Who gets their message broadcast to the top of every page on sacrosaunt.com? Will it be you? Probably!

What’s the best way to broadcast something to many people online? Instagram? You need to have a certain considerable number of followers for it to matter. Send it to a news outlet? They probably won’t publish it and would probably take some time before your story goes live if it isn’t a pressing matter. Say hello to ThePeople’sBanner, where everyone has an equal chance to relay a message of their choice to a huge audience online, instantly.

Just kidding, see the motivation see the motivation behind why ThePeople’sBanner exists.

The user submits a form with the message, which is screened for excessive vulgarity on the Flask server. The final message at the end of the hour is then set for all future FETCH requests for the banner value on pageload.

A BackgroundScheduler() runs when the current minute and hour equal “0”, which updates the banner variable and resets the competitors to 0.

There is an additional check where if a visitor submits a message and the currently displayed message is the default one (like after an application restart) then the displayed message can be immediately updated to the submitted message.

Overall, the technical implementation is relatively straightforward; the part that I am the most proud of is where the grammar in “COMPETING AGAINST X OTHERS” corrects itself to “COMPETING AGAINST X OTHER” when the number of other competitors is equal to one (note the plurality).

sacrosaunt.com needs to give visitors a reason to 1) visit the website and 2) return at some point in the future. The site already had a banner, but I didn’t find it as useful as the one on NotYourVocab, which acts as a changelog for updates (many of which are not visible).

So, does ThePeople’sBanner live up to its standards, ideologies, goals, and motivations?

ThePeople’sBanner has turned out well, quality-wise. I like the realtime aspect, which shows the live number of messages pending on the server, updated within half a second. The design is unintrusive yet accessible. ThePeople’sBanner initially receives a decent amount of visitors when heavily promoted on social media. Eventually, the novelty wears off, and users stop returning. All in all, it is fair to say that ThePeople’sBanner is a success and at least somewhat lives up to its expectations. It is understandable that some users stop returning as the core concept is relatively primitive. A future iteration of the website could extend the time window for message propagation from the current one hour to perhaps 24 hours. This longer period would likely increase the perceived value of securing the final message, as it would become a rarer occurrence.