Negative counting for listening and reading

Hi all,

Does anyone ever see negative counting on their progress snapshot? Today mine said I had listened to -0.2 hours and read -1285 words even though I had listened to about 40 minutes of material today (though I hadn’t read anything). I see this kind of thing quite regularly - does anyone else?

Cheers,
Nick

I had something weird like that happen earlier today- but in the opposite direction. It said in my stats that I had listened for six hours today and read an obnoxious amount and had learned a bunch of lingq’s, etc., but now it seems to have fixed itself. Maybe it was a glitch in the system.

@jungleboy - we are sorry about that! Have you listened to your lessons on your app or website?
@Elzby1985 - have your stats just got to normal without adjusting manually?

Yes, they went back to normal without me adjusting them.

Hi Galina, I listen on the app for iOS. The negative counting happens about once a week for me.

@jungleboy - just one more question: do you use the counter on your app to adjust manually “times read” and “times listened”?

Sometimes, but not today or anytime recently.

@jungleboy - the thing is when you adjust the counter manually, e.g. decrease your numbers of “times read and listened”, it will reflect on your stats. I just took a look at your progress snapshot. All the stats are positive now (for today and yesterday). Have you adjusted them manually after getting negative numbers?

I don’t ever decrease the number of times read and listened on the app - I increase them when I see that they haven’t increased automatically. For today, I manually adjusted the progress snapshot stats to bring them back to positive/zero.

@jungleboy - sorry about that. We are not sure what causes this issue on the new app. Would you be able to track your stats everyday in your progress snapshot for some period of time (selecting in the drop down “yesterday” or “today”) to make sure that your numbers are always correct. Once you notice negative stats again, please try to identify after which actions on your app this happens. It would be very helpful in terms of reproducing the issue and fixing it. So far, we are not sure where to start testing as it is the first report since the new iOS app has been released. Thanks! Sorry for the inconvenience!

Hi Galina, it happened to me again yesterday. For now I have not manually adjusted the numbers so you can see them; perhaps this will help you determine the problem.

Looking at my stats for yesterday, it says -0.7 hours listened and -5821 words read. In fact it should be around 40 minutes listened (i.e. the same 0.7 hours that is currently in negative) and no words read. Yesterday I listened to four 10-minute lessons on the new iLingQ on my iPhone. In all four cases I accessed the lessons through My Courses rather than Playlists. In at least three of the four cases and possibly all four, I was connected to 3G and not wifi at the time I opened the lesson, and I suspect this has something to do with it as I’ve previously noted problems with the app on 3G even though in theory there should be no real difference.

Cheers,
Nick

@jungleboy - Thank you for the additional info on this. In fact, it sounds like it may be due to something in the app and not through the site. We’ll have to do some more testing here to find out what’s going on, but this is a step hopefully in the right direction :slight_smile:

Hi all,

I just noticed that I have -0.1 hours of listening listed for today. In fact I have listened to about 26 minutes today, all through the app for iPhone.

Here were the actions I performed:

  • Opened a lesson from my courses while connected to wifi and played it to the end (while going from wifi to 3G in the early part of the lesson as I left my house).
  • Opened a different lesson from the same course while connected to 3G and played it to the end.
  • Two hours later, opened a lesson from a playlist while connected to 3G and played it. When it finished, it then went on to the next lesson but I stopped this after 5-10 seconds.

Could this last part (i.e. having a lesson start but not finish) be part of the problem?

Also, while on the topic of listening stats, I find the division into 10ths of an hour to be unhelpful, especially when trying to figure out if your listening time has been correctly counted. 0.2 of an hour is technically 12 minutes, but with rounding, it could be anywhere from 9 to 15 minutes, right? Is there any chance of changing it from 10ths of an hour to hours and minutes instead? In real life, nobody counts in decimals of hours.

Thanks,
Nick

Thanks for the detailed feedback on this! I did actually follow these same steps, switching between wifi and 3G, but it seemed to work properly. I wonder if you would be able to actually keep track of the Times Listened for the different lessons you are listening to. In the scenario above, you would just check the Times Listened for the specific lesson each time you finish the lesson to make sure it incremented properly, then at the end of your listening you would go back in and check again to see if those numbers are still correct or if any of them have been incremented again for some reason. I know it’s a bit of a hassle, but it doesn’t seem to be a widespread problem so any help from you in tracking it down should help us get it fixed more quickly for you :slight_smile:

For the listening stats, this definitely makes sense. I’ve added it to our list!

OK, here are the results of today’s experiment:

  • Opened a lesson from my courses while connected to wifi and played it to the end (while going from wifi to 3G in the early part of the lesson as I left my house). The listening count went up 1.
  • Opened a different lesson from the same course while connected to 3G and played it to the end. The listening count went up 1, though I am almost positive that the count did not go up for the same lesson yesterday. I have listened to this lesson at least 7-8 times, and the count is only on 3.
  • Three hours later, opened a lesson from a playlist while connected to 3G and played it and the count went up. When it finished, it then went on to the next lesson which I listened to until the end. However, at some point in this last lesson I went into a shopping centre and lost service. At the end of the lesson (while still without service) it did not start playing the next lesson. When I checked the stats for this lesson the count had not gone up. When I look at my overall stats for today I am at 0.5 hours listened, which means the first three were counted and the last one not (all are about 10 minutes in length).

But after all this, there was no negative count today. Since the steps I followed were very similar to yesterday when there was a negative count, I can’t really see much to work with.

Thanks! We’ll be making some minor changes to how the app works when offline or when using a weak internet connection, and hopefully this will resolve some of the miscounting that seems to be occurring from time to time.

Today’s update is that I had negative reading stats of -747 words. I assume this came about because as I was looking at the app for iPhone earlier today, I noticed that one particular lesson was listed as having been read 0 times, when I had read it at least once. So I clicked on the 0 to make this 1. I can only guess that this action (which I don’t do very often) caused the glitch in the reading stats.

I spent some time fiddling with this to try and reproduce it, but so far have been unsuccessful. I am using the new test version though, so that’s possibly the reason why. The new version should hopefully be up soon and includes some improvements to offline mode and network switching to hopefully stabilize the app further.

I don’t know if this is related to the same issue, but today, my listening count was 27.1 hours and I didm’t adjust anything manually. Obviously, this number is impossible.

Hmm, very interesting. I see your time for yesterday is 6.8 hours - is this an accurate time or is this number also inflated?

Would you be able to go to the My Lessons page with the sort set at Recently Opened and see if there are any very large numbers of listening times for any recent lessons?