Core workflow

Progress, rewards, and privacy

Last updated 2026-09-01T12:16:50+00:00

Progress recognises useful, retained work without turning routine navigation into a contest. Score, spendable points, privacy controls, and rewards are deliberately separate.

Defaults and where to find Progress

Hosted users open Manage > Progress. Collection is active by default, the leaderboard uses a private generated alias and emblem, public participation is enabled, and Subtle interface effects are selected. The orange notice remains until the generated alias is replaced or a real-name display mode is selected. Personal analytics stay available when leaderboard visibility is off, interface effects are set to Background only, or collection is paused with progress preserved.

Super admins use the separate Progress page. Its Users and Admins tabs never share rankings. Admin collection defaults to active with real names. Authorised super admins can inspect opted-in, paused, preserved opt-out, and reset opt-out accounts without exposing private operational identity on the public user ranking.

Progress Score and levels

Progress Score determines level and leaderboard position. It is never spent. Canopy Points are held in a different balance, so redeeming a benefit cannot reduce a level or ranking. Scores may only be revised by an explicitly authorised historical recalculation.

Badge designs become more intricate through solid-colour layers, borders, cutouts, texture, and approved Vecticons. They do not use glows, distracting animation, or uploaded SVG.

Weekly streaks and the 12-week season

A week qualifies after one allowlisted meaningful action from Monday 00:00 through Sunday 23:59 in the participant's validated IANA timezone. Page views, logins, navigation, search, deletion, repeated edits, imports, demo activity, and automated jobs do not qualify. Missing a qualifying week resets the current streak while preserving the longest streak.

The seasonal score includes the current ISO week and the previous 11 weeks. Weekly Gardener badges are awarded at 4, 12, 26, 52, and 104 qualifying weeks. The 12-week consistency strip uses text, colour, and shape so it remains understandable without motion or colour alone.

Badge cabinet

Core badge families recognise trees, memories, stories, archives, events, projects, collaboration, community, trusted installation, reviewed plugins, privacy, accessibility, and long-term consistency. Existing developer badges remain canonical and appear as imported awards. Importing one never creates spendable value. Admin-only badges recognise reviewed operational work, queue stewardship, safe releases, documented policy, privacy, accessibility, and incident closure. Harmful volume incentives such as sanctions, refunds, payouts, or moderation counts are excluded.

All-time and seasonal rankings

The authenticated user leaderboard offers All-time and 12-week views with pagination and the viewer's own position. Hidden, paused, and opted-out profiles are omitted completely from public positions. A hidden participant may see their true private rank, but neighbouring hidden identities are never exposed. Ties resolve by the earliest time the score was reached, then the stable normalised display identity.

The super-admin Users ranking and the admin-only ranking are separate datasets. Admin recognition never contributes user points, rewards, subscription entitlements, or a cross-ranking position.

Identity and leaderboard privacy

A hosted user's default generated alias is unique and case-insensitive. The user may choose another unique alias, first name, first name plus last initial, or full name. The public emblem can be generated, use an existing profile photo, use an approved Vecticons icon, or use an independently uploaded image.

Uploaded emblems accept JPEG, PNG, or WebP up to 2 MB. Racinage decodes, crops, removes metadata, re-encodes to WebP, and scans the image when scanning is configured. An image is not displayed before validation succeeds. Arbitrary SVG uploads are prohibited. Profile photos remain private by default and appear only after the user explicitly selects that mode.

Turning off leaderboard visibility does not stop collection. The participant continues climbing privately and may become public later without losing progress.

Pause, opt out, reset, and reactivate

• Active: eligible trusted activity can be processed.
• Paused with progress preserved: collection stops, analytics remain visible, and the profile leaves rankings.
• Fully opted out: collection stops and the participant chooses Keep progress or Reset progress.

Keep progress resumes from the saved totals on reactivation. Reset removes score, unspent points, streaks, badge awards, and event history. It keeps redeemed benefits, the minimal redemption ledger required for hard caps, alias preferences, the independent emblem, and the opt-out state. Reactivating after reset starts at zero. A platform emergency pause can stop collection, ranking, visuals, or redemption without changing personal preferences.

Canopy Points and permanent rewards

Canopy Points can be redeemed transactionally for permanent, capped additions. Account rewards include funded AI credits, storage, owned-family slots, Advanced Progress Analytics, and the read-only Progress Coach. Selected-family rewards include finite tree, album, event, project, document, history, and custom-wallet slots.

