Chapter 56: Taking Off—New Users Surge by 980,000! (3k words, please follow and read)

"Sen-ge, the front-end validation is fine." Zhang Wenbo tapped away at his keyboard for a while, then looked up five minutes later and said.

"The request data code looks normal too. Hu Yun, are there any problems with the bargain-hunting users' IDs and IPs?" Xiang Pengfei stared at the screen and asked.

"The IDs and IPs of the users helping him bargain are all normal, but the numbers don't add up—the other party only invited 17 old users and 3 new website users."

A flicker of panic crossed Zhuang Rui's eyes as he said in a solemn tone.

A real bug?

Chen Yansen frowned slightly, rubbed his temples, let out a long breath, and forced himself to calm down.

After sorting out his thoughts, he said to Zhang Wenbo and Xiang Pengfei: "The other party probably exploited a gap in network transmission, replaying normal bargain requests multiple times to fool the server. Hurry and add a timestamp for the bargain validity period, then set a random number—fix the bug first!"

He'd encountered this kind of situation in his previous life too, and was very familiar with how to contain it.

"Got it, Sen-ge." Xiang Pengfei hurriedly agreed, his eyes bloodshot, fury smoldering inside him—angry and regretful at once.

The 0-yuan bargain event had only been live for two days, yet already exposed such a massive design flaw; as the backend team lead, he naturally couldn't escape blame.

"Should we take the event offline first?"

Song Yuncheng's face was full of worry; she had clearly sensed how serious the situation was.

"No need! Users' sense of trust is actually very fragile—even a temporary takedown would make them suspicious."

Chen Yansen stood up and said without hesitation.

Once the seed of doubt is planted, getting rid of it becomes a thousand times harder.

Time ticked by, second by second; even though it was already noon, no one thought about going to eat.

Half an hour later, Xiang Pengfei shouted loudly: "Sen-ge, the bug's fixed. The classmates from the testing group and I verified it—it's enough to block exploits like packet sniffing."

"Take it live!"

Chen Yansen nodded and said nothing more.

"Sen-ge, I went through the data again—only this one user's bargain behavior is abnormal." Hu Yun reported.

"Sen-ge, how do we handle this user who exploited the loophole to bargain?"

Having just fixed the bug, Xiang Pengfei walked up to Chen Yansen with a dark expression, looking ready to shoulder all the losses.

"Give him a call. Say that to thank him for helping Fox-Tao discover a system vulnerability, we'll send him a brand-new mp4, then ban his account."

Chen Yansen said after a moment's thought.

"What if he makes trouble?" Xiang Pengfei hesitated a few seconds, then pressed on.

"If he doesn't know what's good for him, seal up his bargain request data and hand it straight to the inspection office—let him have a taste of prison food."

Chen Yansen said coldly, word by word.

"Song Yuncheng, post an announcement in a bit to explain—say this user exploited a system loophole to snatch a phone purchase qualification that should have belonged to other users, and we've now banned his account."

Chen Yansen turned around and instructed Song Yuncheng.

"Got it." Song Yuncheng nodded in agreement and turned to head toward the operations team—after all, Hu Li, a senior, majored in Chinese Language, so writing announcements came more naturally and rigorously to her.

"Sen-ge, I'll go call the user then." Xiang Pengfei said, reaching for his phone.

"Wait! You're not suited for it."

Chen Yansen reached out to stop him. Xiang Pengfei was currently seething inside; there was no telling if he'd start arguing with the other party and make things worse.

"Class monitor, let me make this call?"

Xu Xingxing, standing off to the side, suddenly spoke up and volunteered.

"Are you sure you can handle it well?" Chen Yansen looked straight at her; seeing how confident she appeared, he chuckled and asked in return.

"Give me ten minutes, guaranteed done." Xu Xingxing made an OK gesture.

"Pengfei, send the phone number to Xu Xingxing."

Chen Yansen said to Xiang Pengfei—this call was meant to give the other party a way out; if they didn't want to be graceful, then he couldn't be blamed for turning hostile.

Xiang Pengfei had wanted to insist on making the call himself, but seeing Chen Yansen's displeasure, he reluctantly handed over the phone number and stood ramrod-straight in front of Chen Yansen's desk.

"What are you loitering around my desk for? Get back to work."

Chen Yansen found it funny and scolded him in exasperation.

"Sen-ge, I'm the backend team lead—I didn't think things through carefully enough when designing the underlying logic…"

Xiang Pengfei gritted his teeth, took the initiative to admit his mistake, took on full responsibility, and prepared to accept punishment.

"Fine, your bonus this month is gone." Chen Yansen was helpless—seeing the other's stubborn "punish me or I won't leave" attitude, he could only give this neither-heavy-nor-light punishment.

"Thanks, Sen-ge! I'll get right back to work!" Xiang Pengfei broke into a grin and scampered back to his workstation.

Damn, what a shameless skin!

Chen Yansen shook his head, unable to resist that internal jab—he understood what the other was thinking. In the end, it was just too much student mentality; feeling the loophole was entirely his fault, as if he couldn't face staying at Fox-Tao without taking some punishment.

He turned to look at Xu Xingxing and saw her standing by the window, speaking with a smile—not arguing with a user, but chatting with a lover.

In no time, Xu Xingxing hung up the phone, breezed over to Chen Yansen, and said with a light smile: "All done! The other party was a college student too—I threatened and warned him, plus threw in an mp4, and he apologized obediently."

