MC Banhammer Posted:

This would be my suggested algorithm, which would allow for you to indicate which forums are part of the streak:

Create a new DB table to hold streaks. First column, is the alt’s ID#. Second column is to hold the forum ID# of any forums currently on the streak. One row per forum. The table is keyed on both columns.

Every time you complete a forum successfully, the system tries to insert a row for you and that forum. If it gets a duplicate key restraint, that means you broke your streak. All records for you are deleted from the table, and a new row is written with this most recent forum (the start of a new streak).

Then you do a “SELECT COUNT(*) FROM <table> WHERE user_id = <userid>”, and divide the result by four. If there’s no remainder, award the appropriate peen and scoops for that result number.

If you fail to beat a forum, the system deletes all rows in the table for you.

That’s what I’d do.

Uh, I don’t think that’s actually what you want to do. The idea is we want to break the streak when pwning the a forum that was already in your streak, right? Consider this example:

1. Forum A

2. Forum B

3. Forum C

4. Forum D

5. Forum A

6. Forum E

If you delete all the past history as soon as your find a repeated forum, your algorithm will not necessarily yield the longest streak. In this example, your algorithm calculates the longest streak as ABCD, and the current streak would be AE.

The way I see it, the longest streak here should be BCDAE. So instead of clearing out all the history once you pwn a duplicate forum, you’d just delete the first match and everything earlier than that.