ComusThumbz

This is the original prod booster technique. It's very good for high traffic sites, builds pages quickly, and is more accurate and tracking.

The idea.
Every 10 minutes (or whatever interval you choose) a new thumb is added to the site. Causing us to use 144 thumbs per day.
The clicks are tallied on all the thumbs, and the thumbs are reorganised based upon their popularity.
If we only use 35 spots per daily section, this means we will discard 144-35=109 thumbs per day and keep only the best 35.
This forces our site to have better quaility content. And lowers our need to maintain quality control over our layout.
This in turn increases productivity and attractiveness of our sites.

Here's the general strategy.
We split the site up into Hall of Fame at the top, then todays best, then yesterday and day before. We then cycle the thumbs into the site.

We set each line of your hall of fame to display 1 day of best thumbs..and dont use the noclicks stuff.

IE:
Your site then gets the best of all worlds.
as for actual macros...
Working on points for style we can extend this idea by creating archives. On my site I've niche targetted my archives. But you can also create historical archives which will list all 144 of the thumbs for each day. I wont discuss how we can do this at this point though.. thats a topic for another day.

More on the prod booster setup

Prod booster works like this, every X minutes, (X depends on what you set the refresh period time to), the script will pull 1 new thumb for each and every new thumb spot.

If you are set to a 10 minute build that is 144 thumbs per day,
5 minutes=288 thumbs per day
30 minutes = 48 thumbs per day.

If you add extra 'new' spots then the thumbs per day will multiply for each spot. So 2 new spots on a 10 minute build would be 288 thumbs per day.

If you add extra pages which pull new thumbs, then the thumbs per day will multiply again for each page that does so. IE: 2 identical index pages will pull twice the thumbs. This is one reason why we use {{buildonce}} on archive pages. After the daily build hour, where things are advanced for the day, the best thumbs of the day will be pushed forward to the next day, and the new thumbs will start filtering in.

The new thumbs are then cycled into the stage1 area, and will roll across the stage1 area until they are released into the age1 area for the best thumbs of today.

During each build period, the script collects click information, it cycles the thumbs across the stage 1 area, and then pushes the best clicked thumbs to the top spots in your site.

The idea of prod booster is to keep the best stuff, and throw away the junk.

We do this by pulling MORE thumbs than you have spots available, the ratio of which will determine the degree of quality boosting you wish to excersize.

For example lets say you only have 35 spots per day... 5 rows of 7.

You are set to refresh your site at a rate of 10 minutes per build. This means you will pull 144 thumbs per day, and keep only the best 35. A Quality Control Ratio of 35/144, or very roughly keeping the best 30%.

If you lower the build time now to 20 minutes, that means you only extract 72 thumbs per day, and keep the best 35.. for a ratio of 35/72 or very roughly keeping only the best 50%.

Thus by adjusting the refresh rate of our sites, we adjust the automatic quality control of the prod booster.

This is what the 'big deal' about Comus is, because it lowers the workload and requirement on you to scour the galleries and thumbs, so you dont have to quality control as hard in order to be competitive with the guys who are spending hundreds of hours hand picking every thing on their site.

There is almost no way to manage more than one site, if you are hand picking everything.

Let the script do its thing.

Prod booster lets you run better sites with less work, which should mean you can run more sites.

It works like this.
{{all-thumb-1-query-new}} Pulls a new thumb at each build, if your build period is 10 minutes that means 144 new thumbs per day will come into this spot.
{{all-thumb-1-query-stage1}} A staging area for the new thumbs to collect clicks, the new galleries will move across these spots one by one. If you have a 10 minute refresh period and 5 'stage1' spots, then if we include the 'new' spot you will collect clicks for one hour.
{{all-thumb-2-query-stage1}} next spot, note that these spots are NOT sorted by clicks, they only collect click counts.
{{all-thumb-3-query-stage1}} next spot
{{all-thumb-4-query-stage1}} next spot
{{all-thumb-5-query-stage1}} next spot

{{all-thumb-1-query-age1}} After the gallery has moved across the stage1 area, it is released into the age1 area where it is sorted by click through rate. If it has collected enough clicks it will find a home in this area, if it has not, it will be discarded.

The method for running a daily style site, is quite different. It doesnt pull new thumbs throughout the day. And the macro layout is quite different.

On a daily template, remember you will want to do your own quality control, so you will want to review and prepare carefully what goes on to your site. Well if you want to competitive at least.

The method of daily is to simply pull exactly what you want to use each day. You can still sort by click count during the day if you like. That means you will need 35 'new' macros instead of 1.

You can see the difference by looking carefully at the examples provided for daily templates and prod booster templates. You'll note the daily template has a lot more new macros than the prod booster.

I am trying this setup on teen-series for a while.
I noticed several problems somebody might run into when using this template.

Best3 has bad thumbs, Best4 has no thumbs at all.
That has to do with spinning. If you have a rotating database with spin 50% or so, most likely the good thumbs will get reset already before they will get displayed at best3 + best4.

What I did now, was setting spin to 100%
and hold period to 6. Am I correct that now every thumb that gets 6 periods old will be resetted and none will be resetted before getting 6 periods old?

you're right on that\, using holdperiod instead of spin will work.

For others wondering why best3 and best4 have issues, it would be because you would need to do the math on the amount of galleries that you have in the database, vs the amount of galleries that you use per day. If you only had 500 galleries and ran a 10 minute refresh= 144 galleries per day, then you would run out well before the 6th day.

so whats a typical hold period/spin for about 500 galleries....Right now I am using 0 hold period and 95% spin...should this be different?

0 hold period would force the galleries to completely reset on every build.

Try changing the holdperiod to something huge, 1000000.

And let spin% be the primary rotation device.

what should my spin be at? and should I do 5 min or 10 min build?

I think 75% spin is good.
10 minutes is best.

with 1000000 hold+ 75 spin(build:10min) for 500 gals??

That should work, 500 gals is a little low when you are trying to hold a history though.

at 10 minutes you will use 144 galleries per day.

in 5 days you will use over 700 galleries.