Sweeps

[Emirus]

1. Firstly can you ask for a sweep to be done of your stories?

2. If so are all stories automatically swept or can you ask for specific ones to be done?

3. When they are swept are the 1’s and 2’s that have been deliberately and maliciously put there removed?

4. If so is it just them or will a matching number of fives be removed?

5. If that’s the case what’s the point?

6. Who do you contact to ask for a sweep?

 

[SyptemberSmyth]

Yes, you can ask for a sweep of your stories. Yes, you can ask for a sweep of specific stories and no, they will not sweep all of your stories if you only request a sweep of one. However, if all your stories were affected by the same issue (i.e. the same person 1-bombed all your stories) it will kick their vote off of all the stories affected. In my experience, if I request a sweep and am clear in my request what I feel the issue is, usually only the offending votes are removed. For example, if I notice 2 or 3 of my chapters are 1 or 2 starred within 15 minutes, I will go to the "report story" button, select "other" then in the explanation I will put, "This story and several others all received a 2 star vote within 15 minutes" and then request the votes be checked. Usually it takes about a week or two, sometimes longer. I have never had 5 star votes removed when I have requested sweeps. However, I have had 5 star votes removed during the random sweeps that occur.

 

[RejectReality]

The sweeps aren't looking for 1s and 2s, they're looking for votes that are cast in a suspicious manner. If you have some fan ( or just a forgetful re-reader ) who casts a second 5, ( or any score ) you may very well lose that too.

Typically, what vanishes are 1s and 5s, because that's what bad actors tend to score, depending upon which end of the spectrum they're coming from.

Whatever your reason for requesting a personal sweep is, you're probably better off just letting nature take its course. There are sweeps running through the system all the time, and if a bad actor is mucking with your score, they're probably doing it to others, and it's going to get caught by a sweep somewhere, and removed from your story as well.

A personal sweep may very well wipe out the damage immediately, but if that raises your score enough to appear on a toplist, you could get bombed even worse, and possibly by more savvy trolls who use methods that take longer to detect.

Slower rises caused by letting the Hoover pass by and do it's work in its own time give your story time to accumulate more natural votes ( especially if you're regularly producing new work that gets your name out there ) and be more difficult to bomb down once the bombs slip away.

You can also get a serious rude awakening if you have some overzealous fan(s) who vote 5 every time they read the story once a week. That's probably not going to be detected by other sweeps, because it's not intentionally malicious, and thus not widespread in the story file. When looking at your story specifically, they'll be found and nuked.