Day 7 of Building Crowdwide — UI Polishing, My First Advertiser, and Translation Breaking AGAIN 😭

First of all, THANK YOU for this progress and reading my articles! ❤️

Welcome back to another update on building Crowdwide, my social platform!

A lot has happened since my last update. I'm working on polishing the UI, improving the Waves system, getting my first external advertiser, welcoming a new moderator, and trying to fix a translation feature that keeps breaking for some reason. 😭

So yeah, there's a lot to talk about. Let's get into it!

1. Current Progress 📊

Here's where Crowdwide stands right now:

• 7 members
• 35 posts
• 4 communities
• 2 advertisers, including me

I know these numbers are still small, but I'm happy that people are starting to join and try the platform!

Every little bit of progress matters, especially when you're building something on your own with a budget of basically ZERO (I'm not harmed by this line). 😂

I'm still at the early stage, and I know there's a long way to go. But getting actual people to try something you've built yourself feels different from just seeing it work on your own computer.

2. My First External Advertiser! 🎉

One of the most exciting things that happened recently was getting my first external advertiser!

The advertiser submitted an application, and it was approved by both a moderator and an admin.

At that time, I was handling both the admin panel and the moderator panel myself.

But there was one problem...

The advertiser didn't have enough Waves to start their campaign. 😭

And honestly, I hadn't even thought about this situation properly before.

Here's how the advertising process works on Crowdwide:

1. An advertiser submits their website, product, or service details along with a description.
2. The campaign goes through moderator and admin approval.
3. Once approved, the advertiser needs to set a campaign budget of at least 25 Waves.
4. The campaign can then run, with Waves being charged according to impressions and clicks.

The idea is to make promotion accessible to people who want to reach an audience without needing a huge advertising budget.

Now, here's what actually happened.

I approved the advertiser's application, but I didn't focus on whether they had enough Waves to launch the campaign.

I even emailed them twice because I was wondering what was going on. I thought, What's the matter? Why aren't they starting their campaign?

Then I checked the details and finally realized...

THEY DIDN'T HAVE THE 25 WAVES NEEDED TO START THE CAMPAIGN!

That's why the campaign was paused.

I had been wondering why they seemed busy, when the actual problem was something I hadn't considered in the first place. 😭

This was a good lesson for me: approving an advertiser's application is only one part of the process. The advertiser also needs to be able to fund the campaign with enough internal Waves to get started.

Crowdwide is still in its early stages, so the audience is small right now. I'm hoping that changes as more people join!

3. The Waves System 🌊

After this happened, Harun( @koda2026 ) suggested giving an approved advertiser a one-time boost of 25 Waves so they could try launching a campaign.

That got me thinking...

Instead of helping only one advertiser, I decided to give 25 Waves to every current user account as a one-time early-user boost!

This should give early users a little more room to explore the platform and try its features.

I also realized that I need to think more carefully about how people get their first Waves, especially when some features require Waves before users can fully try them.

But I want to clarify something important:

Waves are an internal platform currency. They are NOT real money, NOT cryptocurrency, and NOT connected to a bank account.

They are designed to help users participate in Crowdwide's internal reward and promotion systems.

Since I'm under 18 and building this project with a very limited budget, I wanted to experiment with an internal system rather than deal with real-money payments.

The goal is to make the platform's reward and promotion features accessible without requiring users to make real-money payments just to participate in this internal economy.

How can users earn Waves?

Here's the current reward structure:

These rewards are intended to encourage participation and help users explore different parts of Crowdwide.

Waves can also be used for promotions and other supported platform features.

I'm still learning how to balance the reward system so it feels useful without making it too easy to abuse.

I want people to have reasons to participate, but I also need to make sure the system isn't easily exploited by people trying to collect rewards without genuinely using the platform.

That's something I'll keep improving as Crowdwide grows.

4. A New Moderator Joins Crowdwide! 🛡️

Another important update: Harun( @koda2026 ) agreed to help moderate Crowdwide! 🎉

I'm really grateful for this because building a platform alone means you have to think about everything yourself: features, UI, bugs, moderation, rewards, advertising, and about a million other things.

Having someone else look at the platform and give honest feedback helps a lot.

