Certainly looks odd, some getting 1-3 points out of nowhere considering you can only get 1 pt. per/day.

Maybe logins from beta.pinside.com and being added with logins from the normal site. No effin' clue.
I honestly didn't even know this was a thing. Hell, other than the screenshots above, I don't even know how to access that info.

Go to the Community section click on and scroll down, you'll see it all there.

I stay logged in. So I'm not in the running.

LTG : )

Some people log in when they visit Pinside and log out when they leave. Who knows why ? Maybe force of habit from other internet things like banking or paying bills. Or they don't visit that often. Maybe their browser logs them out ?

I stay logged in because a long time back I had trouble logging in because of Google accounts, and Pinside Dear Lloyd column. So I just stay logged in to avoid the hassle.

LTG : )

I haven’t logged out more than once or twice in 5 plus years. Not sure how this is tracked either.

Easy, log in from cell or mobil device. Then log in from a desktop....this is a guess, but logging in from two different IP addresses.

Had no clue about this stat either. Man I need to get a life. Haha

Yes, your on the list Chuck.

Not sure what happened to me? I was at the top as I haven't logged out since I joined but apparently it started over a few months ago? That sucks but it's not a big deal .

I'm not really sure what this means. I don’t think my devices ever log me out, I haven't typed in a password in forever. I am on pinside most days, but not every day.

I had my 1st vacation in over a decade. I was in the top 10 but now my login streak is back down to a couple days.

Glad to be back, but didn’t miss it while I was gone. Made some great memories with my family.

Yikes some people need something to do in life.

All you have to do is visit the forums. You don't have to logout/login.

lol!

That’s pretty funny.

I read Pinside every day on my iPhone. The same iPhone every day. I don’t even post that much anymore.

Last time I looked at that stats page was months ago ... I was like 1 “day” behind making the list. It has been like that for a long time ... I was always a day or two or three behind making that list.

I have no idea why I jumped up the list - and I don’t really care, to be honest!

Maybe Robin should delete it and be done with it. I don’t think it matters to anyone?

But then what would you have to study?

rd

Hey, you found my thread!

I supposedly might be one of the most knowledgeable on this topic. After discussed it with Robin quite a bit in PM, I was able to figure out that Pinside code runs based on his time zone. That may sound like a no-brainer, but that’s precisely why it was an issue.The 24-hour window to login was actually from 0:00-23:59 CET. So you must login once every 24hour window in the CET timezone.
If you logged in at 1am EST Thursday 2/6 (6am CET Thurs 2/6), and then you logged in at 11:30pm EST Friday 2/7(5am CET Sat 2/8) you would lose your streak because even though you technically logged in yesterday and today (Thursday and Friday) in CET you logged in early-morning Thursday and then by waiting till late Friday night EST that was actually Saturday morning CET.
The simple version? He’s a few hours ahead of us so basically the day comes “early”
Anyway that was a crazy issue to finally fix and what happened was he ended up amending it to give larger grace periods to account for timezone differences. With this addition many many folks who probably never noticed started gaining large login-streaks.

Another note, it is not based on “login/logout” you actually simply need to just have a Pinside page open once a day really. And it has to be an active session.
If I simply opened Pinside and refreshed the homepage every single day and nothing more, that would still count me as logging in that day. It doesn’t even need to be a recorded action that shows up on pulse and it will count.

Now some background: When I first got into pinball, Pinside was my start and I’ve basically been addicted every since. I hardly ever missed a day. I was using several other social networking apps that required you to “collect your streak” everyday and they all had flaws and such. I also used to play Ingress every day for 2 years or so

Anyway, so I was a bit obsessive about login streaks at the time and I noticed I would get to around ~70 ~100 ~150 days
on Pinside and it kept resetting. I was getting very annoyed. I checked religiously and yet my streak kept resetting. This caused me to investigate deeper, and I eventually figured it out.

Another interesting bug had to do with database and the fact that the Pinsider user IDs had grown so massive there were more than Robin even initially though would use his site! So he had to extend the upper limit to account for this and future growth!

With the bug chasing credentials out of the way, let’s try looking into what’s causing this. I had noticed there was a bunch of weird changes to the “login streak” scoreboard and it was odd because for years beforehand it never changed much. You can’t gain points. You basically have to have been an addict since he started keeping track.

I wasn’t as proactive as you to take screenshots and keep track of the charts every few days to see how they’ve changed. Without diving too deeply I am curious if this is possibly an issue with how the site orders the list of “highest streak” perhaps it has grown to such absurd numbers it is no longer ordering them properly?
The other guess would be that perhaps the earlier suggestions of the beta site could, in fact, add to your streak. I can test this theory real quickly and report back.

I appreciate your dedication in logging this bug! It’s hard to track it without the proof since there isn’t a “historical stats” function.

I think the login streak is a cool and fun feature and I know MANY people track it. Even those who say they don’t

But I’m not sure how this bug can still be here as I was pretty sure this was fixed once and for all after my extensive troubleshooting with Isochronic_Frost - I also believe this is no longer connected to your timezone but it’s been a while.

Anyways, I’ll take another look at it!

Just for reference I tested it and it didn’t increase my streak at all to open a beta session and sign in.

I don’t really understand how it could be giving people an extra day/point. I assume the ranking allows people with an identical login count to be displayed higher or lower based on who logs in first for the next day. So maybe that’s why we see some folks swapping positions back and forth. But I see some folks are climbing in the ranking which should be impossible. How could they get extra days?

Please, by all means, take it @rotordave!

I have always wanted to be the best at something... just not sure obsessively reading about pinball machines on a daily basis will sound good on my obituary.

But... this is the only source of news I can deal with these days, so I won’t stop reading every day. If it eventually makes me king nerd for a few weeks so be it

In the western US, back in the day there was a way to deal with cheats and people of questionable motive. Matters were settled within the day and for good. Today such matters are settled with gifs.

2EEB65F8-8B10-459C-98D1-C83469C63D32.gif

I had some time to spend on this issue today and have decided to rewrite the mechanism that calculates login streak.

The way it used to work is that each time you visit the site (as a logged in Pinsider), the system would check when was the last time you visited the site. If that was more than 24 hours, it would reset your streak to 1. If it was less than 24 hours, it would proceed to check if you already got a 1 point streak increase for today. If not, it would increase your streak by one. Theoretically this would work fine, but I assume different timezones were messing things up.

The rewrite of this code introduces a much, much simpler, once-a-day, system job that checks the "last seen" time for all Pinsiders and then increases the login streak by +1 for all who were "seen" in the past 24 hours. Everyone else will have their streak reset to 1.

Hopefully that will solve this once and for all!

I have stopped the old streak counter process and will start the new process tomorrow (24 hours from now).

This post aged pretty well

oh no! Does this mean the current streak "champions" will be lost? I like being a "winner" .

Screen Shot 2020-02-28 at 7.56.09 AM (resized).png

The current streak will remain. I thought about starting over fresh but honestly, that would kinda suck.

And although I can't fix the past inconsistencies in the scores, which may have lead to some wrong numbers (that would be way too time consuming) - after quickly checking the top 25, the Pinsiders up there are pretty much valid give or take a few days where the system flunked due to timezone differences.

So all the numbers are on pause now and tomorrow at 13:00 (Amsterdam time) everyone who was seen in the past 24 hours (at that time) will get +1. Everyone else will be reset to 1.