Daily regeneration doesn't properly propagate to full database

[BadCosmonaut]

My understanding is a subscriber should get a full regeneration of every entry in the database every day. During or right after this regeneration, the new PSI for each entry (or lack of a PSI if there isn't one) that was just generated should be pushed (aka propagated) to the full database. So if I'm a subscriber, if I go to the full database soon after a regeneration has occurred and press the "Regenerate PSIs on this Page" button, there usually shouldn't be too many if any changes to the entries on that page.

Instead, I'm seeing some entries in my full database that seem to not be regenerated during daily regeneration. For example, here is a screenshot of my full database page 10 about an hour after daily regeneration occurred this morning. Here is a screenshot of that brief moment right after I press the button where it shows which entries have a change. In the second screenshot, 16 entries have lost their PSI and 3 entries had their score go from 70 to 60.

When I looked up each of the movies that lost their PSI, some of them had zero ratings by users who are currently in my top 1,000 TCI. For example, My Best Girl (1927) currently shows zero users who have it ranked in my top 1,000 TCI.

In order for this movie to have a PSI in the first screenshot, I would have needed at least 3 users in my top 1,000 TCI to have scored it. If I had 3 users like that during daily regeneration, I really doubt all 3 would have dropped out of my top 1,000 TCI in between the daily regeneration and when I took the screenshot about an hour later. While I'm sure this kind of rare coincidence can happen, I've noticed this issue many times on pages where I haven't pressed the button recently. I've been noticing this for months if not years, so I think it's a bug and not just rare coincidences happening a lot.

Okay, that's the issue I've noticed. Does that make sense?

On the one hand, if the system isn't working as intended it should probably be fixed. On the other hand, I kind of feel like I might be missing out on a lot of recommendations if this is fixed, since it could be a long time if ever before I regain a PSI for those movies that lost a PSI. While I do think bugs should be fixed, I wonder if maybe there's a way to preserve these 'old' PSI's that were highly recommended. Maybe movies that have a tier 8 or higher PSI could be added to an automatically created private and hidden collection if it loses its PSI? And if so, if it ever regains a PSI, it could be automatically removed from the collection.

[mpowell]

Okay, yes this sounds like a problem.

As a sponsor, your PSIs should be fully regenerated every single day. We'll look into this very soon, and let you know what we find.

I understand your second point, too... but our goal has to be maintaining valid data, and if a PSI isn't able to be generated, we need to reflect that. One thing we could think about, though, is allowing sponsors to store their top 2000 TCIs. Since only the top 10 TCIs for each film are used, this wouldn't affect the PSIs of films that already have enough. Bit it would allow for the generation of more.

We'll take a look at both these soon, and update back here.

[BadCosmonaut]

I do like the sponsor top 2,000 TCI idea better than my collection idea, so please consider this a feature request

[mpowell]

Alright, we've made both changes.

Now, part of the daily PSI rebuild also clears out-dated PSIs, ie. those that can no longer be generated. This is the way it worked at one point, but we must have accidentally written that functionality.

More excitingly, we've now bumped up the number of TCIs which we store to 2000 for sponsors. This is a limit we put in place for practical storage purposes, but since sponsors are helping support the site, it just made a lot of sense to allow them to store more. This will definitely result in you having a lot more PSIs available. And it's already active -- you should be able to see the changes right now. The PSI for My Best Girl is now able to be built.

Thanks for alerting us to the problem, and inspiring us to figure out a way to improve Criticker for sponsors! And of course, thanks again for helping support the site. Merry Christmas!

[BadCosmonaut]

Quick response time on this one! Top 2,000 looks nice already. Thanks for the reply, and merry xmas to you as well!

[BadCosmonaut]

Quick update. You may want to investigate whether daily regeneration is occurring properly. On my special features page, it says "The last regeneration occured on Dec 24, 08:27." I noticed last week it skipped a day as well.

(Also, I think occurred might be misspelled, unless it's spelled different locally.)

[mpowell]

Hmm... okay, we'll take a look at that soon, and let you know what we find.

(Plus, you're right about "occurred"!)

[stsakiri4]

It hasn't been fixed yet

[mpowell]

It hasn't been fixed yet

Are you sure about this? Maybe it's something we've fixed as part of the general cleanup of bugs related to the game-rollout, but it looks like everything is regenerating properly.

[BadCosmonaut]

I resubbed two days ago. Today, about 8 minutes after my daily PSI regeneration, I went to page 2 of the full database and hit the "regenerate PSIs on this page" button. This was the result. I marked in red 6 movies that changed after I pressed the button, which I had pressed about 8 minutes after my daily regeneration. While it's possible my TCI just happened to change during that time, my guess is it's more likely that the issue described in the OP is happening again.