Boost to Priority: pay to be read first — and the page keeps 70% after charges

A submitter can now pay to put a ⭐ Priority mark on their own post. It sorts above the unpaid queue, it cannot be quietly destroyed, and once published it joins a public Rank box under the form. Most of what clears goes to the page that received it. Here is exactly what the mark buys, what it deliberately does not, and where every sen of a RM 10 boost ends up — plus everything else that shipped this fortnight.

By the VibeFlow team · 20 September 2026 · 10 min read

A page that takes anonymous submissions treats every one of them the same way, which is usually the point. But it means the person who most wants to be read has nothing to do except wait their turn behind everyone who submitted before them — and it means a page carrying hundreds of submissions a week earns its admin nothing but the work of reading them.

Boost to Priority is one answer to both. A submitter may pay, on the spot or later, to have their own post marked ⭐ Priority. The page admin sees boosted posts first, the post cannot be permanently destroyed while it carries the mark, and once it is published it appears in a public Rank box under the form. Most of what clears goes to the page that received the submission, not to us.

This post is the whole of it: the form, the mark, the money, the page’s wallet — and the parts that are still done by hand.

What it looks like on the form

The card sits at the foot of the public submission form, after the terms checkbox and before the submit button, with its switch off. Ignore it and the form behaves exactly as it did yesterday: the post is submitted, moderated and queued, and nothing is charged.

Turn it on and four preset amounts appear — RM 5, RM 10, RM 20, RM 50 — beside a Custom box that takes anything from RM 2 to RM 500. The RM 2 floor is not ours: it is the smallest ringgit payment Stripe will create a checkout for. The submit button then changes colour, grows a padlock and reads Submit & Pay RM 10, so nobody reaches the end of the form unsure whether they are about to be charged.

It reads the same in all three interface languages. The card is Naik Taraf ke Prioriti in Bahasa Melayu and 升级为优先投稿 in Chinese, and so is every line under it, down to the bank-page warning further below.

1. 01

   Write your post as usual

   Boost to Priority sits at the foot of the form with its switch off. Ignore it and nothing changes: the post is submitted, moderated and queued exactly as before.

2. 02

   Pick an amount, then a way to pay

   RM 5, 10, 20, 50 or your own figure. Every way to pay is priced for that exact amount before you choose one, so you can see what reaches the page.

3. 03

   The post is saved, then paid for

   Your submission is stored and your recall code shown first. Only then does the payment open — so a payment that fails never costs you the post.

4. 04

   It carries the ⭐ from then on

   The page admin sees it above the unpaid queue. Once they publish it, it joins the public Rank box under the form.

What the ⭐ actually buys

A boosted post sorts above every unpaid post in the page admin’s queue, on all six tabs. It carries a gold badge reading ⭐ Priority · RM 10.00, and hovering it shows when the boost was paid. Boosted posts are grouped under their own heading, the tab pills carry a star count, and the admin can filter to Priority only or sort the paid group by amount.

It is also protected. The Destroy button is not drawn on a boosted post, and the server refuses the action independently of the screen with “Paid priority content is protected and cannot be destroyed.” The nightly sweep that clears out long-deleted posts skips it too, however old it gets. Somebody paid for that post; it does not quietly disappear.

Once the admin publishes it, the post joins the 🏆 Rank · Priority posts box at the top of the page’s feed — the ten largest boosts, medals for the top three, each row showing the excerpt, the amount and a link to the post on Facebook or Instagram. There is a Paid only toggle in the box header for readers who want just those.

That second column is the part we would rather say too often than not enough. A boost buys attention from the admin, not agreement. If the page rejects or removes the post before publishing it, the boost is refundable — which is the honest version of the same sentence.

Where the money goes

Three rules, in this order. You pay exactly the amount you picked and nothing is added on top. The payment company’s charge comes out of that amount first. What is left is split 70% to the page and 30% to us.

The first rule is not a courtesy — Bank Negara’s Payment Card Reform Framework forbids surcharging a card payment, and a checkout fixes its price before the payer has even chosen a method, so there is no compliant way to bill the charge separately. The third rule runs on what is left rather than on the full amount for an arithmetic reason: a flat 30% of the gross cannot cover a RM 1.00 fixed fee below RM 3.71, and a RM 2 boost would have quietly cost us money.

Every rate a boost can settle at is listed on the form itself, in a panel headed All payment charges — who gets what. Each row is tagged either You can pick this or Applied automatically, and each is priced for the exact figure on screen: on RM 10 by card, “RM 1.30 charge · RM 6.09 to the page · RM 2.61 platform fee”. When a flat-fee rail would swallow a small boost whole, the row says that instead of quoting a cheerful number.

One charge cannot be designed away. Online banking through Billplz is RM 1.25 flat on personal banking and RM 3.00 flat on business banking, and that choice is made on the bank’s own page, where we cannot speak. So the charges panel carries a warning, and the moment you pick online banking the form repeats it outside the panel: choose PERSONAL — with what the page receives either way.

Every way to pay, including one with no payment company at all

• Through Stripe: a card — Apple Pay, Google Pay and Link ride the card rails — GrabPay, FPX online banking, or Alipay.
• Through Billplz: FPX online banking at a flat charge, which beats a percentage once a boost is worth more than about RM 8.
• Straight to us: DuitNow QR or Touch ’n Go, with a screenshot of the receipt.

