I often use skritter at about 3 or 4 am mountain time - about 6pm here in China. Frequently, there is a glitch that resets my time and loses the characters I have practiced in that time. For example, just now I practiced for almost 30 mins and when I looked to check my time it had reset to 2 mins. I'm not sure how this affects my stats and the learning algorithm, but I'm not as worried about that part since I need the practice. :-) Is there some sort of daily maintenance going on at that time? Should I just avoid that time of day?

Based on my experience, the timer gets reset at the beginning of each new "practice day". However, the practice day doesn't start at the same time as the corresponding calendar day. I'm in the Central time zone, and my practice day for December 20th ran from 4am on the morning of the 20th to 4am on the morning of the 21st. So, at 4am, my practice time goes to zero and starts all over. I believe that 4am Central time is the same as 6pm in China, so that would explain your time being reset.

I don't know how this applies to your losing practiced characters. I have seen my number of characters to review jump a little, but I always figured that they were just being updated and I had more to review.

Does it have anything to do with the time settings in your general settings section of your account?

Mykal, thanks! That seems like good information!

Adolman, I'm not sure....I'll take a look. Thanks!

Mykal is correct; the day starts and ends at 4am of the timezone you choose. I figured that people's days are really divided by when they sleep, so if they do a late night practice session past midnight, that should really count toward the day before, so 4am is the arbitrary dividing line.

And yep, I just checked and you're set to Denver time, so it resets at 4am mountain time. That's why we have you fill in your country and timezone right after you make a new account; the progress page won't assign your work to the correct day if you don't set it!

The timezone isn't used for much else; actually I think the only other place it's used is here in the forum, showing you the time posts were made based on whatever timezone you have set.