Her lively, spirited manner was a hit with the tech folks. Before Chen Yansen could speak, Xiang Pengfei suddenly stood up and shouted at the top of his lungs: "Junior, you're amazing!"

"Sen-ge, Xu Xingxing doing admin work is really a waste of talent—she should be in PR!" Zhuang Rui joked with a smile.

"That's not a bad suggestion! I'll think it over properly later. Pengfei, the bonus docked from you this month—give it to Xu Xingxing."

Chen Yansen smiled and said casually, then looked at Xiang Pengfei again.

"No problem, how could I have the nerve to take that bonus?" Xiang Pengfei, seeing the matter resolved perfectly, felt the great weight lift from his chest, as if his whole body had grown lighter by half.

"Sen-ge, another user has completed the iPhone 4 bargain task!"

Just then, Zhuang Rui suddenly let out a yell—perhaps afraid of being misunderstood, he quickly added: "All the data is normal. This guy is insane—he got 379 old users and 803 new users to help him bargain. I have no idea how he did it."

"Xu Xingxing, I have a task for you—call this user and do a simple follow-up. Wang Zihao will follow up and use his experience as reference material to assess the ad performance." 【61】 Wang Zihao agreed immediately without hesitation, gathered the ad team members, and together with Xu Xingxing finalized the follow-up script and process—Xu Xingxing seemed to have something she wanted to say, but ultimately held her tongue.

Chen Yansen folded his arms, beckoned Wang Zihao over, and only after Wang Zihao arrived did he give them both their instructions.

Wang Zihao agreed readily, without a word of hesitation, took the投放 team members, and together with Xu Xingxing confirmed the follow-up script and process—only Xu Xingxing seemed to have something she wanted to say, but in the end swallowed it back.

With the first free iPhone 4 shipped out, user participation was greatly stimulated. Some users felt the iPhone was too high in value and required too many assist clicks, so they settled for the next best thing, setting their sights on the Nokia 5230, Samsung i8000, and 1,000 yuan in cash.

Fruits, tissues, and laundry detergent were likewise highly favored.

Chen Xu and Hu Li, while busy selecting products, also had to manually export users' shipping addresses, place orders on Taobao and JD platforms, and once the tracking numbers came out, manually import the numbers into the backend.

Fortunately, the volume wasn't large yet, so the two of them could still handle it.

It wasn't until past 9:30 PM that that day's real-time user registration speed gradually slowed down.

"Sen-ge, yesterday's new customer increment was 27,000. As of today, the number of new users registered through the 0-yuan bargain event is 71,000, of which 4% of new customers came from paid channels." Hu Yun, cradling his laptop, reported the data situation of the past two days to Chen Yansen.

"Zhuang Rui, bring out your lucky draw plan. New customers are guaranteed to win a double cash-back card, and first-order commissions are fully refunded. Pulling new customers in is only the first step; being able to keep them counts as success."

Chen Yansen patted Zhuang Rui and instructed him seriously.

Zhuang Rui acknowledged and said: "Tomorrow I'll sync up the requirements with Peng Fei and Zhang Wenbo. It's just a small plugin anyway, let's aim to have it live within two days."

Chen Yansen raised his hand to check the time—nearly 10 PM—so he stood up and urged: "Everyone head home early. Any later and we'll have to sleep on the floor."

Looking at the twenty-some young people in the room, he felt bad for the first time. The pay is only so much each month, yet they work overtime day after day.

Who says the post-90s generation is a broken one? That they don't like working overtime?

Pay them enough, give them proper respect, and if you don't let them work overtime, these bastards will get anxious with you.

"Sen-ge, today's gross profit just broke 30,000! Order volume is 6,109 orders. Hehe, almost at 10,000! Our first little goal is still 40% away!"

Hu Yun laughed out loud, face full of excitement, completely ignoring Boss Chen's request to clock out.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah! If gross profit breaks 300,000, are you not going to sleep at all?"

Chen Yansen stepped forward and kicked him, laughing and cursing.

"If I could go a whole week without sleep in exchange for our gross profit breaking 300,000, it'd absolutely be worth it!" Hu Yun didn't mind, chuckling as he spoke.

"You guys go to Egypt or whatever, whether you clock out or not—I'm heading back to sleep."

Chen Yansen ignored him, called Wang Zihao over, and led the way downstairs.

"Sen-ge, you haven't shared the news you picked up this morning yet?" Having just stepped out of the startup park, Wang Zihao, who had held it in all day, hurriedly pressed.

"You really took it to heart?"

Chen Yansen stopped walking and looked him over with a strange expression.

"Spill it!" Wang Zihao urged.

"Sigh, the good news is, Teacher Liu doesn't have a boyfriend." Chen Yansen sighed, hesitant to speak.

"And the bad news?" Wang Zihao's face lit up as he asked expectantly.

"The bad news is, Teacher Liu has a fiancé." Chen Yansen finished speaking and took off running.

"Damn you, Chen Yansen! Playing me again!"

Wang Zihao's smile instantly froze. He chased and cursed, making such a ruckus that even the dogs on campus started barking.

From the dormitory building nearby, people thought someone was fighting and poked their heads out one after another to watch the show below.

"Which class are you from? Not sleeping late at night, making a racket on campus!"

A stern voice came from behind.

Crap!

Campus security!

Chen Yansen glanced back, immediately greased the soles of his feet, and dashed back to the faculty apartment in a flash.

Wang Zihao was even more impressive—having practiced running since childhood, in the blink of an eye he slipped into the student dormitory.

(End of chapter)