Each method shows what it leaves the page before you choose it, and the list is ordered by that figure, not by what is convenient for us. The manual rail is never pre-selected, though, even when it nets the page a few sen more: something that settles by itself beats something that waits on a person.

That manual rail is genuinely manual, and the page says so: scan the QR in your own banking app, tell us what you actually paid, upload the receipt. “Checked by hand, usually within a day. Nothing is charged here — you pay in your own banking app.” A new receipt supersedes the last one rather than queueing a second decision, and the desk credits the amount it can see on the screenshot, which is the only figure anyone can verify on a static QR.

The page’s side: a wallet, a ledger, and an honest receipt

Every page now carries a wallet, at its own Page Wallet screen. The balance sits at the top under one line — “You earn 70% of every boost after payment processing · 30% platform fee” — over three figures: Earned total, Priority posts, Paid boosts.

Each settled boost writes two ledger lines: the whole amount in, then everything that is not the page’s share out, with a note naming the real charge rather than a category. Under Boosts received — how each was paid, every boost breaks into four lines — Paid, Payment charge, Platform fee, To your wallet — and a totals table groups the same figures by method with the identity printed under it: paid minus payment charges minus platform fee equals what reached you, on every line.

When a boost settles differently from what the form quoted, the wallet says so in a banner and gives the reason in plain words — a card that turned out to be foreign, business banking chosen on the bank’s page, a DuitNow receipt showing a different figure. Money that is waiting on a receipt review is named separately, and deliberately not counted in the balance until it is approved.

Withdrawals are where the honesty is due: there is no self-serve payout yet. The Withdraw button composes an e-mail to support with the page id and balance filled in; support makes the bank transfer and records it, and recording it is all the admin screen does — it moves no money by itself. Automating that is the next piece of work, not a finished one.

None of this can cost you the post

The order is deliberate. Your submission is stored and your recall code shown before the payment is opened at all, so a card that declines, a bank page that times out, or a browser closed at the wrong moment leaves the post exactly where it was — submitted. If the payment cannot even be started, the form says so in the same modal, with the code still on screen: “Payment could not be started — your submission was still received.”

A boost can only be bought with the submission’s own recall code, so only the person holding it can boost a post — which is also why the boost link in your e-mail is worth keeping to yourself.

If you skipped the card at submission time, both the transcript e-mail and the publish alert carry a Boost this post link back to the same choices, from RM 2. A post that is already boosted says so and charges nothing; one that has been recalled or deleted is refused outright, because a mark nobody will see is not worth selling.

Refunds are written down properly for the first time as well — seven days to ask, back to the way you paid, 7–14 working days to arrive. A full refund takes the ⭐ back off the post and takes the page’s share back out of its wallet, which is the only arrangement that is fair to both ends.

Also shipped since the 1.0.34 note

The boost is the headline, but it is not most of the fortnight. The rest, briefly:

• Payments

  DuitNow QR at every counter

  Boosts, shop orders and coin top-ups all take the same rail: scan, pay in your own banking app, upload the receipt. A person checks it, usually within a day.

• Payments

  One table for every rate

  Each payment method’s charge lives in a single table the desk can edit, and the form, the pay page and the page’s wallet all quote from it — so nobody reads a different number.

• Mail

  Mail moved to Amazon SES

  Our own transport, a bounce ledger that refuses a known-bad address before sending, and one shared hourly budget for app mail and the server’s own.

• Mail

  The backlog was re-sent, once

  Submission mail lost during the changeover goes out again automatically, rebuilt from the submission as it stands now, with a line apologising for the delay. A second run mails nobody twice.

• Safety

  Every public form has its own budget

  Named rate limits per feature instead of one shared counter, and a refusal that now reads like a sentence instead of a wrong password.

• Safety

  Commenters prove their address

  The code comes before the account: a sign-up is held outside the commenters table until the emailed code comes back, and an unverified session cannot post, react or edit.

• Identity

  A records board that shows what it keeps

  Measurements and the details read off a document open on demand, every read is logged, and one action answers a delete-my-data request across every attempt at once.

• Identity

  You can read your own document back

  The name taken off your card is shown to you, labelled with how it was read — and only a name the document’s own check digits verify is allowed to drive a payout match.

• Product

  Six tabs became six addresses

  /pending, /published, /scheduled, /deleted, /reported and /archived are real URLs now: typeable, shareable, and Back goes where you expect.

• Product

  A refund policy worth reading

  One card per thing you can buy, what is and is not refundable on each, and a link that fills in the request for you. Seven days to ask; 7–14 working days for the money.

Two of those deserve a sentence more. Outbound mail moved to Amazon SES with our own transport and a local bounce ledger, which means a known-bad address is refused before we ask SES to send to it rather than after — and mail lost during the changeover was rebuilt from each submission and re-sent automatically, exactly once, with an apology for the delay. And the public /event page went up for I-RICE’26: a wall of visitor reviews where a reviewer proves an e-mail or a WhatsApp number before their review counts, with the form auto-saving so nobody loses a half-written review to a dropped connection.

What is still by hand

Three things, named rather than glossed. Page payouts are a support e-mail and a manual transfer. DuitNow receipts are read by a person. And the business-banking charge on online banking can only be warned about today — switching it off needs a second, FPX-only collection on Billplz, which is the one piece of plumbing this feature still owes.

Everything else above is in the product now. If you run a page, the wallet is already there waiting for its first boost; if you submit to one, the switch is at the bottom of the form, off, where it will stay unless you want it.