Vote Removal

[scipioparkins]

I know that there's a mechanism that removes votes if they aren't considered valid, but did I miss a memo about this?

This month I seem to have been heamorraging votes - 125 alone this month. Normally it's ones or twos but on one day there were 39 removed and on other days there were 27 and 20. I accept that this is a 'thing' but I haven't seen it like this before. Was there a problem with the system that meant it suddenly caught up on where it should have been>

 

[Enchantment_of_Nyx]

I know that there's a mechanism that removes votes if they aren't considered valid, but did I miss a memo about this?

This month I seem to have been heamorraging votes - 125 alone this month. Normally it's ones or twos but on one day there were 39 removed and on other days there were 27 and 20. I accept that this is a ;thing; but I haven't seen it like this before. Was there a problem with the system that meant it suddenly caught up on where it should have been>

Somebody else mentioned something similar, but I don't know who it was. I'd ask Reject Reality about it.

 

[RejectReality]

The Nude Day contest closed recently. The contest sweeps always have wide-ranging shrapnel that hits non-contest stories.

Along the same lines: The monthly awards for June should probably go live soon. If the story was released in June of this year, it's probably getting direct contest sweeps.

 

[LexxRuthless]

Oof. After reading your post, I compared my current number of votes to the last time I had downloaded my stats (12 days ago). I've lost 1100 votes in that time.

No idea why that would happen. I haven't posted anything new in over a month.

 

[scipioparkins]

Oof. After reading your post, I compared my current number of votes to the last time I had downloaded my stats (12 days ago). I've lost 1100 votes in that time.

No idea why that would happen. I haven't posted anything new in over a month.

I haven't published anything in 3 months. This is across all of my published work - I keep a daily log of all of the stats (come on! I can't be the only one?). Anyway July started pretty normally, then on 17 July -8, 18 July -39, 19 July -5, 0, -7, -7, -3, -27, -20, -1, 0, -5.

There have been the odd additions but over all I'm down -55 votes for July (it was up to 67 for the month on the 16th, all those were removed and 55 more) - as opposed to April 147, May 139 and June 106 - none of them exceptional numbers, perhaps April was a little more than I expected but nothing major.

As I say I expect some removals but well, I've never had minus numbers for a month before.

 

[NotWise]

I haven't published anything in 3 months. This is across all of my published work - I keep a daily log of all of the stats (come on! I can't be the only one?). Anyway July started pretty normally, then on 17 July -8, 18 July -39, 19 July -5, 0, -7, -7, -3, -27, -20, -1, 0, -5.

There have been the odd additions but over I'm down -55 votes for July (it was up to 67 for the month on the 16th, all those were removed and 55 more) - as opposed to April 147, May 139 and June 106 - none of them exceptional numbers, perhaps April was a little more than I expected but nothing major.

As I say I expect some removals but I well, I've never had minus numbers for a month before.

I've seen the same thing, but very few changes in scores as a result of the vote changes.

 

[SimonDoom]

Since July 15, my 32 stories, collectively, have lost 367 votes, and if I discount the one new story I've published in that time, which now has 220, my other 31 stories have lost 587 votes. About 1.1 percent of my total, and I've been publishing since December 2016, so it's a lot.

Most of the votes were lost from stories that were published at least a few years ago.

I assume, but don't know, that the Site is purging votes that appear to come from questionable sources -- perhaps bots or something like that.

The purging has had almost no effect on my scores.

 

[LexxRuthless]

I just checked the latest stats on my stories, and I have lost another 84 votes since I looked yesterday morning. The average of all my scores took a .01132 uptick, so it's not a problem, but it is a troubling trend. When 2-year-old stories suddenly lose 40-50 votes, it leaves them more vulnerable to down-voting.

 

[LexxRuthless]

Okay, the vote loss continues. This has been going on now for more than three weeks. My stories are now down a collective 1368 votes from July 9th. My older standalone stories have all taken the biggest hits at 50 votes or more per story. My most recent standalone story has also lost 51 votes (it has only been on the site since May).

The average rating on my stories has also taken a hit since my last post, so the vote removal is not merely purging the obvious down-votes. This is beginning to suck.

 

[RejectReality]

I haven't looked at anything closely in quite some time, but the two most recent stories — for which I have a reasonable recollection of where they were — seem to have changed little.

It's entirely possible that the sweeps ferreted out a botnet or something, and is doing the removal in stages.

Don't forget that there were indeed two heavy contest sweeps in recent days, and that's a part of the equation. ( Nude Day and June Monthly )

I have noticed some uptick in a couple of toplists, so there may be toplist maintenance going on. Or, it could be that the change is a result rather than a cause. Either way, there's some upward score movement at the top.

