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Congratulations to DragonCobalt, SolarRay, xelliebabex, and all the contest participants.
On to Summer Luvin'
Egads! I thought for sure I'd crossed the too-many-votes threshold. I guess I just slipped by for once. Thanks-- and congrats to DragonCobalt & xelliebabex! And a huge thank you to Alice_Rosaleen, who was kind enough to be my beta reader and steer me right during my fav contest. If you haven't read her stories yet, please do!
Basically, the site administrators regularly (and more frequently during contests) run an algorithm through the story files and purge suspicious scores, both one-bombs and helpful-fives. Nobody knows how it's done, but speculation suggests there's a connection with time on the page as well as noting the IP address. That is, if a story is opened and a score dropped on it in less than a human's reasonable read time for a given text length, that score will be stripped.Well, I'll be darned... I'm a newb and couldn't understand why my score changed from approx. 4.45 to 4.65. I didn't know about this 'sweep' business, and still don't really understand what it is, but I'm not arguing...!
Basically, the site administrators regularly (and more frequently during contests) run an algorithm through the story files and purge suspicious scores, both one-bombs and helpful-fives. Nobody knows how it's done, but speculation suggests there's a connection with time on the page as well as noting the IP address. That is, if a story is opened and a score dropped on it in less than a human's reasonable read time for a given text length, that score will be stripped.
I couldn't vote twice on my own stories, for example, unless I used different IP address. I'll occasionally read someone's story and think, this sounds familiar, and then find I've already read it, scored it, and sometimes left a comment - so the system remembers IP addresses.
Your whole story file will be scrubbed, regardless whether or not you have a story in that particular contest.
Sweeps can happen at any time, depending what is happening across the whole story file. There can be several sweeps across a contest and in the period immediately following.Fun fact, my nude day story entry just got swept. went down from 1850 to 1750. When the contest ended (and the sweeps were supposed to have already happened) it was at 1800. How did I get a sweep that took away so many votes after it should have already been swept? If everything was done correctly during the contest sweep, there is no way my votes should have dropped below 1800. Something seems really wrong here.
Sweeps can happen at any time, depending what is happening across the whole story file. There can be several sweeps across a contest and in the period immediately following.
It is what it is - your story must have had a high number of suspect votes for such a reduction. Or look at it this way, a 5% noise floor. No point worrying about it though, you can't influence the outcome.
Fun fact, my nude day story entry just got swept. went down from 1850 to 1750. When the contest ended (and the sweeps were supposed to have already happened) it was at 1800. How did I get a sweep that took away so many votes after it should have already been swept? If everything was done correctly during the contest sweep, there is no way my votes should have dropped below 1800. Something seems really wrong here.
There you go, RR has explained the deeper sweep.He points out a curious phenomenon, however, which is that there can be subsequent sweeps that delete votes that presumably should have been deleted in a previous sweep. So sweeps appear not to be handled the same way all the time. And that is a huge number of votes to be deleted. I can't recall ever having so many votes deleted all at once.
I've experienced the same phenomenon with comments -- where nasty comments get deleted over time, and comments that seemingly would have been candidates for deletion don't get deleted the first time but do later. It makes me wonder what method the site admin has for scanning story comments.