Harun also gave me some useful suggestions about separating moderation actions according to their risk.

Here's the general approach I'm working toward.

Lower-risk moderator actions:

• Mark a post as a “Good post.”
• Propose an edit to a post.
• Flag obvious spam so it can be automatically hidden while awaiting final review.

Higher-risk actions requiring admin approval:

• Warn or suspend a user.
• Permanently delete a post.
• Change community settings.

The idea is to let moderators handle routine tasks while keeping more serious actions under tighter control.

I don't want moderators to be powerless, but I also don't want one person to have too much control over the platform.

Some actions are simple and reversible, while others can seriously affect a user's account or community. It makes sense to treat them differently.

I'm still working on improving the moderation system, but this feedback gave me a clearer direction.

Welcome aboard, Harun! 🎉 And thank you for the suggestions!

5. UI Polishing Is Taking FOREVER 😭

Now comes the part I've been spending a lot of time on: polishing the user interface.

Crowdwide has more than 80 pages, and I still have around 30 or more pages left to polish.

BRO, WHY ARE THERE SO MANY PAGES? 😭

I thought adding features was the big challenge, but now I'm going through all these pages and finding things that could be clearer, better organized, or more consistent.

And honestly, this process has taught me a lot about UI design.

I'm learning things like:

• Keeping interfaces simple and clear.
• Using bold text to highlight important information.
• Improving spacing between elements.
• Organizing headings, subheadings, and content properly.
• Making layouts more consistent.
• Improving alignment so pages feel more organized.
• Making information easier to scan instead of putting everything in front of the user at once.

Sometimes, a page technically works, but it still doesn't feel right.

The buttons work, the information is there, and the feature does what it's supposed to do. But the page can still feel cluttered or confusing.

That's why I'm trying to focus on more than just functionality. I want Crowdwide to feel understandable and comfortable to use, too.

I'm also trying to avoid unnecessary backend calls. I already have a preloader, and I don't want to add unnecessary work for the server just to make the interface feel more polished.

Since I'm using free-tier hosting, performance is something I have to keep in mind as well.

I can't just throw money at better hosting, so I have to work with what I've got. 😂

For now, I'm focusing on improving the existing pages instead of endlessly adding new features.

6. Helping Early Advertisers

The first advertiser situation also got me thinking about how difficult it can be to start advertising on a platform that doesn't have a large audience yet.

Since Crowdwide is still new, advertisers might not get much reach right now.

That's understandable. A platform with only a handful of members can't offer the same audience as a huge established social network.

So I'm considering giving early advertisers some Waves from my own account to help them test their campaigns.

Harun's suggestion about the one-time 25-Waves boost made me think more about how to help people get started.

I don't want someone to go through the application process, get approved, and then discover that they can't launch a campaign because they don't have enough Waves.

At the same time, I need to keep the system fair and make sure the rules are clear.

I also want to keep track of transfers and make sure the system has proper abuse detection.

If Waves are transferred between accounts, I want those transfers to be recorded properly so I can understand where the Waves are going and investigate anything suspicious.

Transparency and abuse prevention are important, especially when a reward system is involved. I made the system for it.

I want the Waves economy to be useful, but I also want to understand how it's being used and keep improving it as the platform grows.

and yea, my system detected that... someone has to give those 179waves to system basic to make him neutral!!

At this point, I'm basically considering taking a loan from myself. 💀😂

7. Translation Is Broken AGAIN!! 😭

Okay, this one is frustrating.

I noticed that the translation feature stopped working again, and I honestly don't know why.

At first, I tried integrating Google Translate using its developer documentation.

But after going through the setup, I found out that the option I was trying to use required payment or billing setup.

SORRY SUNDAR PICHAI (CEO OF GOOGLE), MY BUDGET IS LOW (OR YOU CAN SAY 0) LOL 😂

Then I tried another service, thinking maybe I could get a smaller plan or a little free trial.

BUT THEY ASKED FOR MONEY TOO!!

I SAID NO AGAIN. 😭

Then I asked Claude for help, and somehow it got the translation feature working! It also refactored some of my code.

And guess what?

TRANSLATION WORKED FOR SOME TIME...

