes of RateAFace.com
As you may have noticed user thumbnails target the center of the user’s main photo. If their face is off center, especially if a photo is of portrait dimensions, their face will not be in the thumbnail correctly.
A feature will be released within the next few days to address this issue. It will allow you to edit your thumbnail in a similar way that you edit the main photo positioning on your profile. Just bare with us.. these things take time!
RateAFace was made public today, 14th March 2009!
We’ve started from scratch - so please help RateAFace grow by getting your friends on it!
Refer your mates!
Refer friends by using the following address: http://www.rateaface.com/signup/your-username
(replace your-username with your username, obviously!)
You’ll get rewarded for referrals.
It’s new!
So the site will take a while to get busy, please be patient! 
Over the next few weeks we will work on getting the site as busy as possible.
Keep up to date.
Ratings update instantly (after each vote), ranks update every hour. So use your personal RSS Feed to keep up to date. (RSS Button near your username on the site.)
Report errors
Help RateAFace grow by reporting anything you don’t like, think is an error, or can’t understand. We’ll reward help accordingly!
The rankings update every hour.
Your ratings will update after each vote you receive - but your offical rank (and the rankings table) will update on the hour, every hour.
The rating system resets every 24 hours. This is at 8am GMT (1am EST). This time allows for most average users in Europe and North/South America to rate people once a day. Messages in your ‘trash folder’ also are deleted at the same time.
RateAFace, like alot of sites, offer easy to remember user urls.
http://www.rateaface.com/Mark is tidy, user friendly and search engine friendly. But how is it done?
If you’re thinking some sort of 404 redirect (like I did at first a couple of years ago), then you’re wrong. Apache (Apache web server version 1.2+) has a very sexy url rewrite rule - which comes as standard. All you need to do is set up a .htaccess file to tell your server what to do with certain URLs!
To set up your .htaccess file simply create a blank file (in notepad or similar) and save it as some temporary name. When you upload it rename it to .htaccess - the dot in front is important, as it makes it a hidden file on unix systems.
The content of your .htaccess file can vary based one what you want it to do.
FOR EXAMPLE, turn it into a 404 command by having it say
ErrorDocument 404 /location/of/404.html. But obviously this is not what we want - this is a redirect, not a rewrite.
RateAFace’s user "redirect" (it don’t actually redirect your browser, but y’kno) works from a htaccess file with the following data:
Let’s go though this.
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
Tells Apache to load the mod_rewrite stuff.
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ user.php [L]
The base/root of the rewrite.
Followed by condition of the rewrite - as in what triggers a url rewrite.
Then followed by the rule.
So when htaccess sees a url that fits the condition, it runs the rule.
%{REQUEST_URI} ^/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)$ refers to any url which contains letters, numbers and - or _ (allowed chars for user urls)
^(.*)$ user.php [L] tells it to go to user.php.
The [L] is a mod_rewite Flag. L for Last, meaning the data of the rule is not checked. - Basically, going to user.php will result in a "user not found" instead of loading the page! (We have profile.php to manually load a profile.) Pretty nifty, yo.
And that’s it! Well, of course there’s more - inside user.php, which takes the REQUEST_URI and works out what to do with it. Either load a user profile or throw back a 404, etc.
I found a good article about this on Sitepoint as I was writing this, http://www.sitepoint.com/article/guide-url-rewriting/ take a look if this is what you’re after!
It wasn’t long after RateAFace version 2 was closed in April 2008 that plans to start from fresh started. Bringing in new knowledge, new skills and more private funding - RateAFace 3 started looking like a great idea!
Work began on RateAFace version 3 on 1st September 2008. Almost 6 months later, on 16th February 2009, the beta version 3.0.1 was ready for launch!
It took many long hours to get RateAFace 3 ready for public use, but I think anyone can see - it’s a whole lot better than RateAFace 2!
After a month of internal testing, RateAFace 3 was made public on 14th March 2009 as an open beta.
Mark Willis
Co-Founder, Developer, Interface Design and Development, Layout Design.
Will Peirce
Co-Founder, Layout Design, Marketing.
There is also a small team of people who will be moderating RateAFace.
