Weird Ranking

Vlatiha · Post by **Vlatiha** » Fri Jun 13, 2014 10:47 am

Hello,

I've noticed, that when I check my current ranking via [url]http://www.hacker.org/forum/profile.php ... ile&u=4652[/url], my ranking jumps up and down over the day.
Sometimes I'm on level 70, a few hours later on level 36 or even level 20. Then it drops down to level 72 again.
I'm not doing any riddles in the moment, so my understanding of the rating is, that the level can only increase over the time, since others - like you - are having successes as well.

What's the matter with that ranking thing?

Cheerz
Vlati

Redford · Post by **Redford** » Fri Jun 13, 2014 7:24 pm

The ranking got broken many months ago, but unfortunately nobody takes care about the site.
I mailed admins about this problem (and others), but they don't have time to fix it/don't respond. I hope some day a new person will take over hacker.org and fix all that issues.

Sun Jun 15, 2014 2:41 pm

The only person who could fix such things is adum. Nobody else has access to the website's code itself, as far as I know.

A website that has only one single maintainer will always run into problems when said maintainer does not have the time anymore to look after things.

Redford · Post by **Redford** » Sun Jun 15, 2014 3:06 pm

AMindForeverVoyaging: how about bok? I think he can fix it too.

We need a new admin, otherwise the site will get worse and worse :/

Thu Jun 19, 2014 10:56 am

Redford wrote:AMindForeverVoyaging: how about bok? I think he can fix it too.

bok's last post in this forum was in 2008, and his last activity regarding puzzles was in 2010 according to his profile. So it seems that he is gone for good.

We need a new admin, otherwise the site will get worse and worse :/

Either we need a new one, or we need an old one to return. At the moment neither is happening.

Zeta · Post by **Zeta** » Sat Jul 05, 2014 7:51 pm

Back to the original question: The ranking is not exactly broken, but you sometimes see bogus values. This occurs while computing the global score from the ranking tables of the different puzzles on this site. Unfortunately these intermediate values are user visible.

At some point the ranking had several problems including a permanent recalculation of the global score, so that you would never see the final result of a calculation because it would immediately be set to zero again when the next calculation started.

AFAICS the ranking table itself is correctly calculated now, you only have to make sure it's a complete ranking, i.e. tails should have over 1000 points. Ranking entries on the profile pages can be wrong for some of the first players with a score now so low that they don't even get an entry in the ranking table.

Hckr · Post by **Hckr** » Wed Apr 29, 2015 10:23 am

Could it be that the ranking table is not updated at all? I noticed when i saw Hippo's profile
http://www.hacker.org/forum/profile.php ... le&u=33373

He should be way higher..

Hippo · Post by **Hippo** » Wed May 20, 2015 9:28 pm

Hckr wrote:Could it be that the ranking table is not updated at all? I noticed when i saw Hippo's profile
http://www.hacker.org/forum/profile.php ... le&u=33373

He should be way higher..

Yes I have tought about it as well

...
My total ranking is 296 with subrankings 91, 9, 277, 19, 169, 855, 42, 95, and 18.

... either the PusherBoy (855 is the most important) or there the rankings does not work at all.

(277 and 95 are just by time of full solution).

OK I should solve 4 PusheBoy levels to have all subrankings better than total ranking

.

Zeta · Post by **Zeta** » Fri May 22, 2015 12:00 am

Yes, the top hackers list isn't updated anymore. Cron jobs don't seem to be possible with the current hosting solution.

According to my own calculations Hippo is currently ranked number 20:

Code: Select all

  1  tails                1088.56931   2011-09-18 22:57:40
  2  Yharaskrik            774.70417   2015-04-09 05:42
  3  zeased                648.71126   2014-11-12 09:39
  4  Tron                  613.84666   2012-04-30 12:01
  5  miroe                 599.00076   2015-01-11 13:56
  6  Zeta                  561.35022   2015-05-17 12:00
  7  adum                  559.81847   2011-05-22 17:01
  8  portal                552.56427   2013-04-11 07:07
  9  Schlaule              530.31107   2014-12-12 14:26
 10  bellerophon           527.69560   2015-05-12 10:24:13
 11  stubbscroll           458.91462   2014-04-27 16:04
 12  cutter                455.85582   2012-09-27 06:37
 13  eremes                451.09838   2015-05-01 07:47:11
 14  dangermouse           450.42113   2015-04-17 13:20
 15  dividead              426.95168   2015-02-25 13:08
 16  papa                  415.51603   2014-11-29 03:13
 17  Captain Segfault      401.97065   2010-08-25 00:26
 18  SnakeSnake            401.10795   2013-02-10 08:19:55
 19  bsguedes              397.39771   2015-05-03 11:30:27
 20  Hippo                 391.26813   2015-05-20 14:51

Hippo · Post by **Hippo** » Sun May 24, 2015 8:25 pm

I have a question to this ranking ... is
A) only set of solved puzzles and levels important
or
B) the solution time is part of the scoring as well.

Zeta · Post by **Zeta** » Tue May 26, 2015 7:18 pm

It's A. Times don't count, only if you get there in the end.

Wed May 27, 2015 5:10 pm

Zeta wrote:It's A. Times don't count, only if you get there in the end.

That is also the only way it makes sense here, really.

Imagine somebody playing the puzzles by hand... then they stop doing a puzzle for a year. Should this whole year then count towards the time for solving that level? Would not make a lot of sense now, would it. Because they were quite obviously not spending that entire time on solving some puzzle.

Using time span (or rank) in a competition is only fair when everybody starts at the same point of time. That never was the case for anything on hacker.org: Neither for the puzzles nor for the challenges. So it's kind of weird that rank does count for the scoring of the challenges. It really should not.