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Every day I open up all four sites (SO, MSO, SU, SF) and check for new activity, that kind of thing. I love the new feature showing the number of consecutive days, but SO says 132, MSO says 18, SU says 21, and SF says 53.

But earlier today, SU said 15. And SF said 26.

Is something broken here? Can we find out what the query is, or whether it's an aggregated field, etc?

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12 Answers 12

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The total/consecutive days visited counters are updated the first time a user hits the site each day - these daily site access checks happen when we authenticate/initialize the current user.

There were two issues that caused the daily site access counter to be off:

  1. When using the ASP.NET MVC HtmlHelper's RenderAction method (which allows "subcontroller" calls), our base controller was reinitializing the current user for each RenderAction call.
  2. Users were making multiple simultaneous requests to the site.

In both cases, the date checks that happen before updating those counters would always pass for the subsequent, simultaneous initializations - the database updates couldn't fire fast enough!

To fix these issues, we now:

  1. Store the current user in the HttpContext.Items collection, making it available to all parts of the request. Only one initialization needs to happen, regardless of how many "subcontroller" calls are made.
  2. Lock the user database record via a simple semaphore. The lock must be acquired before doing any work in the daily site access check.

The data has been fixed and we'll be monitoring how well this works. Thanks for all the input!

Also, the Enthusiast and Fanatic badges weren't as affected by this bug, because they are not yet tied to these counters - they are still checking our user history table.

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  • are you sure you fixed it? In the last ten minutes? cause I keep getting my number jumping around, including 10 minutes ago. I just figured it depended on which computer I was logging in from... since I typically get different responses depending on which I'm using.
    – tbischel
    Commented Jul 2, 2010 at 5:28
  • Alright, I accidentally logged in last night (which was new day in UTC land), so I'm going to use tomorrow to run another hiatus test. Because my '19 consecutive' looks ever so fishy, but mayhaps I just fail at stepping away from Stack Overflow.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Commented Jul 2, 2010 at 12:16
  • Personally, I'd reset them all based on the history, using my consecutive days query with a filter on sequences that finished later than yesterday. Then make the daily update store the latest visit as well as the sequence size. Then when you increment it, you set it to 1 if the most recent was older than yesterday, increment it if it's yesterday, and leave it if it's today. And you set the last visit to now, of course. Then locking isn't a problem, and it doesn't matter how many calls are made "simultaneously".
    – Rob Farley
    Commented Jul 2, 2010 at 12:26
  • ...but if it's really fixed now, then everything's good, right?
    – Rob Farley
    Commented Jul 2, 2010 at 12:27
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    My consecutive days counter has been steady over the last several days, going up one each day like it should. Today it went down one day. Best yet I was at 99 yesterday, today I'm at 98. Are either of these correct now??
    – Chris S
    Commented Jul 3, 2010 at 1:46
  • I'm getting wonkiness as well - WebApps SE tells me that I've been visiting for 6 consecutive days... For something that's only been open 4 days.
    – Margaret
    Commented Jul 5, 2010 at 14:34
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On StackApps I'm getting:

member for 37 days
seen       13 secs ago
visited    47 days, 19 consecutive

Which is most weird as if I've only been a member for 37 days how can I have visited on 47 days?

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Not only is my consecutive days a bit weird, but my visited days are also going haywire.

According to SO I have been a member for 41 days and that I have visited the site for 45 days, of which 30 have been consecutive?

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  • 1
    Considering you had a consecutive count of 24 two days ago... that's quite a jump.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Commented Jun 24, 2010 at 12:26
  • Seems like it is stable now, but still incorrect. It added one day to both visited and consecutive days today.. But alas, no Enthusiast badge yet. :P
    – Pieter van Niekerk
    Commented Jun 25, 2010 at 5:37
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Happened to me too. First 15 then 19 - within one day.

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Yep, me too. I went from 3 consecutive to 8 in about an hour.

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My days counts (on SO at least, I don't spend that much time on SF/SU/MSO) are currently jumping three days for every actual day.

OK, here's the steps I took this morning to demo the problem. Obv. this will only work for your first visit each day.

  1. Go to StackOverflow
  2. Click your logon to go to your profile. alt text http://philippursglove.com/stackoverflow/104days.png
  3. Click your logon again. alt text http://philippursglove.com/stackoverflow/107days.png
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I decided to not visit Stack Overflow for all of yesterday, so that my consecutive days counter would reset. However, when I visited today after that hiatus, I saw that it has jumped from 18 to 27 days consecutive! I don't even need to visit the site for the number to increase, and by over a week. I'm aware that this is under review but I thought I'd toss out this part of how it increases seemingly independent of whether you're even visiting or not.

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  • I have the exact opposite problem. I visit the site every day and this morning when I logged in I was greeted with a nice 1 day consecutive. Unless my activity didnt register yesterday or the day before, which I think is HIGHLY unlikely.
    – Pieter van Niekerk
    Commented Jul 5, 2010 at 14:14
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I think the problem still remains. Here is a screeny from my Web Apps profile. It shows 6 visited days (6 consecutive), but I'm a member for 4 days. This is wrong.

alt text

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  • 3
    Might open a new question since this one is marked "status-completed". Let the team know that they did not fix the problem in all places/sites.
    – Awesome Poodles
    Commented Jul 5, 2010 at 13:14
  • Thanks Brock. I also asked about this issue on Web Apps meta, and they have solved the problem.
    – Mehper C. Palavuzlar
    Commented Jul 15, 2010 at 6:51
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I have exactly the same problem. Two or three days ago I had 28 on SuperUser and now I have 36 though it should be 30 or 31. And in addition I haven't been given Enthusiast badge.

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  • Hey, I have got my Enthusiast badge today only when my consecutive visit reached 42 days. So people, be patient and you will get it.
    – Bakhtiyor
    Commented Jun 29, 2010 at 9:11
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For me, it is from 8 to 13 to 1 to 3 in last few days. I am logging everyday (in fact multiple times a day) since last one month. SO is always open in my browser, so even if I do not search anything, whenever I connect to internet, I am supposed to visit SO automatically.

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  • Looking at your history, you had a streak going from June 25 - July 9. You didn't access the site on July 10, so the consecutive day count was reset then. Your current, 5 day total looks correct. Note that these history records are in UTC time, so be sure to visit once per UTC day!
    – Jarrod Dixon
    Commented Jul 15, 2010 at 4:28
  • Yeah - I'm absolutely convinced that I haven't missed days, and yet Jarrod would be able to point out days that I've missed. I believe the data, but can't help thinking that somehow something didn't get recorded. Or perhaps something was cached, or something...
    – Rob Farley
    Commented Jul 15, 2010 at 6:46
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This is still bugged, I was @ 52 consecutive days yesterday and today its 2 (on SO)

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I'm having this problem too. I login to Meta SO everyday but my consecutive visit just changed to 2.

If this is still a bug (as proven by other users as well), what's with the "status-completed" tag?

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