Stack Exchange background tasks and jobs status / last updated

Question

Stack Exchange clearly has a lot of background jobs that run and trigger actions such as rewarding badges, reversing voting fraud etc; And most of the time they work.

But a background task that I see failing to run quite often is the tag count update job. (Not sure what you would call it officially).

This job is important for:

• tracking the number of upvotes a users has for a particular tag i.e.
  [109][JavaScript] x 46
• determining the current top users of the tag
• determining eligibility for the gold, silver and bronze badges of that tag.
• presumably updates your percentage on careers. i.e. Top 10% for JavaScript

I am normally aware that it run at daily about 08:00 UTC for Stack Overflow, though I am not sure about other sites. As I check this everyday I am aware that it doesn't always run, sometimes for a couple of days.

Request:

It would be great if there was either a status page for typical (non-sensitive) background jobs where we can confirm a job has run. Or alternatively include a last updated <timestamp> under the profile tags and on the top users page.

Justification:

As most of the information on the Stack Exchange sites are updated in near real time, updating of information relating to tag statistics, by the job outlined above, can be several days behind. Which relatively can feel like a lifetime by a comparison to say reputation.

I know I personally check my stats everyday, that's why I notice when the job doesn't always run. I'm not saying it's earth shattering when it isn't updated, but I think there are certainly users that are using these stats to track their progress in certain tags.

Since the last successful run date is probably stored so it would be useful at least to some to know how far behind this information is, if it's there.

This would quash users expectation of this information to be updated immediately, while making it clear it will update again in the future.

Answer 1

While I can see that having this information would be useful in the loosest sense of the word - it is nice to know how close you are to a certain goal, I don't think that having it would add any benefit to the site.

I assume that the various jobs are monitored^* and the team is aware when they fail, so I don't think it would be of any help for them to get dozens of messages from users who were checking the stats page when they fail to run. I would be like going up to someone standing outside in the rain and telling them that it's raining.

It's not vital to you use of the site that you know when you're likely to get a tag badge. The only exception is the instant close as duplicate privilege, but you've managed without that until now so waiting an extra couple of days isn't going to hurt you.

^{* I know that I shouldn't assume, and if they're not monitored then they should be.}