The daily streak

It was on your stats panel the whole time, and nothing ever moved it.

What was wrong

The last post ended by saying the daily streak was displayed but never advanced, and that it would either start working or stop being shown. It works now.

The number was real in the sense that it was stored, read and rendered. It was not real in any sense that mattered: the only thing that had ever written it was the importer that brings across an old save. If you started an account here, your streak was zero and would stay zero however many Dailies you finished.

The rules, in full

There are five, and they fit in a paragraph each, which is the point — a streak you cannot predict is a streak you cannot chase.

Either Daily counts. The OG and the GO are two ways to keep one streak, not two streaks. Finishing both on the same day counts once.

Finishing counts, not winning. A Daily you lose keeps the streak. What is being measured is that you turned up, and a bad day is still a day.

The day is your local day — the same one the Daily calendar already uses. Your streak turns over at your midnight rather than at a server’s, so it does not quietly punish you for living somewhere.

Miss a day and it lapses. The next Daily you finish starts a new streak at one. The panel shows zero from the moment a day has gone by without one, rather than holding a stale number until you come back.

Unlocking a past Daily cannot repair it. Playing an older date records the result and pays the usual coins and experience, but the streak only ever moves forward.

Zero says something now

A bare 0 is the least useful thing a counter can show, because it cannot tell the difference between two situations that feel nothing alike. If you have never finished a Daily the panel now says start today. If you had a streak and it lapsed, it says start again.

One thing this nearly got wrong

Experience and coins are applied by a piece of code that only runs when there is experience to apply. Hanging the streak off that would have worked for every Daily you win and silently ignored every Daily you lose with nothing solved — which earns no experience at all, and is exactly the day the rules above say should count.

So the test that proves this works plays a Daily badly, on purpose, against a real deployment: nothing solved, no experience, no coins, and the streak has to move anyway. A test that only ever wins would have passed over the bug.

You can see your own profile now

Every player has a public profile at an address they can copy and send to somebody. Until today it was the one address they could not open themselves: visiting your own public profile bounced you straight back to the editor, so the only person who could not see what your profile looks like was you.

Your profile page now carries Copy my profile link and View public profile at the top, beside the heading. Viewing it takes you to the real page rather than a mock-up of it — the same page, with the same data, that a visitor gets. When you are looking at your own, an Edit profile button sits beside the copy button to bring you back.

If your profile is private, that page shows nothing to visitors, and it now says so in those words rather than telling you the player was not found.

It is on the methodology page

The methodology page now carries the streak alongside everything else it publishes, including the part about it being worked out by the app on your device rather than enforced by the server. It was left off last time because documenting a number that did nothing would have invited exactly the suspicion that page exists to prevent. There is nothing to leave off now.

Also in this release

Three smaller things, none of which changes what you see, and all of which are the kind of fix that stops something going wrong later.

The methodology page now checks itself. The rating numbers it publishes — the two K-factors, the starting rating, the equation — used to be compared against a second copy of them written in the app. Two copies of the same number agree with each other right up until one of them changes. They are now checked against the database code that actually settles a match, so the page cannot quietly drift away from the game. The old copy is deleted; it had a rounding rule that disagreed with the database on exact halves, which would eventually have cost somebody a point.

The custom accent bug is fixed at its source. Saving a custom accent and then switching back to a named one used to break your profile page. That was fixed in the app a day earlier, so nobody should have seen it since; the database now returns the right answer in the first place, which is where the mistake actually was.

The last of the old testing accounts are gone. Eight were removed from the player directory a day ago. Two more survived that clean-up — invisible on the site, but still present underneath — because deleting them tripped over a rule the game uses to record who played a Daily. They have now been retired properly, the same way a real account is when somebody deletes one.