Making Progress Numbers Accurate

As things currently stand, the progress page and its numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. Skritter tracks two things separately:

1. How well you know each individual item currently and
2. How much you know overall for any given day in the past

Ideally, adding up the progress of the individual items should give you the overall number for the current day. However, over time and due to persistent, hard-to-find bugs, those two numbers tend to diverge a little bit, usually by no more than a percent or two.

However, with the new iOS app, all sorts of new progress bugs have been wreaking havoc on our intrepid alpha testers. Junglegirl, for example, has reportedly learned over four billion characters. To correct these numbers I've built a quick tool to take all the correct progress stats we have on individual items and reconstruct the sums that are shown on the progress page so they are 100% correct once more. Since iOS alpha testers won't be the only ones who might want to correct errors in their progress, I've added a 'recalculate' button to the progress page (inside the 'totals' popup) on the beta site for everyone to use. Give it a try! Let us know if there are any issues with it before we put it to the stable site in January.

Also, one of the major persistent bugs causing the diverging progress numbers on the site was finally fixed in October, so the numbers should be recorded much more accurate going forward. The iOS progress tracking has been getting much better lately, and will probably end up being more accurate than the site since we're doing it all from the ground up again, but there are still some issues. Once we're pretty sure those are more cleared up, we'll start adding more alpha testers. We know how eager many of you are, but we don't want to put too many peoples' progress stats in danger!