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Credit is generally awarded only for boarding passes collected or scanned by the electronic reader at the gate. Too many ways to get a boarding pass and then not fly, especially in this age of printing a boarding pass from home or hotel up to 24 hours before a flight. Lots can happen after that to prevent someone from boarding, even if they intended to when they printed the BP.

That said, with over 160,000 members and about 10 million posts, the only way to avoid total chaos on FT is to keep questions on specific topics in the forum for those topics. This question is about UA, since in the final analysis each airline makes the rules for its program. There's an active forum for UA questions. Perhaps a moderator will move this thread to it.