Quote from msleeper on June 3, 2014, 7:35 am

For the first time since Portal 2's release, we are about to "catch up" on Community Spotlight releases.

For anyone who doesn't know, the way the Community Spotlight works is this: A script runs once a week that looks for the oldest map in the Spotlight download category which has never been in the left side Community Spotlight before. If it finds one, then it updates it with that map and bumps the old one out. Because we have had such a huge back log of maps in the Spotlight download category, it's taken nearly 3 years for us to get to this point. The script keeps a record of the number of times each Spotlight map has been there. Right now, all but the most recent additions are at 1 time in the spotlight.

In about 2 weeks, we will "run out of" maps that will have never been in the Community Spotlight before. When the script runs then, it will randomly select a map with the lowest amount of times in the Spotlight (which will be the same for all of them - 1) and puts it on the left side Spotlight, and increases it's counter. Then the week after it will do the same, over and over.

If at any point a new map is introduced into the Spotlight category, the map will be in the spotlight the following week since it will have never been shown. This way the left hand Spotlight will always A.) show new maps first and B.) show maps that haven't been in the Spotlight in a while in the absence of any new map.

Anyway. This is exciting for me because up until this point the entire spotlight process has been pretty theoretical. The biggest reason that I have setup the Spotlight to be automatic is because in the Portal 1 days it was updated manually, and in the lull between Portal 1 and Portal 2 when there was low activity in the Portal community, the same map was sitting in the Spotlight for like 2 years straight. So this way I don't have to babysit the website for it to keep functioning.