Typing leaderboards

How these leaderboards work

Three boards, measuring three different things: typing speed, game scores, and practice streaks. All of them are readable without an account. Only appearing on them requires one.

Speed boards are divided by language and by test length, and both divisions matter. A 15-second burst and a two-minute run are not the same event — almost everyone is faster over 15 seconds — so ranking them together would reward choosing the short test rather than typing well. Languages are kept apart for a related reason: a words-per-minute figure is comparable across scripts in its units but not in its difficulty, and a single table across all 86 would be measuring the script as much as the typist.

Each person appears once per board, with their best result. There is no advantage to taking the same test fifty times beyond the practice itself, which is the point. The streak board is the exception to the per-language split: a streak counts days you practised, in any language, so it is one table for everybody.

The division by length is the one people query, so it is worth naming the reason: fifteen seconds and two minutes measure different things rather than the same thing more or less precisely. A short run catches a peak you hold by concentrating; a long one catches a rate you could sustain. Ranking them in one table would reward picking the short test. How long a typing test should be goes through what each length actually measures.

A leaderboard entry is a name you choose and a number. It is never your email address, and there is no way to get from a row on a board to the account behind it. The database function that serves these tables returns a rank, a username, a score and an opaque account id — the id only so the page can mark your own row, and it grants nothing, because every rule in the database checks the identity in your signed-in token rather than any value your browser sends. You can change your name, or remove yourself from the boards entirely, from your account panel at any time.

These boards are new, and it is worth saying so rather than implying a ranking means more than it does. A top position today reflects who has taken a test so far, not who is fastest — and in the less-used languages it may reflect a single result. That will change as more people practise; until it does, treat the tables as a scoreboard rather than a census.

Set a time first: take the speed test, or pick from all 86 languages. If you are wondering what a good result looks like, the guide on what counts as a good typing speed is more useful than the top of a board.