Incorrect lifetime steps in friends leaderboard

[Doug]

I was asked to cross-post this here in the API forum by a moderator in the Dashboard forum.

Just over a month ago, some of us started seeing inflated values reported for lifetime floors and distance (but not steps) in our web profile page achievement section.  We also "earned" badges when the inflated figures pushed us over the next threshold value.

At the time, I continued to receive my correct lifetime step count in the friends leaderboard (as in  GET /1/user/-/friends/leaderboard.json).  But when they fixed my lifetime floors and distance as reported in my web profile, my leaderboard lifetime step value was evidently cleared out as well.  I first reported it when I saw my API lifetime steps drop to a few hundred.  

Michael (the moderator) told me today he thought all values had been fixed, so I reminded him my API step count was still wrong.  He asked that I post it over here as well.

It isn't everyone's lifetime steps which were affected, just as not everyone was affected by the web profile page lifetime floors and distance problem.  I suspect the "fix" run against those values inadvertently also wiped up some cache values used by the leaderboard lifetime steps.

At the time of this writing, the API is returning 105,790 for my lifetime steps and my profile page is 10,347,155 (which is the correct tracker value sum).

[timhibbard]

I am having this same issue. Fitbit.com shows the correct lifetime number, but the activities and leaderboard API calls are short by about 7.3 million steps. It started yesterday around 6:00 PM ET.

[Doug]

What I didn't discover until last night was that the friends leaderboard API call is not even documented as including the lifetime steps count.  See the official documentation here .  But if you use the API Explorer or your own custom software (as I do), the lifetime steps are included.  Mine are just short by the number of steps I took prior to the fix for the issue that arose around July 10.  I bevlieve that all of the others on my friends leaderboard report the correct lifetime step count.  

[timhibbard]

I have a custom app as well. Two other people on my friends list had their lifetime steps apparently reset yesterday.

[timhibbard]

I kind of expected this issue to just resolve itself. Any status update from Fitbit? 

[Doug]

I didn't really expect it to resolve itself, as I suspect it is not a problem with the API per se as much as there being some non-normalized accumulator field which the API reads and that field has been reset.

There was a problem starting around July 10 where the lifetime floors and lifetime miles/km started getting grossly over-stated on the web profile badge, and causing badges to be "earned" prematurely.  This did not affect the web profile lifetime steps, or the friends leaderboard API lifetime steps.

After that issue was reported as fixed, some of us still had over-stated web profile floors / distance.  There was a thread in another forum where those of us still wrong made a post and our stats were manually corrected.  It was on the date they fixed my web profile floors and distance that my leaderboard API lifetime steps dropped to zero.  They have been accumulating since then, but are short by the lifetime steps I had prior to that.

So my SWAG is their databases have various accumulator fields in order to make the retrieval of some figures more efficient than having to sum all the values in a fully normalized database.  I further suspect the leaderboard API will not report my lifetime steps correctly until that accumulator has been rebuilt or patched manually.

What I had not noticed until just the other day is the leaderboard API is not even documented to return the lifetime steps.  Guess I just noticed they existed in the return data while examining the contents under debug so added it into what my custom app reports.

[jak5280]

Yesterday all of my friends lifetime steps reset, but when I look at my lifetime page I see my correct number, vice versa for them. Anyone knows what gives?

[Doug]

Looks like the lifetime stats of all my friends have reset in the leaderboard API as well.

Nobody else is running my custom software, so I don't know what others see about me.  If you are saying each person sees their own stats right, that sounds like a new privacy change (or the API looking at the wrong privacy setting).

Bummer.

In the past it was just mine which was wrong so I modified my software to adjust the value I got back from the API with the steps previously "lost".  Now I can't see anybody's accurate lifetime steps.  😞

Doug

[timhibbard]

I'm still seeing this issue. As viewable from the images, the lifetime from the tracker is correct, but "total" is incorrect and has been reset to zero several times over the last couple of weeks. This has happened to everybody in my friend list.

My app consumes the friends/leaderboard data, which shows the "total" steps rather than the correct tracker steps. It then orders you amoung your friends in weekly, lifetime and daily average steps. As of this writing, only the weekly steps coming from the api are accurate.

I have delayed releasing my app because 2/3rds of the data is incorrect and that lends itself to a bad first impression! Users do not need to understand that the Fitbit api is having issues and will hopefully be fixed, but buy my app anyways!

I could iterate through all the user's friends and populate the lifetime steps from user/<user>/activities, but that would result in lots of api calls, slowdowns and likely rate limiting. Which is also a bad experience. I'm really hoping one of the Fitbit API folks will jump in and let us know when we can count on this being resolved.

Thanks!