My guess is that the "Profile" points are updated every time you get points while the "Leaderboard" points are updated (probably) daily. Your "Profile" points should be slightly higher than your "Leaderboard" points. Mine are.

Well, the difference between Leaderboard points and my Profile points are not equal to what I earned today. The difference is close to 170 and I only earned around 97 today. But I did notice that my Profile points are updated in real time (I did a quick puzzle just to check) but the leaderboard points are not. So I am guessing there is some kind of delayed updating of leaderboard but maybe it is not once a day. I suppose one way for me to check is to not earn any points for a day or two and see if the leaderboard points catch up. But I don't want to quit doing the puzzles so I have to wait for a day when I can't solve anything.
Just one of those minor curiosities of life that was bugging me.

Well... I can conduct the experiment for you. I gave up working Tanga puzzles for Lent - yeah, I know - crazy... but I couldn't think of anything more important to me, at least not in the "not strictly critical for life" category.

So, I get to work puzzles on Sundays which I did yesterday. My profile has me at 4858 while the Leaderboard has me at 4697. I won't be able to work puzzles again until Sunday so we have all week for me to watch the Leaderboard.

The only possible problem would be if I get a puzzle featured. I haven't figured out if you get the points when the puzzle is confirmed with a feature date or if it's the day of actual feature. I have nothing slated for feature right now so maybe the experiment will stay clean.

Well now I know. Thanks, Arnott! Now... don't feel you have to hold off nominating or scheduling any of my puzzles... it's ok with me if you mess up this little experiment! ;)

Guess we have an answer now - sort of. My leaderboard now matches my profile. My history shows I solved my last puzzle at 9:10pm on Sun. 3/14. I checked the leaderboard last night after 9:00. It's now Tuesday morning ~5am, so I'm guessing the leaderboard updates around midnight? But why it didn't update Sunday night, I don't know... 24 hr. delay + at midnight? You know, mmene, I can be quite obsessive about stuff - your minor curiosity has gotten under my skin! :)

Ah sonjahi - I think I recognize a kindred spirit. Somehow my natural order of things is disturbed when I cannot figure out the answer to a seemingly simple question.
Looking at the point difference now I am kind of thinking the update to the leaderboard might happen at the first midnight following a 24 hour gap after which the points were earned. If that makes sense.
Might be interesting to earn some points just before midnight and some right after midnight and seeing if they get credited on different days. I probably am expending way too much intellectual effort pondering this question.

I was thinking the same thing. Although "first midnight after a 24 hr gap" seems like a rather arbitrary and pointless programming decision. Why not just have a cron job that runs every night at midnight? Period. I think your experiment sounds rather interesting and I don't think you are wasting intellectual effort - staves off alzheimer's, right? ;)

At any rate, that's not an experiment I could hope to perform until Easter and even then, being in the Central time zone, I'd have to be working the puzzles right before and after 2am. Too late for me! I'd be paying for it for days!

Yeah, I am in CST too and have the same problem unless I am up late some weekend. And I know the algorithm does not seem to make much sense to say first midnight after 24 hrs, my guess is that it is some kind of a two step update with two different cron jobs. With the first one running every 24 hrs and the other at midnight.
But what truly baffles me is that if it is possible to update the numbers in points history in real time why would it need a two step process (if that is even true) for leaderboards. I know that leaderboard is one additional calculation over the points history number and if that runs at midnight it would update in less than 24 hrs.
The only other possibility is that the update to leaderboards does happen at midnight but not every midnight. If I am sufficiently bored I might try and keep track over the updating pattern for week and see if it is consistent.
This is almost as intriguing as a Tanga puzzle.

gotta stop reading this thread. my head is gonna a splode. :)

You know, technically... (I don't know who will shoot me first - mmene or j15bell, who shouldn't be reading anymore anyway... :)

You are on CDT now... CST ended Sunday morning... :) FWIW, I had to look that up to make sure I was right first. Central Standard is during the winter, Central Daylight is during the summer.

I hope you get sufficiently bored, mmene. I wouldn't mind an answer to the riddle!

notlookingnotlookingnotlooking.

bleh!

i have an ocd gene too. :)

84682/84745

So here's a related question... How soon after you earn your 5000 points do you get your STU badge? It's not immediate because I just hit 5002 and I don't have a badge. Midnight tonight? First midnight after 24 hours? We shall see...

It's not midnight or 24 hrs + midnight. It's more like "don't rush to your profile immediately in anticipation, you geek!" Either that or you have to get above the margin of error (I have 5010 now). Badge is there now.

It especially won't show up if you stare at your profile too long. :)

:) I didn't sit and stare - I'm not THAT bad!

I got to 5002 and went to Profile and it wasn't there. I poked around on the discussion threads and went back - still not there so posted [13].

Worked a couple more puzzles and went back and there it was.

And see, if we just had the fruit, I could have nights like that so much more frequently!! :)

BRING BACK THE FRUIT!!!

(Am I allowed to say that if I wasn't here when it was? :)

ofc you can say that. wasn't there for the fruit either. but!

BRING BACK THE FRUIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I got the STU too - I did not check immediately since I was probably not as instant gratification deprived as sonjahi but I checked within about 10 minutes and it was there.
As expected my all time points showed that I had crossed the STU limit but the Tanga point history did not.
BTW what are the fruits? I obviously missed something...

Look back through the threads. You don't have to look far. The thread was started by Arnott asking if anyone remembered the order of the old fruit system. Basically, instead of just one level (STU), you earned different fruit levels. Some folks used to have golden versions of their fruit badge preserved but they all disappeared when these Beatles badges were awarded (the actual event was before my time but the badges just posted). Arnott hints maybe it'll be back next month...At any rate, check out the thread for more info.

BRING BACK THE FRUIT!!!!!!!!!

[18] For completeness, here is the discussion link [19] was referencing.

http://www.tanga.com/forum/blogs/old-fruit

BRING BACK THE FRUIT (and my golden peaches)!!!

Thanks [20]... mmene, dragontrainer has all the old fruit icons as his/her avatar...

This discussion aroused my curiosity, so I checked it out. Here's what I figured out...

As has been stated, the points on one's Profile page are always current.

The "points in the last 24 hours" reported on the leaderboards are also current.

It appears that they capture the data to update the points for the month, points for the year, and all time points shortly before the featured puzzles appear. But they don't actually update those three totals until several hours later, sometime during the middle of the night. So if you check your total points on the leaderboard during the day, the reported total will NOT include any points you earned on the prior day's featured puzzles. Thus, the effect is that the total points on the leaderboard are a day behind.

Ahah! So it basically IS a sort-of "first midnight after a 24 hr gap" kind of thing. Interesting... Thanks for unraveling that, Philana.