As always, I'm going to say to ask readers not to multi-vote or bomb other people to "help you out". You'll probably be surprised by how much of an impact it ends up having on the amount of votes swept off your stuff, and the score that results.

Never underestimate your fanbase's capacity for shenanigans, or believe that it doesn't exist at all.

 

[LexxRuthless]

I haven't looked at anything closely in quite some time, but the two most recent stories — for which I have a reasonable recollection of where they were — seem to have changed little.

It's entirely possible that the sweeps ferreted out a botnet or something, and is doing the removal in stages.

Don't forget that there were indeed two heavy contest sweeps in recent days, and that's a part of the equation. ( Nude Day and June Monthly )

I have noticed some uptick in a couple of toplists, so there may be toplist maintenance going on. Or, it could be that the change is a result rather than a cause. Either way, there's some upward score movement at the top.

As always, I'm going to say to ask readers not to multi-vote or bomb other people to "help you out". You'll probably be surprised by how much of an impact it ends up having on the amount of votes swept off your stuff, and the score that results.

Never underestimate your fanbase's capacity for shenanigans, or believe that it doesn't exist at all.

I understand what you're saying, but the numbers I see on my stories don't support that. It is my older, standalone stories that are losing the most votes, and those had very little movement in the past 9 months. Suddenly, they are losing votes -- every day now for three weeks.

In June, I published a 4-part series. It pushed the total number of votes on all my stories over 100,000 for the first time. It felt like a real milestone to me, since "Views" is affected by all sorts of things and isn't a reliable measure of how much interest a story actually generates. People who care enough to vote, however...that means something. Even if they are finding ways to down-vote repeatedly, it shows they care about the story.

Now, my total number of votes is well below that 100,000 mark, and it continues to drop. Only three of my entries have managed to increase their total number of votes since this thread brought the trend to my attention.

Also, this is a site-wide phenomenon. There was a recent post in the tech support forum concerning the issue. Some of the poems and art submissions have lost votes, and they had so few that they were reduced to an "x.xx" rating. I just thought it was worth mentioning, in case other authors were unaware that their own stories -- possibly ones that have been on the site for years -- may be hemorrhaging votes.

 

[Bramblethorn]

IAs always, I'm going to say to ask readers not to multi-vote or bomb other people to "help you out". You'll probably be surprised by how much of an impact it ends up having on the amount of votes swept off your stuff, and the score that results.

Never underestimate your fanbase's capacity for shenanigans, or believe that it doesn't exist at all.

Yep, this.

A couple of years back I noticed a story series that was doing implausibly well - this is no criticism of the story, it was well written, but the chapters were getting something like a hundred votes a week, more than a month after they'd come out, in a category where votes would normally be trickling at that point. I collected stats over a few days, confirmed my suspicions - I think I worked out that it was getting something like 90 "5s" and a single "4" in that period, and then reported it to Laurel. She agreed that something weird was going on.

Hundreds of votes disappeared from that story. Then they came back. Then they disappeared again. I assume the sweeps and the multi-voters were fighting it out.

Then the author posted that she was leaving the site because her votes kept disappearing. I felt pretty bad about that. I have no reason to believe she was involved in the vote-stuffing, I doubt she'd have reacted that way if she knew the votes getting swept were bogus. My best guess is some misguided fan thought they were doing their favourite author a favour by boosting her stories, when actually they were setting her up for a fall :-/

I don't know whether that's what's happening this time around, but having seen it before, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if this was the explanation.

 

[RejectReality]

I've had stories that have been virtually stagnant for years suddenly get caught up in sweeps. Once the Hoover detects something malicious, it doesn't care when the matching activity happened. It's going to remove it.

The worst kind of manipulators are the really skilled ones. It may be a very long time before they make that one critical error that exposes long periods of mucking with things. Once they do slip up, there's a mountain of their existing mess to sanitize.

This is hardly the first, and it won't be the last great purge. It will, however, come to an end in time. In the meantime, all you can do is think about mitigating the things that you can. That's your fans.

Get them to stop boosting you and bombing your competition, and the only thing the Hoover will find to eliminate are your detractors.

I understand what you're saying, but the numbers I see on my stories don't support that. It is my older, standalone stories that are losing the most votes, and those had very little movement in the past 9 months. Suddenly, they are losing votes -- every day now for three weeks.

In June, I published a 4-part series. It pushed the total number of votes on all my stories over 100,000 for the first time. It felt like a real milestone to me, since "Views" is affected by all sorts of things and isn't a reliable measure of how much interest a story actually generates. People who care enough to vote, however...that means something. Even if they are finding ways to down-vote repeatedly, it shows they care about the story.

Now, my total number of votes is well below that 100,000 mark, and it continues to drop. Only three of my entries have managed to increase their total number of votes since this thread brought the trend to my attention.

