Bug vBActivity 3.1.0 points calculation, competition calculation errors
- Thread starter rpm
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Which access do you need enabled? We haven't disabled anything on our side, but will double check.
The password for the user account you provided on your forum appears to have changed, as I was logged out and can no longer log back in.
For the record, the discovery I made was that there was a discrepancy between the options presented to you in the "Exclude Criteria" menu and the actual list of criteria being used in the re-calculation feature.
In short, this caused more points types than intended to be included in the sum of points, which may account for the discrepancies in the sums you've discovered in your tests.
I incorrectly believed this was a system-specific issue because my test forums (including this forum) did not have any points data in the criteria that were affected by this issue.
This only affects retroactively calculated contests, so it wouldn't account for the Polls Posted issue you described. I've not had a chance to test that specific issue further just yet.
At this time, I have no reason to believe that contests that run their course "naturally" (i.e. if you were to create a contest from Oct 1 - Oct 16) would be affected, as virtually no code is shared between these two areas of the mod.
For the record, the discovery I made was that there was a discrepancy between the options presented to you in the "Exclude Criteria" menu and the actual list of criteria being used in the re-calculation feature.
In short, this caused more points types than intended to be included in the sum of points, which may account for the discrepancies in the sums you've discovered in your tests.
I incorrectly believed this was a system-specific issue because my test forums (including this forum) did not have any points data in the criteria that were affected by this issue.
This only affects retroactively calculated contests, so it wouldn't account for the Polls Posted issue you described. I've not had a chance to test that specific issue further just yet.
At this time, I have no reason to believe that contests that run their course "naturally" (i.e. if you were to create a contest from Oct 1 - Oct 16) would be affected, as virtually no code is shared between these two areas of the mod.
I have verified that the correct criteria are now being used when re-calculating contests. I have ran the re-calculation process again for all your contests (this is normally not supported, but seeing as no prizes or notifications are being handed out for these contests, it's safe to force another re-calculation).
If you wish to create more test contests to verify the totals, please feel free to do so.
I want to thank you for your patience, especially considering your circumstances - I've certainly experienced the ire of people with less of a stake in our products than you have placed in this aspect of one of our products, and I can only apologise for having taken so long to correct it.
Moving on to the Poll Trophy issue:
Currently, vBActivity has records of 10 polls posted on your forum since 1 Jan 2013 - Poll IDs 268 through 277 - you can easily find what threads these polls belong to by going to /poll.php?pollid=268&do=showresults and then clicking the thread title in the bread crumb, changing 268 to whatever other poll ID you wish to check.
User ID 6438 has posted 3 polls, meaning this person should be awarded the trophy for Polls Posted. I am indeed seeing that this user is not the current trophy holder for Polls Posted. I have verified that this user ID is not a member of a usergroup that should render them ineligible for this trophy.
Upon further investigation, I'm seeing that according to the points cache, user ID 17 (the current owner of the trophy) has the most points for trophies posted.
Tell me, have you changed the Points for Polls Posted since the first time you re-calculated vBActivity? If so, then the issue is that the Recalculate Points action does not appear to reset the points cache table before re-calculating.
I have amended the relevant file on your site and I'm now running points recalculation.
I'll manually run the "Re-Assign Trophies" cron job tomorrow and post back with an update on whether this has fixed the issue.
If you wish to create more test contests to verify the totals, please feel free to do so.
I want to thank you for your patience, especially considering your circumstances - I've certainly experienced the ire of people with less of a stake in our products than you have placed in this aspect of one of our products, and I can only apologise for having taken so long to correct it.
Moving on to the Poll Trophy issue:
Currently, vBActivity has records of 10 polls posted on your forum since 1 Jan 2013 - Poll IDs 268 through 277 - you can easily find what threads these polls belong to by going to /poll.php?pollid=268&do=showresults and then clicking the thread title in the bread crumb, changing 268 to whatever other poll ID you wish to check.
User ID 6438 has posted 3 polls, meaning this person should be awarded the trophy for Polls Posted. I am indeed seeing that this user is not the current trophy holder for Polls Posted. I have verified that this user ID is not a member of a usergroup that should render them ineligible for this trophy.
Upon further investigation, I'm seeing that according to the points cache, user ID 17 (the current owner of the trophy) has the most points for trophies posted.
Tell me, have you changed the Points for Polls Posted since the first time you re-calculated vBActivity? If so, then the issue is that the Recalculate Points action does not appear to reset the points cache table before re-calculating.
I have amended the relevant file on your site and I'm now running points recalculation.
I'll manually run the "Re-Assign Trophies" cron job tomorrow and post back with an update on whether this has fixed the issue.
Great news; thanks for the feedback.
I will do some testing my side to see if the contest points are calculated as I'd expect and give my own feedback.
Regarding the polls, I can't clearly recall, but it is likely that I adjusted the points for creating polls from the default setting. However, I have also run the points recalculation numerous times as well, and then run the trophy assignment cron job following that. Having done that I was still seeing the same incorrect user being assigned the trophy for polls.
