Points and rankings
Daily rewards
The exact schedule, how streaks and calendar days work, and why the reward stops growing.
You can claim a small number of points once a day. Claiming on consecutive days builds a streak, and a few days in the streak pay more than the rest.
There are three places to claim: a pop-up the first time you load a page after signing in, the panel on your dashboard, and your points and rewards page. All three are the same claim — take it in one and the others show it as taken.
You have to claim it
The reward is never given automatically. Signing in does not claim it, and neither does loading a page. There is a button, and pressing it is the whole mechanism.
This is on purpose. A reward that arrives by itself is not a reward, it is a login bonus you cannot decline — and it would quietly pay people for opening a tab rather than for taking part.
The pop-up is the one exception to Democratia never interrupting you, and it is a reminder rather than a reward: it tells you what today is worth and offers the button. Dismiss it and nothing is lost — the reward is available all day, from the dashboard or the rewards page. It appears once per sign-in, not once per page.
The schedule
| Day of cycle | Points |
|---|---|
| 1–4 | 1 |
| 5 | 5 |
| 6–9 | 2 |
| 10 | 10 |
| 11–29 | 3 |
| 30 | 30 |
A perfect thirty-day run pays 114 points in total. The panel always tells you what today is worth and what the next higher day pays, before you claim — the numbers are fixed and knowable, never a hint that something better might happen.
It repeats, and it never grows
After day 30 the schedule starts again. Your streak keeps counting up — day 47 is still shown as day 47 — but the reward comes from where that day falls in a repeating thirty-day cycle. Day 31 pays like day 1; day 60 pays like day 30.
This is the whole reason the cap exists. Without it, a streak long enough would eventually out-earn every other way of participating, and the leaderboard would rank persistence at logging in above organising polls and casting ballots. Turning up should be worth something. It should never be worth more than taking part.
Calendar days, not 24-hour windows
A day is a calendar day in Democratia's timezone (Europe/Lisbon by default), not a rolling twenty-four hours from your last claim.
The practical difference: claim at 23:50 and you can claim again twenty minutes later at 00:10, because that is the next day. A rolling window would refuse until the following evening, which is not what a "daily" reward means to anybody.
Your streak continues if you claimed yesterday. Miss a day and it restarts at 1 — there is no grace period, no way to buy the day back, and no way to repair a streak after the fact.
The day boundary is decided by the server. Changing your device's clock or timezone has no effect whatsoever; none of it is read from your browser.
Your history
The rewards page shows your streaks as runs of consecutive days — "7 days, 3 to 9 July, 14 points" — along with your longest streak, how many days you have claimed in total, and what they have paid. It also shows the full cycle table with your current position marked, so what comes next is never a surprise.
Achievements
Claiming feeds three achievements: your first claim, a five-day streak, and a thirty-day streak. See achievements for their values.
The points are ordinary points
They go through the same ledger as everything else and count towards the rankings identically. They are also subject to the same rule about reversals: a daily reward is never taken back, because unlike a ballot award there is no poll that could later be cancelled.
If you claim twice
You cannot. If you press the button twice — a double click, a slow connection, two tabs — you get one claim, one ledger entry, and a note saying you have already claimed today. That is not an error and nothing went wrong; the second press simply had nothing to do.