I checked again later, and it was BROKEN AGAIN!! 😭😭

I genuinely don't know what's causing it.

Is it an API issue? A configuration problem? Something in my implementation? Did something get changed during the refactoring?

I haven't figured it out yet.

I'm almost done with this feature, and I really want to get it working properly. I don't want to abandon it after putting so much effort into it.

So I'm asking for help from the community.

If you've worked with translation APIs, multilingual features, or debugging API integrations, could you help me figure out what's going wrong?

Even a suggestion about what to check first would be useful.

Here's the repository:

https://github.com/DeveloperPuneet/Crowdwide

And here's the live platform:

https://www.crowdwide.run.place/

If you're willing to take a look or have any ideas, please let me know!

Any help, suggestions, or guidance would genuinely mean a lot to me. ❤️

8. Video Tutorials Might Be Coming (Not sure) 🎥

I'm also thinking about creating some short video tutorials to make Crowdwide easier to understand.

Even if a platform has useful features, people might not know how to use them when they first arrive.

I could make short tutorials covering things like:

• How to create an account.
• How to create posts on the main feed and inside communities.
• How communities work.
• How to use quests and events.
• How the Waves system works.
• How to create an advertising campaign. and adding them in docs maybe useful for someone... The idea is to make it easier for new users to understand the platform without having to figure everything out by clicking around.

I haven't made these videos yet, so this is still a plan rather than something that's already available.

But I think tutorials could be useful as Crowdwide grows and more people start trying its features.

9. Crowdwide Spotlight? 👀

Another idea I've been thinking about is something called Crowdwide Spotlight.

The idea is to let people share links to their external reviews, along with a short description.

For example, someone could share a link to a review they've published elsewhere and add a little context about what it's about.

It could give users another way to share their work and help others discover useful content outside Crowdwide.

I'm still thinking about how exactly it should work, so this is just an idea for now. But I already created a community named Crowdwide Spotlight on Crowdwide and you can post there...

I don't want to rush into implementing it before I have a clearer idea of how it would fit into the platform.

For now, it's on my list of things to explore later.

10. What's Next for Crowdwide? 🚀

There are still quite a few things I want to work on.

My current priorities are:

• UI polishing: Continue working through the remaining pages and make the interface clearer and more consistent.
• Translation: Figure out why the translation feature keeps breaking and get it working reliably.
• Waves system: Keep improving the reward system, transfer tracking, and abuse detection.
• Advertising: Make it easier for approved advertisers to understand what they need to launch a campaign.
• Moderation: Continue improving moderator tools and safeguards for higher-risk actions.
• Crowdwide Spotlight: Think through the idea before deciding how to implement it. (community is already there... you can post and build it)

There are plenty of things to do, but I'm trying to take them one step at a time.

I don't want to keep adding features forever without making the existing ones better.

At this stage, improving what I've already built is just as important as building something new.

11. I'd Love Your Feedback! ❤️

First of all, thank you again to everyone who has read my updates, checked out Crowdwide, offered suggestions, or supported this project in any way.

I'm building Crowdwide with a very limited budget, and I'm learning a lot as I go.

Some things work, some things break, and sometimes I discover a problem only after someone tries to use a feature. That's part of building something new, I guess. 😂

There are definitely things I still need to improve, and honest feedback helps me figure out what to focus on.

I'd especially love to hear your thoughts on a few things:

• The Waves reward system: Do the reward ranges seem reasonable? Are there any obvious ways people might abuse it?
• Advertising: What could make the campaign setup easier to understand for a first-time advertiser?
• Moderation: What other safeguards or tools should I consider?
• Translation: If you've worked with translation APIs, could you help me figure out why mine keeps breaking?
• UI design: What makes a social platform feel simple and easy to use?
• General feedback: If you check out Crowdwide, what's one thing you think I should improve first?

You can check out the project here:

🌐 Live platform: https://www.crowdwide.run.place/

💻 GitHub repository: https://github.com/DeveloperPuneet/Crowdwide

I'm still at the beginning of this journey, and Crowdwide has a lot of room to grow.

But I'm excited to keep building, fixing things, learning from feedback, and seeing where this project goes.

Thank you for reading, and see you in the next update! 👋❤️