I always thought maintained progress referred to the fact that someone had started maintaining my abandoned add-on, so I never looked really closely at this thread. When I realized it was an entirely different metric, I obviously wanted to try it out.
I had been getting these weird huge jumps, which I attributed to not really grokking the metric. In practice, I’d get a beep (Beeminder emergency eep day), do all my outstanding reviews, study some new cards and only barely reach my minimum for the day. The next day, if I synced the add-on, there’d be a huge jump.
Today, I figured it out (since I’d be derailing otherwise). The graph looked like this at the start:
I did everything I possibly could. And … my rotestock was lower than it had been just two days ago?
The add-on basically searches for cards “-is:suspended -is:new -is:due -is:buried -prop:due<=0”. If you have notes with many cards, say 5, and you’re reviewing 100 of them with the bury related cards option(s) checked, that potentially adds 400 cards to the buried count, which will subsequently be subtracted from the rotestock count. The next day, those automatically buried cards will be unburied again, and the metric will jump.
Immediate fix? Unbury before syncing!
Possibly, the metric should be tweaked a bit. But I don’t believe Anki makes it easy. There’s no way to search for “overdue” buried cards (which are the only ones that should be subtracted from rotestock IMO) that I can think of. Might need to be a feature request for Anki? But definitely a nice add-on @bluetulip!