A selected-family grant remains owned by the redeeming account. It becomes dormant if the family is transferred or deleted and may be reassigned to another owned family after 30 days. A grant is also dormant while the current plan provides an unlimited allowance and becomes effective again after a downgrade. Rewards never grant permissions, administrator or commerce powers, collaboration powers, MCP writes, security controls, paid plugin licences, or publisher-owned benefits. See Plans and reward limits.

Default earning catalogue

Verified actions use versioned rules and fixed caps. Examples include a qualifying active week, retained owned families, structured trees, albums with at least three distinct media files, completed events and projects, meaningful documents or history, accepted cross-account collaboration, verified installations, reviewed plugin milestones, and settled plan tiers. Created content matures after 72 hours, owned families and verified installations after 7 days, and settled subscriptions after 14 non-refunded days. Bulk imports may qualify the week once but never award every imported row.

The exact active values are shown in the Progress interface. The initial catalogue awards 25 score and 10 points for a qualifying week, milestone bonuses at 4, 12, 26, 52, and 104 weeks, and capped values from 20 to 150 score for retained, successfully verified records. Administrators can publish only values inside fixed server safety ceilings.

Fair use and abuse protection

Only allowlisted, successfully committed server actions can become candidates. Each candidate has an idempotency identity based on participant, rule, resource, relevant revision, and rule version. The worker verifies ownership, family scope, permissions, meaningful content, retention or settlement, distinct collaborators, and daily, weekly, monthly, and lifetime limits.

More than six candidate events in 60 seconds places that category in cooldown until the next ISO week and until its rolling seven-day volume is within its configured cap. Three bursts in 28 days place the account in Catch-up mode. Awards resume only after two clean qualifying weeks and after the rolling 28-day rate returns inside its limit. Suppressed events are never backfilled.

Recreated records, reinstalling the same client or plugin, self-interaction, circular collaboration, refunded payments, duplicate resources, and repeated normalised content do not award twice. Participants see neutral explanations such as Daily cap reached, Waiting for verification, or Catch-up period. Authorised super admins can inspect the underlying audit detail.

Background, Subtle, and Expressive interface modes

Background only collects and analyses progress without decoration. Subtle, the default, adds a level-coloured profile ring and a small static badge notch. Expressive can add static header accents, progress colours, and badge stickers. Effects never move content, obscure a photo, or add distracting animation, and reduced-motion preferences are respected.

Rule publication and recalculation

Published rule versions are immutable and audited. A prospective publication affects future processing only. An authorised recalculation rebuilds score and badge eligibility in a background shadow snapshot, keeps the current ranking available during the job, and swaps the completed snapshot atomically. Recalculation never reduces Canopy Points or an already redeemed benefit. Changes to scoring, badge thresholds, maturity, caps, cooldowns, and safety rules require can_manage_settings. Changes to spendable-point grants, reward prices, permanent limits, AI grants, and paid-feature unlocks also require can_manage_commerce; mixed publications require both.

Advanced analytics and the Progress Coach

Advanced Progress Analytics and the Racinage AI Progress Coach are included for Family, Max, and Lifetime accounts. Lite users may permanently unlock them with points after reaching Branch. The coach is read-only, requires an explicitly configured AI provider, and consumes normal AI credits. Progress is not inserted into ordinary AI prompts. The assistant reads cached Progress aggregates only when an authorised Progress capability is invoked.

Background processing and performance

Normal navigation and ordinary writes do not calculate scores, streaks, badges, ranks, or reward eligibility. A leased command-line worker processes trusted activity in bounded batches of at most 500 and exits immediately when no work is available. A bounded hourly scan advances each participant's cached seasonal window only when their local ISO week changes, so expired weeks leave the 12-week score without adding ranking work to page requests. Non-Progress pages load at most one indexed cached profile summary per session when a visual mode is active. Detailed rankings and analytics load only on Progress routes.

Racinage Free

Racinage Free keeps private offline-only score, weekly consistency, badge, and interface-mode data in its local SQLite database under %LOCALAPPDATA%\Racinage Free. It recognises trusted local core actions and reviewed installed-plugin milestones. It has no alias, public leaderboard, Canopy Points, rewards, plan boosts, hosted AI credits, or Progress synchronisation. The local database is never exposed to hosted services or companion jobs.