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I was just awarded the woot (enthusiast) badge on Stack Overflow, but I definitely didn't visit the site every day for 30 days. Here is my theory on how this happened.

When you open a new tab in Safari 4 it displays a new feature called 'Top Sites' which shows you previews for the front pages of your frequently visited sites. Stack Overflow shows up in my 'Top Sites', so I suspect that when Safari generates an up to date preview the 'visited today' count on Stack Overflow gets incremented.

If this is the problem then I doubt it's something that you can easily fix, but I thought I'd point it out.

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    This is good to know. I'll have to toss SO/SF/SU/Meta onto my Top Sites as insurance... Jul 19, 2009 at 20:13
  • Chromium also has a most-recently-visited feature on the new-page tabs. However, unlike Safari, Chromium uses cached thumbnails instead of generating fresh ones, so Chromium users aren’t subject to this benefit, uh, I mean bug.
    – Synetech
    Feb 16, 2010 at 16:37

5 Answers 5

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We have a fix for this in place now.

I am not too terribly concerned about the extra silver Enthusiast badges awarded up to this point, but we have to be a bit more protective of our gold (Fanatic) badges.

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    Wait, how do you fix something like this? I'm just curious... Nov 11, 2009 at 1:24
  • My guess is a combination of browser agent detection and activity heuristics (kind of like a CAPTCHA) to determine if a human actually did anything. It may be why people who merely read now and then are missing it.
    – Synetech
    Feb 16, 2010 at 16:35
  • @Synetech: Wouldn't the user agent be identical to when a user is browsing? Also, how could CAPTCHAs be used in this situation, as the Top Sites feature only loads the home page? :) Jul 13, 2010 at 23:56
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And here's me carefully accessing the site every day. D'oh!

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True, it might have happened to me as well.

Safari 4 beta would show a slightly different User Agent for Top Sites than for actual usage. This is no longer the case in the current 4.0.2 release of Safari (at least not on a Mac; not sure when it changed).

But hey, we're still creating hits, right? ;-)

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This would affect Opera for most users too; at least stackheads with the page set in Opera's speed-dial.

Opera uses the speed-dial (customizable grid of favorite pages miniaturized) as default for new tabs; not 100% sure what reloading policy that governs by default, but it would be a sensationally crappy feature if it didn't at least do it once a day ;-)

That being said, I'm an avid Opera and SO-user...wait...no StackOverflow in speed-dial...will keep sentence in answer, and mayhap post as a silver-medalist in a month.

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    Opera takes a snapshot when you set the speed dial. Not every time it's loaded. If you want to be certain, just hit reload on the speed dial page.
    – random
    Dec 4, 2009 at 1:12
  • Wasn't 100% sure of the mechanism, and haven't got the time to indulge in this delicious little nugget right now, but a quick glance at my current speed dial shows updated thumbnails (I can barely make out a 5 and a December on Coding Horror, and I now I haven't put it anywhere near my cache for quite a few days)....It would be a terrible feature (it already suffers from complete uselessness (at least for my surfing habits)) if it's default was never to update the thumbnails.... Dec 6, 2009 at 22:21
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I visited woot with FireFox every day for less than two weeks when I suddenly got the woot badge. I still go there a few times a week just to see what they have.

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