Have your Bunchball points stopped working? Better check End Dates on Missions

We launched the Advanced Gamification module, powered by Bunchball, on March 8, 2013. To award points for actions, we created a mission for each. This worked fine until Sep 30, 2013, when members of our community noticed they were no longer getting points. Their point totals appeared to be frozen.

Since this happened shortly after Bunchball did major maintenance that broke our leaderboards, we did not get immediately alarmed -- we suspected it was simply a new display issue, just as the leaderboards had been displaying incorrect ranking numbers for people and incorrect point totals.

This morning we learned that the reason our points have not been accruing for the past three days is that every single one of our missions expired at 3:45AM CT on Sept 20, 2013. Needless to say, we never set such an expiration date and time for these ongoing missions. Even odder, every single mission also has an identical start time of 12AM CT on Sept 22, 2013. Yet all of these missions were active long before then, most of them since March.

My conclusion? These dates and times were not set manually, but were set by Bunchball either during the error-producing maintenance period or else during Bunchball's efforts to fix the errors from that maintenance. After I manually removed the end date from each mission, points are now accruing correctly.

If you're running Bunchball's Advanced Gamification module, I suggest you check that points are being awarded in your community and look at your missions to make sure they don't have an end date that you did not choose.