Forum: Bug Report and Feature Requests

so I've been going through and dling authors I like and sometimes the story count is or at least seems to be wrong. I've not made notes but I've hit the limit either early or late.

I looked back on last 24hrs as I thought it was over counting but when I file check it's good. however a little while ago I definitely went over when I account for local 'day' reset. iirc all files were in a single day window but file count for that 'day's' folder which I'm sure did not cross the end of day was well over 300.

I've since broken that folder back into authors folders rather than individual days, 2x days, 1 folder per day. then a secondary division by author but not by download 'day'.

I'd have to go through histories etc to double check as I may have made a mistake but I used 1 day per folder to keep better track.

most of the time when I look back it is accurate but on this occasion it seems to have dropped more than a few files.

is there a second system I can check against to double check this?

when I do a folder properties on the appropriately dated entries (sorted by date modified) I get 728 files over two consecutive days total. I'd have to check each folder and sub-folder sequentially to 100% this but 128 over seems like something broke, even if I ticked over by a bit. downloads were done around 10 days ago(+ up to 3 days).

Perhaps your SoL day doesn't match your local calendar day.

I think my SoL day changes at 16:45 local time so in theory I could download my limit (50 for a free member) in the morning and again (another 50) in the evening, and then again 50 tomorrow after 16:45 totaling 3x my limit in two of my days.

If you visit your My Account page, under the heading Account Information is given the time your download counter is reset and a count of stories accessed since that time 'yesterday' - this is the same time each day for any particular account and not likely to be your local midnight, the times are spread through the day to even out server load. You can get a reliable matching download count by referencing this count shortly before the given time and then not accessing any other stories until after the given time, and using the given time as your 'day' delimiter.

The main page count is nearly the same, but changes to the count may be delayed by caching for display on the front page, also the front page does not give the reset time which is important to know if you want reliable statistics.

The reset timing may temporarily change by an hour around the DST transitions as the site seems to use the North American DST transitions internally, if you don't live in NA your DST transitions are likely to be on different dates. This won't bother (or even be visible to) most users, but you're digging deep enough that it may trip you up.