Also, this is a site-wide phenomenon. There was a recent post in the tech support forum concerning the issue. Some of the poems and art submissions have lost votes, and they had so few that they were reduced to an "x.xx" rating. I just thought it was worth mentioning, in case other authors were unaware that their own stories -- possibly ones that have been on the site for years -- may be hemorrhaging votes.

 

[RejectReality]

Doesn't this draw the attention to something most readers wouldn't ever think of? On the other hand, I don't think readers who've taken the time to figure out how to make multiple votes, and take the time to do so, will be affected by your note; I'd guess they are too full of themselves, being able to manipulate the system.

I had some of my readers flat-out apologize when I first started posting those notices on the end of my stories. At least a half dozen. You can bet they were the tip of the iceberg. What prompted it was one fan casually mentioning that they voted again every time they read a story/chapter, and another talking about casting multiple votes in a contest.

They don't realize that they're using obvious methods of casting multiple votes ( which can even be done by accident it's so ridiculously simple to do ) and there's no chance in hell that they're not going to be removed in the Hoover's next pass. Probably including their original, legitimate vote. So they're actually doing damage, rather than "helping".

They think they're doing you a favor. When they find out they aren't, and that you don't want it, they stop. Ever since I started posting those notes, the # of votes ( especially 5s ) swept off my stuff has plummeted. My % of swept votes was half or less of the average in contests, for example, where previously it was right there on the average of 20-25%.

My three most recent contest stories only had around 20 votes swept off them combined. Now that I looked that up, I can see that I've had about 30 votes swept from "Golden Rolls" since the end of the contest. ( + any I picked up since that post ) "Closing the Distance" is up 13 since the end of the contest. "Unsealed" is down 2. (+ any I picked up in the meantime ) So I haven't had any significant sweeps of at least those three since the end of the contest.

 

[bushyTrail]

Honestly, I'm kind of astonished by the commitment these people show. I always assumed that it was the authors that gave "a little help" to their work, either by giving it 5 stars or hurting the competition, especially during contests.
But readers... And setting up bots nonetheless... Wow...
Anyhow, I, too, have lost an unusually consistent portion of my votes. Honestly, considering that in 1 year my most popular story has gained just 190 votes and most of them don't have more than 40 votes, I doubt that anyone meddled with mine. The result has been that I've lost a lot of 5 stars and saw a small decline in my ratings, which pisses me off a little.

 

[SimonDoom]

I'm continuing to see votes removed from stories -- new stories, old stories, the entire lot. I first noticed it happening after July 15, and it's been happening since then.

What puzzles me is why votes would continue to get swept from old stories. I suppose it's possible that it's just new votes for old stories, but it doesn't quite look that way.

Still no impact on my stories' scores.

 

[mistersnifter]

I know that there's a mechanism that removes votes if they aren't considered valid, but did I miss a memo about this?

This month I seem to have been heamorraging votes - 125 alone this month. Normally it's ones or twos but on one day there were 39 removed and on other days there were 27 and 20. I accept that this is a 'thing' but I haven't seen it like this before. Was there a problem with the system that meant it suddenly caught up on where it should have been>

To add a touch of pathos, of my two stories on Literotica, one (published end of June) was rated *4 for 3 votes, but is now *3 for 1 vote. Tragic or what??

 

[Emirus]

I have to admire those writers, particularly those with many stories, who keep such detailed records of how their stories are doing so diligently. I’m retired, so I could probably make time available to do the task, except I don’t have the technological expertise to do it. I’m still trying to work out how to to do the multi-quote response when making a comment on my iPhone. That’s not a joke, it’s the truth.

I do keep a list of my stories (but it’s easy because I’ve only got eleven) which I check against my current score every 5/6 weeks but the list is only in the form of the story title against which is, for example 4.78/102. I don’t bother keeping anything more detailed. I have only one story which sticks out and that’s because it still has three 1’s against it which have never been removed. But it is red and I know what the score should be so it’s not so bad.

The only thing I’ve noticed, as a result of this thread, is that over a period of about four weeks one story has gone down .03 with the same number of votes and two others have remained as they were but with less votes. The rest have stayed the same.

I’m wondering, because this phenomenon only seems to be affecting writers with lots of stories (I haven’t checked up so this is only supposition), if there is a connection there and mere mortals, like myself, are immune?

 

[29wordsforsnow]

I’m wondering, because this phenomenon only seems to be affecting writers with lots of stories (I haven’t checked up so this is only supposition), if there is a connection there and mere mortals, like myself, are immune?

It does affect authors with a small number and even newbies too, saw some that lost their only vote and are back to none at all. It's mostly related to voters that are quite active with voting. So, yes, I'm quite disappointed that my support of my single vote for good stories, poems and artwork is lost...I tried to remember some of them, but how to recall all the art that you looked months ago?

