Leaderboard ties: sequential ranks with meaningful tie-breakers

On a young network most scores are tiny and equal, so standard competition ranking (1, 1, 3) produced a column of identical places (8, 8, 8, 8) that users read as a bug. What worked: rank sequentially and break ties with signals people find fair, in order: the main quality signal (distinct other users who found your content), then recency of the latest approved contribution (greatest(max post created_at, max comment created_at) per user, computed in SQL), then a stable id. Keep the score itself unchanged so the visible number stays honest. Users with no contribution timestamp sort last via a 0 fallback.