Badging newbies - Achievement Automations

LisaM said:

We would like to give our newbies a badge to identify them on the community as being a newbie. We've created an achievement and a new badge and we've used the automation of Award to members based on their account age with the account age range being from 0 to 30 days,

However.....

It's only picking up a handful of people i.e. I have only 80 users showing as having our new newbie badge but in actual fact we've had over 415 new accounts created in the last 30 days? 

What is the trigger that you are using to perform the action of awarding the achievement?

It's just based on the OOTB achievement automation which is scheduled to run every couple of hours. 

Award to members based on their account age  with the range being set as being 0 to 30 days so if the account is between 0 and 30 days old it awards the achievement to the user and then revokes it if the account is over 30 days old. 

I've changed the numbers to see if it's that i.e. had it set to 1 - 30 days or blank - 30 days and 0-30 days and it makes no difference to the number of users it's picking up. 

It's working as I'm seeing some of our new users being awarded the badge but it's not picking up all newbies and I can't fathom why! 

It's just based on the OOTB achievement automation which is scheduled to run every couple of hours. 

Award to members based on their account age  with the range being set as being 0 to 30 days so if the account is between 0 and 30 days old it awards the achievement to the user and then revokes it if the account is over 30 days old. 

I've changed the numbers to see if it's that i.e. had it set to 1 - 30 days or blank - 30 days and 0-30 days and it makes no difference to the number of users it's picking up. 

It's working as I'm seeing some of our new users being awarded the badge but it's not picking up all newbies and I can't fathom why! 

Looking at the automation, which we haven't changed in 12.1.4, I observed that:

- By default, it runs at 6 am each day, which means it wouldn't award the achievement to any users after this time in a given 24-hour period, so they would look "missed"

- The server may be running a different timezone than what you're expecting, which would also shift when this 6 am schedule runs

- The script may be having difficulty pulling the account age from the user account due to a bug in the platform or upon user registration or interrogating the user account

- Something may interrupt the server when it's looping through the users it's collected in the specified period

My next steps with it would be to run it on a non-production instance with debugging, and using an automated script to create user accounts to trigger the problem, or to make sure that date/time/year is being passed to the script correctly if any changes have been made.