This post has been written about in our changelog:
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Daily streak
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Jan 15, 2022
With the success of our January Pages Challenge, people have been asking if there is a way that it could continue for the rest of the year.
We think that the best way to give people the same motivation they currently have to read a little bit every single day is to offer the option to turn on a reading streak — each day that you mark some reading progress in the app, your streak will go up! Miss a day, and you'll be reset to 0.
This will be opt-in so as not to stress out anybody not interested in this!
Comments
I love this feature so much! One small thing - it would be amazing if the streak could use pages and/or minutes so that we could switch from listening to audiobooks to reading digital or IRL books without losing our streak. :)
ETA - so basically 1 minute OR 1 page (or whatever the user's threshold is) could count toward the streak.
Hi! It looks great, thank you :) Unfortunately I forgot to track one day in February and even though I have updated the journal entry, the streak does not take that day into account :/ Might it be possible to have it based on journal entries instead of logging date ? I think you did sth similar with the January challenge :)
edulaia This is interesting! I posted earlier that my streak is up to date, but not my longest streak which is not taking my January days into account when I completed the daily pages challenge. I also thought it had to do with backdated entries but this morning I logged my reading from yesterday and my streak updated from 3 days to 4.
kipipsi hmmm 🤔
edulaia It is based on the journal entry date and not the logging date. However, once a streak is in progress, after the original setup calculation, we only check back up to two times whatever your interval period is. For example, if you have a daily streak, we check back for two days' worth of logging, etc. It wouldn't be very performant/efficient for us to check back longer every time an update is made! If you'd like your streak recalculated wholly again you can turn the setting on and off on the Preferences page!
Nadia ah I see! Thank you :) It makes sense, ppl will not go back that far to log entries normaly, it was just the setting up of the feature that made me realise I forgot that day.
I am super excited and love this feature! I have it setup and my current streak is accurate (4 days), but it's saying my longest streak is 4 days, even though I read every day in January and completed the pages challenge. It says it's supposed to backdate to the beginning of the year ☹️
kipipsi Hello! I've just updated the wording on the Preferences page to explain what's actually happening!
Nadia I am pretty sure I understand now, thank you so much! Just to clarify; had I maintained the streak from the January pages and not broken it, those days would have been grandfathered in? But since I broke the streak, it's just picking up at my current one.
kipipsi Yes, that's it exactly!
would love the option to make this visible to friends on our profiles!! :)
ellieeeeeee It's on your stats page!
Head to your Preferences page to turn on streak tracking! Enjoy!
Nadia Yay! Thank you!
Oh great! I love that you can set what "counts" as a streak yourself. And I like the graph of the last month of reading as well
Def worth the wait!
Edit: I also love the fact that the little icon turns from outline to full-coloured after you log the streak for the day <3
emvdw Yayyy! This makes me so happy to read as this is part of why it took longer — wanting to give y'all these options! Originally it was just going to be a 1 page/minute per day thing only.
This was mentioned in a comment thread below from last year but I'm curious about the status after the new rounds of feedback collection of whether backdating will be allowed. I feel like the difference between StoryGraph and other apps like Duolingo is that you can't do Duolingo without opening its app, but with reading, you're doing the activity elsewhere and then remembering to open TSG once a day to update. I personally can't maintain a Duolingo streak for long without the Streak Freeze feature bc I'm garbage at long term daily habits....... except, blessedly, with reading. And while I'm as fastidious as I can be about tracking daily as well to keep my stats accurate, sometimes things happen and I update the next day, or even a few days later, with the reading that I completed. It's one of the things that frustrates me about the streak in the Kindle app, it only counts Kindle reading, so if there's a day that I listened to a book for four hours but did not think to open my Kindle before bed, my streak gets broken (not to mention if I dare read a physical book haha!). I feel like it will be sad for my TSG stats to show "you've read every day this year" (🤞) but my streak to only say "five days" or something because of a day I forgot to track. ALL OF THAT SAID THOUGH, I'm incredibly excited for this feature in whatever form it takes!!!
jaina8851 We'll definitely have some level of ability to backdate entries! The question will be how far! Because V1 might come with more customisation options than we originally envisaged, we have to keep performance implications in mind: how far back are we checking to re-calculate somebody's streak every time they do a progress update or update their reading journal? I think we're on track to figure something out that keeps most people happy! :-D
Nadia Oh yay!!! Ahhh I'm so excited for this feature!
I really enjoyed the January challenge for giving me a convenient place to see pages read. It's a bit of an inconvenience now that it's over having to go to stats, filtering by month, scrolling to the bottom. Would be great to see some easier viewing of this month's stats maybe? Or of just seeing that pages read graph in general.
sinerak We'll be making old Jan Pages challenges and the daily page graph easier to see at some point!