If it is indeed a points cache problem, I assume fixing that will mean all the trophies are subsequently assigned correctly? I look forward to your feedback on this problem.
I will do some testing my side to see if the contest points are calculated as I'd expect and give my own feedback.
Regarding the polls, I can't clearly recall, but it is likely that I adjusted the points for creating polls from the default setting. However, I have also run the points recalculation numerous times as well, and then run the trophy assignment cron job following that. Having done that I was still seeing the same incorrect user being assigned the trophy for polls.
If it is indeed a points cache problem, I assume fixing that will mean all the trophies are subsequently assigned correctly? I look forward to your feedback on this problem.
Once I have figured out why the data is not resetting as intended, any future Recalculate Points actions should reflect the correct amount of posts everywhere, including trophies.
My initial efforts in attempting to fix this on your site has failed, so I will need to dig deeper to see why that is.
I will post back with any further updates.
My initial efforts in attempting to fix this on your site has failed, so I will need to dig deeper to see why that is.
I will post back with any further updates.
Update: I have discovered a very strange and disturbing issue on your forum. Your thread table has wrong Poll IDs for approx. 165 threads, which is causing issues with vBActivity's points recalculation.
To see this problem in action, please execute the following query:
You can validate the output of this query by manually inspecting the poll table. At the time of writing, the highest Poll ID is 280.
As you can imagine, this should never happen. There should not exist any poll IDs in the thread table bigger than the IDs found in the poll table. Are you able to shed any light on this issue? Can you think of a reason why this would happen?
If you don't know the reason behind this, you can use phpMyAdmin to search in all tables & all columns for the highest poll ID (on the last page of the query results of the query). If there are any matches, you may be able to find an explanation (possibly a modification that decided to hijack the pollid column rather than adding its own, a horrible practice that should be reported as a bug).
I will work around this issue by changing the way vBActivity counts polls. That being said, if you would like to fix this issue on your forum, please execute the following query:
I would strongly recommend going through the phpMyAdmin search first, or backing up your database, to ensure it is indeed not a rogue modification doing this.
I will post another update when I have completed the code changes and re-calculated points yet again.
To see this problem in action, please execute the following query:
Code:
SELECT *
FROM vbulletin_thread
WHERE pollid > (SELECT MAX(pollid) FROM vbulletin_poll)You can validate the output of this query by manually inspecting the poll table. At the time of writing, the highest Poll ID is 280.
As you can imagine, this should never happen. There should not exist any poll IDs in the thread table bigger than the IDs found in the poll table. Are you able to shed any light on this issue? Can you think of a reason why this would happen?
If you don't know the reason behind this, you can use phpMyAdmin to search in all tables & all columns for the highest poll ID (on the last page of the query results of the query). If there are any matches, you may be able to find an explanation (possibly a modification that decided to hijack the pollid column rather than adding its own, a horrible practice that should be reported as a bug).
I will work around this issue by changing the way vBActivity counts polls. That being said, if you would like to fix this issue on your forum, please execute the following query:
Code:
UPDATE vbulletin_thread
SET pollid = 0
WHERE pollid > (SELECT MAX(pollid) FROM vbulletin_poll)I would strongly recommend going through the phpMyAdmin search first, or backing up your database, to ensure it is indeed not a rogue modification doing this.
I will post another update when I have completed the code changes and re-calculated points yet again.
Last edited:
Hi Fillip,
Points calculations
I have run a number of tests and things seem to be accurate now.
One test that concerns me is "thread ratings test 2" which isn't returning any results when I recalculate. It is set for the same time frame as my original competition criteria that has been the focus of this discussion. You can see this test in the activity contest CP.
Can you check why this might be? It's plausible that no one rated any threads during the time period but I am not sure how to check this.
Can you please confirm from your side:
- System-wide activity points are now generated correctly
- Activity points are cached/stored correctly
- Competitions are calculated correctly
- Competitions can be correctly calculated retroactively
Poll database ID
Thanks for the feedback; we have our database admin looking into the problem and will report back on what they find.
Points calculations
I have run a number of tests and things seem to be accurate now.
One test that concerns me is "thread ratings test 2" which isn't returning any results when I recalculate. It is set for the same time frame as my original competition criteria that has been the focus of this discussion. You can see this test in the activity contest CP.
Can you check why this might be? It's plausible that no one rated any threads during the time period but I am not sure how to check this.
Can you please confirm from your side:
- System-wide activity points are now generated correctly
- Activity points are cached/stored correctly
- Competitions are calculated correctly
- Competitions can be correctly calculated retroactively
Poll database ID
Thanks for the feedback; we have our database admin looking into the problem and will report back on what they find.
Last edited:
It is impossible to retroactively determine when someone rated a thread because vBulletin does not store this information. For that reason, when you re-calculate points, it will pretend all thread ratings were made way in the past.
Future thread ratings will be correct, unless points are re-calculated again.
Affected Points Types:
* Friends Confirmed
* Thread Ratings Given
* Thread Ratings Received
These points types, as a result, are not generally fit to be included in contests unless the Re-Calculate Points feature is not used.
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