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.

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?