// the take
A Ruby gem that implements leaderboards on top of Redis sorted sets, with three ranking variants (plain, tie-aware, and competition-style) plus pagination, 'around me' queries, and optional member metadata. It's aimed at Rails/Ruby developers who need high-score tables or ranking features without standing up a separate ranking service.
It leans on Redis sorted sets for the core operations, so ranking, paging, and range queries are O(log n) and don't require loading the whole set into memory. The three ranking strategies (lexicographic-on-tie, same-rank-on-tie, and competition ranking with gaps) cover edge cases that most DIY Redis leaderboard tutorials never handle. The API surface is unusually complete for a small gem: percentile calculation, score-for-percentile, merging and intersecting leaderboards, and ranking a member across multiple leaderboards in one call are all things people end up hand-rolling elsewhere.
The last commit is from March 2021 and the README still references Ruby 2.2 and a Redis client gem from the 2.x era, so there's real risk it breaks or behaves oddly against a current redis-rb and Redis server without someone picking up maintenance. Nothing here is Redis Cluster aware — merge_leaderboards, intersect_leaderboards, and rank_member_across all touch multiple keys, which fails outright on a cluster unless you've hashtagged the keys yourself, and that's not documented. The optional member-data feature is a known leaky abstraction: the README itself admits that remove_members_in_score_range and remove_members_outside_rank leave orphaned member-data hashes behind because the underlying Redis command only returns a count, not the removed members. All calls are synchronous/blocking Redis round trips with no async option, so under real throughput you're paying full latency per leaderboard operation.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →