Vote Removal

[Fervid]

I agree it's a two way street, and the results seem so hard to fathom that a little explanation from the site would be appropriate. I raised the topic in a message to Laurel when I first saw a sweep. Here's the answer (which I realize may be a standardized response). It seems to confirm only what we could guess already. I does not seem to account for massive vote losses with no change of score, or for other things I've seen:

"We have a script that tags fraudulent votes (fraud votes being anytime someone tries to vote for a story more than once by trying to get around our system). If you see a story - yours or anothers - that has suspicious-looking voting patterns, please do use the REPORT THIS STORY feature to bring it to our attention and we will run a manual check as well. In the OTHER field, tell us to check the voting. When you report suspicious voting this way, the system will send us a direct link to the story and make it much easier for us to check.

If you believe multiple submissions were affected, you only need to report one of the stories. Please do not report the same story more than once in a 48-hour period, and please do not report more than 2 or 3 stories at a time.

Do know in advance that we will not remove votes unless they appear to be fraud."

 

[SimonDoom]

The vote removal process for my stories dropped considerably in the last 24 hours. I lost 1 net vote among all my stories.

 

[Emirus]

Does it make much difference to individual stories?

I’ve only got 11 stories and my total votes are over 1000 but aren’t anywhere near 2000 so I’m not in the 100’s of stories and 1000’s of votes league. So it’s easy for me to keep track of each story and my query about how to you keep track when you’ve got 100’s/1000’s was answered long ago in this thread. But I was wondering, even you lose a lot of votes, does it even out over the stories so, on average, the score for each story stays around the same? Or can’t you differentiate with the system being used?

I only check every few weeks but I’ve just checked again from a week ago and discovered three stories have lost 4 votes between them and each story has gone up by .01. So I was wondering, when looking at 100/1000 is it the same?

 

[RejectReality]

One last time. RR -25 visible, +7 visible. Score up this time.

Les -3 visible. No change in score.

Dark: Nothing. Score unchanged.

The only patterns I've seen is that newer stories are more likely to have been swept than older ones. Stories with more votes are more likely to have been swept than those with lower vote totals. I've only seen "return hits" on 2 stories with thousands of votes and a couple of brand new stories. Everything else has been hit only once during the four days.

All consistent with normal sweeps. The newer the story is, the less likely it's been subjected to repeated sweeps, and the more likely that fraudulent voting remains.
The more votes there are, the more likely there are fraudulent votes there.

The only difference is that they've taken place over an extended period of time. My evaluation hasn't changed at all. It looks like large scale fraud such as a botnet was discovered, and it's being slowly removed by wiping out — for example — votes from a few of the offending IP addresses a day.

If it was some glitch ( queries still don't work this way, and it's not possible ) then why has Dark remained virtually untouched? That pen name is only 6k votes short of Les, who has been hit every day, if only a little.

If it was randomly sucking up votes without direction, Dark should have seen more or less identical activity to Les, at least.

 

[jsmiam]

I’d suggest keeping in mind the lit operators are the same people whose web design talents match a ninth grade computer club’s skill set. We are at times projecting them to having some computing and statistical skills they probably don’t have. (I used to say high school, but kids keep getting smarter at computers)

More likely they’re just running their regular sweeps more often, maybe having to spread out over time (days, weeks, months) to gradually hit all stories sooner or later.

To be fair, also as I say, Amazon with a full time staff of fraud detection people can’t stop review fraud (or counterfeit products), so lit certainly can’t be foolproof either. They’re doing their ninth grade computer club best!

 

[RelentlessOnanism]

I've mentioned this in another thread, but I'll repeat it here. If you think your story has been unfairly scored, and think it's incorrect, you can request a sweep. Click on the 'report' link, choose the 'other' category and write in 'can you please check the score'. I've done it for a couple of my stories and the score eventually shot up. It can take a few weeks to happen though.

 

[LexxRuthless]

It's impossible to tell how many votes my stories are actually losing, since I don't know exactly how many new votes each story has received since this started a month ago. I can look and say, "Well, this story is up 2 votes from yesterday and this other one is down 1 vote," but the first story might have received nine votes over that span while the second didn't get any.

All I know for sure is that this is still going on -- whatever it is -- and I'm tired of it. Over the last two days I finished three more stories I had been working on, but I'm not about to post them while this crap is continuing.

(Yeah, they're all terrible stories. At least this gives me a reasonable-sounding excuse not to share them until I make them a lot better. )

 

[SimonDoom]

Holy smokes. 91 votes removed in 24 hours.

2 of my stories saw dramatic increases in scores. One went above the 4.5 threshold for the very first time -- more than three years after publication.

I'm not alarmed, but it is kind of weird.

I've had a story sitting at 4.49 for almost three years and am hoping the sweeps somehow knock off a few bad votes to push me above that red H threshold.

 

[bushyTrail]

I’d suggest keeping in mind the lit operators are the same people whose web design talents match a ninth grade computer club’s skill set. We are at times projecting them to having some computing and statistical skills they probably don’t have. (I used to say high school, but kids keep getting smarter at computers!

Have you met any? Because nope, their mastery of computers is embarrassing, in my experience (and also country). Digital natives are like "car natives": almost nobody really knows how a car really works and yet almost everybody drives.

This said, I totally agree with the overestimation of how sophisticated sweeps are, which is why I assumed a glitch in the first place (or rather an imprudent change in some parameter, considering that sweep after sweep my votes have been almost unaffected but now a lot of them disappeared)

 

[LexxRuthless]

I've showed a slight net gain in votes the past two days. However, every time I check my stats a dozen or so individual stories have lost more votes.

Now I wish I had been tracking some of the top-list stories to see if their vote loss is proportional to what I'm seeing. Should have thought of that earlier; I'd have some potentially useful data...or not.

 

[LexxRuthless]

I've showed a slight net gain in votes the past two days. However, every time I check my stats a dozen or so individual stories have lost more votes.

Now I wish I had been tracking some of the top-list stories to see if their vote loss is proportional to what I'm seeing. Should have thought of that earlier; I'd have some potentially useful data...or not.

As we said in the Navy, "Belay my last." That little uptick in my total votes over the past 5 days all got washed away today and I had another net loss of 75 votes despite a few stories garnering positive votes. Two of my stories' scores dipped a point (.01). Still not a peep out of site administration to explain what is going on.

I had contemplated putting something on my author page to make sure it isn't my followers trying to up-vote my stories repeatedly, but how am I supposed to do that without violating Laurel's directive? We're not supposed to mention the "S" word at all, much less mention it to readers on the site, right? Not that it would make much difference. It's not like my followers are rabid fans the way it has been suggested. Everyone who follows me also follows dozens of other authors or more. When I take a peek at my newest followers' favorites list, I usually have to scroll down at least a page or two before I reach my name on their list of favorite authors.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I had contemplated putting something on my author page to make sure it isn't my followers trying to up-vote my stories repeatedly, but how am I supposed to do that without violating Laurel's directive? We're not supposed to mention the "S" word at all, much less mention it to readers on the site, right?

Laurel has asked that we don't speculate on how sweeps work, since it might give pointers on how to bypass them, but I don't recall her ever saying that we can't mention their existence.

 

[RejectReality]

Start out with a few stronger statements for long-time followers.

"Please don't multi-vote or down-vote other people. I don't want that sort of 'help'. Cheat votes get removed anyway, so just play fair!"

After a few stories, you can strip it down to something like I use most of the time. "I'd appreciate your vote ( one per reader! No shenanigans! )"

And you don't have to remember to do it every time. Just frequently enough that any newcomers don't get not-so-bright ideas. You can skip it if you're testing the waters of a new category, breaking out into a story with a different 'feel' than usual, etc. If you have a blog, website, etc., where people who read you go, then bring it up there as well. It's part of the main top-page blurb of my website in both the Dark/Les and RR parts of it. You can go into more detail off-site about how they actually have a negative effect on your scores, and an even worse one on your spirits as a result.

 

[Salacious_Scribe]

So on August 2nd I found out you could download a spreadsheet with stats, so I did. