I know, this is a bit of a perennial issue on here, but:
As of this week, the browser version of LingQ (using Firefox) is overcounting words read by a factor of 3-5 (!) again. For illustration, a ~6 min Chinese lesson with <10% unknown words is awarding me 600+ coins (should be ~150, judging by previous experience and app).
I use coins to gauge how much I’m doing every day, but of course this state of affairs makes that impossible.
Here’s another example from today. Just from having my Persian lesson on the screen (around 340 words on one screen) for some time, and before interacting with it at all, I get awarded ~1100 words read, for 110 coins. (That was when I started writing this post. After checking back just now, it went up to 1780 words read for 178 coins. I did not LingQ or read anything in the meantime.)
I think the problem might be that the browser counts words read when they display on the screen – rather than after paging or some other type of interaction. Thus for some reason every time the browser window is opened, it counts another 300+ words read. That, of course, results in a massive inflation of words read, especially if you go in and out of the window/tab while working on the lesson.
To summarize what I think is happening: it seems like LingQ’s browser version refreshes words read at particular intervals (possibly when the window/tab is accessed, or possibly at regular time intervals), AND counts everything on the screen as newly read with every refresh. This results in overcounting by hundreds or thousands of words if the screen remains the same for any length of time.
Yeah - I just “earned” 165 coins just from having my Ukrainian lesson open (without interaction) for about 1.5 hours by accident. There is definitely some kind of double and triple counting of words on the screen.