Hullo CharlieB4 and GforGraham - welcome to this board.
Trolls and frauds are the people who 1-bomb your story. This happens constantly, whether because they want to vote it down to make their story look better or just because they think that's funny. Mostly they vote 1 on it, however sometimes they will vote 2 or even 3. They have figured out that even a 4 can bring your overall score down from the magic 4.5. (Once you have 10 votes and 4.5 or over, you get a red H next to your story to show it's Hot.)
We are not allowed to know what the algorithms are, because if we knew we would bend the rules and some of us on here would manage to make our 1-bombs stick to stories, LOL. Manu (who does the technical side of this website) has ways of identifying which votes are fraudulent and will clean them off all stories periodically. The 'sweeps' of these votes happen more regularly during competitions (when there is a lot of cheating by pals voting 5 on a story as well as trolls 1-bombing). He will do a private sweep of a story if you think it has been 1-bombed and report it to him.
(When you get more settled in, put a link to your stories in your signature. Then people will see your submissions list as you post and may go and read your stories - and hopefully vote fairly and leave nice comments for you.)
. The downloads have never stopped pouring off the net since I got that one. Too bad I put up the story for free, I would be a rich woman by now if I had charged for everyone to be offended by the poor job I did self-editing and the scrappy dialogue. When I first saw it, with its poor little one star, I felt a bit sad but when the downloads started pouring off the net, I started laughing about it and now I often boast about it here and there. 
I will go and leave a cup of tea for you in my thread in a minute, my dear.
You have just the right attitude, Charlie. If anyone is trollling your story or making adverse comments, I think the best way is to take that as a backhanded compliment. It touched sufficient of a nerve for them to say something or hit a star.
That is a spectacularly good comment! Possibly even worth putting in your signature, to provoke interest. The twisted logic does sound a little familiar to me, I could make a guess who your troll is, LOL, but there are thousands reading our stories so I could be wrong.
My best comment was an unsolicited one star on Amazon calling my first werewolf story 'depraved filth'
If your score went down then some higher votes were identified as being your mates just bumping you up. This is perfectly legitimate, you are entitled to have fans who like your stuff and a group of buddies who give each other a boost. If you send your story round to people, make sure and ask them to keep the page open a little while before they press the star buttons. The make-up of the algorithms which sweep scores is a deep dark secret but we think one way it's done is to clean off any score which has been put on a story seconds after the page was opened, and then the page gets immediately shut again. Unfortunately this excludes scores where people have read the story, gone away to think about it, then come back to give a thoughtful score, but hey - nothing's perfect.
When you are getting a reasonable number of votes (50, 100, 300), then the 1-bombs and overly enthusiastic 5s may not show up too badly. The main problem with 1-bombing is when you are in a category which gets very few votes overall. If your story only gets 3 votes on the first day, you can have a 5 and 4 then one 1-bomb will reduce you to 3.33. That's not an issue in itself, however if it leads to fewer people opening your story and reading it, then it has a bad ongoing effect. Eventually your story will catch up as people access your work, read it and vote, however.
The best way to make sure you get the good scores you deserve is to keep writing. You will get a solid fanbase who look out for your stories, who know how to vote and who will reward you for the work they know you are putting in to give them stories to enjoy. Your later stories will start to score more highly as people rush to your stories when they post up on the New lists, and attract other readers in.
*SOB*s
The ho! LOL.
