What is up with Challenge participants "learning" 1000 words a day?

Not a problem nor am I stressed about it, just curious what is going on. In one challenge I see two participants “learning” exactly 1000 words a day for 25 straight days. That looks really weird. If I joined a challenge of a language I already know, for whatever reason, and started jamming on known words, I might clock a lot of words per day but in different amounts. Like 621 one day, 832 another, etc. But these are exactly 1000 per day. Are those bots or a quirk of the system? It is too bad because it kind of trolls the challenge. Is this kind of thing “a thing” on LingQ? Cheers!

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We just recently had a thread about that: https://www.lingq.com/en/community/forum/open-forum/subject-challenges-and-competi
Honestly the only thing you can do is to ignore people you think cheat. LingQ doesn’t police the challenges, the system is honor-based. It’s probably just human nature, given a ranking some people will try to get to the top. Of course there can be legitimate reasons for someone making rapid progress, although it’s rather suspicious if they never create a LingQ.

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There is no real way to police “Known Words”. They will be subjective and self-reported for each person. Give people an incentive, no matter how little, then make it a competition, and you will find people that simply click through lessons to make the number go up.

Also, most people do not come to LingQ with no knowledge of a language beforehand. They come in knowing a lot more words than their Known Word Count represents, and as they find them in content they will instantly become known.

To summarize as succinctly as possible, everyone has their own thing going on. Not everyone is “cheating” per se, but just the way Challenges are structured makes it impossible for them to be apples-to-apples competitive. If they provide you motivation to study more, or really any benefit at all, by all means join them, but do not spend any time worrying about what anyone else is doing :).

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