 

[NotWise]

I'm continuing to see votes removed from stories -- new stories, old stories, the entire lot. I first noticed it happening after July 15, and it's been happening since then.

What puzzles me is why votes would continue to get swept from old stories. I suppose it's possible that it's just new votes for old stories, but it doesn't quite look that way.

Still no impact on my stories' scores.

I'm seeing it too, but not quite as much as Lexx. I did an informal check, and it looks like I've lost votes every day since July 19th. My older, higher-vote stories are effected more than my low-vote stories.

The scores aren't moving much.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I’m wondering, because this phenomenon only seems to be affecting writers with lots of stories (I haven’t checked up so this is only supposition), if there is a connection there and mere mortals, like myself, are immune?

I've got a fair few stories/chapters posted, but my scores are pretty stable, I can't see much change.

I don't write in the high volume categories, though, so I guess the usual sweeps remove the garbage as I go along.

 

[Enchantment_of_Nyx]

To add a touch of pathos, of my two stories on Literotica, one (published end of June) was rated *4 for 3 votes, but is now *3 for 1 vote. Tragic or what??

I took a quick look at that one. I think people may have been thrown by the technique with the alternating third person omniscient narration and the first-person narration. If they got confused right off the bat and didn't keep reading, that might explain it. They obviously liked your other story, and you picked up followers.

On to the next one!

 

[LexxRuthless]

I have to admire those writers, particularly those with many stories, who keep such detailed records of how their stories are doing so diligently. I’m retired, so I could probably make time available to do the task, except I don’t have the technological expertise to do it. I’m still trying to work out how to to do the multi-quote response when making a comment on my iPhone. That’s not a joke, it’s the truth.

I do keep a list of my stories (but it’s easy because I’ve only got eleven) which I check against my current score every 5/6 weeks but the list is only in the form of the story title against which is, for example 4.78/102. I don’t bother keeping anything more detailed. I have only one story which sticks out and that’s because it still has three 1’s against it which have never been removed. But it is red and I know what the score should be so it’s not so bad.

The only thing I’ve noticed, as a result of this thread, is that over a period of about four weeks one story has gone down .03 with the same number of votes and two others have remained as they were but with less votes. The rest have stayed the same.

I’m wondering, because this phenomenon only seems to be affecting writers with lots of stories (I haven’t checked up so this is only supposition), if there is a connection there and mere mortals, like myself, are immune?

I'm not really that dedicated. There is a built-in function on your author dashboard that gives you detailed statistics for all your stories -- a little "down-arrow" on the right hand side of the bar where it says "Sort By." If you click on that icon, it will download your story statistics into an Excel file so you can take a look at them.

I only became aware of it after reading a discussion on this board over a year ago. Up to that point, I was wondering where people were getting all this information about their stories.

 

[joeyjax]

...
I’m wondering, because this phenomenon only seems to be affecting writers with lots of stories (I haven’t checked up so this is only supposition), if there is a connection there and mere mortals, like myself, are immune?

Emirus, your library of stories is roughly five times mine (since I only have two published stories as of today) but I've noticed the same thing over the last ~couple of weeks. Either my total votes goes down or it stays the same but the average changes. This is following a months-long trend of my vote totals only going up (albeit very slowly). This has happened even on my poems which I'm pretty sure never had more than 5 votes each and are now down to 3.

I understand the sweeps running on occassion, especially near the end of a contest, but I've never noticed it happening nearly every day, like it seems to be doing. It probably only makes me nervous because I've never seen it do this before. So, yeah, there's a little bit of worry it might be sweeping legitimate votes away.

That said, my scores really haven't changed drastically during this time, so I'm cautiously optimistic, though I do keep expecting it to stop at some point. After two weeks of (seemingly?) running every day, it still hasn't finished finding whatever's it's going to find?

I'm pretty certain I've had at least one troll who repeatedly downvoted some of my stuff (who probably hasn't?), but the thought that I might have a rabid fan or two upvoting multiple times never once crossed my mind until someone suggested the idea in this thread.

Since I have so little work published so far, I just find it hard to believe, but I guess it wouldn't be that different than having a troll latch on, right? I'm not sure if I should feel concerned or flattered to have a fan like that.

Actually, I think I'll just revert to my original thinking, which was that it's not happening in the first place. Ha!

In fact, I think I'm going to do the same thing here that I've been doing with my retirement -- stop looking.

 

[mistersnifter]

I took a quick look at that one. I think people may have been thrown by the technique with the alternating third person omniscient narration and the first-person narration. If they got confused right off the bat and didn't keep reading, that might explain it. They obviously liked your other story, and you picked up followers.

On to the next one!

No plans to use that contrivance again. Thanks for your encouraging note!