One thing that would be very nice would be to have streak-adjacent stats as well!
For a lot of people streak systems can have the opposite effect on motivation ("well, I just broke a very long streak, what's the point of starting again?"), so having a stat saying "you read 28/30 days this month" or whatever, regardless of whether the streak was broken, would be super cool :)
Love this! When this feature goes live would it be possible to backdate it to when your streak started? Eg. if it was to go live on Feb 1, anyone who had successfully done the Jan pages challenge would have a 31 day streak (or longer) straight off the bat?
mustbeinwantofawife The plan was to have this feature out for Feb 1 for that very reason, but after the wonderful feedback and suggestions we've received on Instagram and Twitter, we've decided to take a little longer with our streak feature to make it special!
The current plan is to backdate the streak until the beginning of this year and have the streak feature come out some time in Feb! Let's see! Keep reading! :-D
I would LOVE this feature. It would be cool to see if there could be some stats that go along with it to see what days of the week we do the most reading on.
This is a thing in beanstack too! I would love to have things update in beanstack when I post here or vise versa.
It would be cool to include some form of 'Badge' or 'Achievement' for reaching a week / month / year streak too if there was ever an idea to do anything like that!😁
ambzillius Some other users have had some fun ideas like this about a range of badges we could add to the app. :-D
Nadia sounds like a lot of fun. i would love to do special challenges and the like for unique badges. it adds an element of gamification to reading and that really gets me motivated!
Will the daily Streak include stats? I would like to know how many pages/minute/hours I’ve read in one day.
ebbookworm Do you mean you'd like to see those stats separate from your daily pages/minute chart? We'll definitely make that chart easier to access in general and might incorporate it into the streak section/have a new calendar-type view in the streak section as an attached visual.
Nadia Love the calendar view idea!
Really looking forward to this! I imagine the ability to add new journal entries retroactively will become a much more popular feature request after this comes out :D
Ooh — can you tell me a little bit more about why?
I do this! If I'm reading in bed at night and realise it is past midnight and the pages won't count for a day, and my reading graph for that month will have a zero day, I update the reading journal for the previous day. I want the accuracy and I compete with myself. I do the same thing with the rings on my Apple Watch.
Yes, I do this as well, as do several others, but that's backdating, as opposed to adding them in retroactively. I want to understand why adding them retroactively — i.e. after a book has been marked as 'read' — will be more popular. Oh — I see: you've marked a book as 'read' to get your streak count, and then later you want to go in and add your notes! :-D
Sorry, I'd missed this comment!
Actually, the scenario I was thinking of was more: say I've been reading a book for a few days and now finished it. I mark it as read, and only realise then that I forgot to add journal entries for the previous day, or that it's now after midnight, and I accidentally lost my streak. So now it's too late to fix that, because I can't add a new journal entry after a book has been marked as "read." Backdating isn't possible in this scenario.
Ah, I see!
We're not sure if backdating will be a thing with the streak in the same way it was with the January Pages Challenge, because it'll likely be an automated counter that just increments once every 24 hour period, once you've logged any reading activity.
With the January Pages Challenge we can afford to calculate your progress each time someone goes into the app/views the challenge: there's a maximum of 31 data points. It takes less than a second.
It wouldn't be performant for the app/website for us to check each time if someone has an entry going back however many days to calculate the streak.
We're envisaging something more like on apps like Headspace or Duolingo, where you do your meditation or your lesson, and you immediately see your counter go up for the day!
Yes, I would love the ability to do this. Sometimes I don't have access to the internet and I'm taking notes in a notebook as I go or highlighting in my eBook. I would really like the ability to go back and add those notes in without having to delete the book, mark the book done in the increments I have notes, and then go back and backdate all of those entries. It's a lot of work to go back and add notes but I'd really like to be able to do this afterwards. I have so many books with notes I would import to Storygraph if this were possible.
Can you also do something about actually showing that we listened to audiobooks in the daily log? On days that I only listened to an audiobook (but have listened to 1% or more) it still says "0 pages" which is really discouraging. Unless you created one for audiobooks Ana one for physical/digital books...
I know you've seen this post, but I'm putting the link here for anyone else who sees the discussion: https://roadmap.thestorygraph.com/features/posts/we-have-a-stat-for-hours-listened-to-for-audibooks
This might fall into this, but the January Pages Challenge had me realizing that I'd love to be able to create Reading Challenges based on pages read rather than prompts for books! So like, "In Feb, read 10 pages a day" - goes a little farther than the overall pages per year challenge and can be set for shorter time frames!
I love this so much! I am really enjoying the January pages challenge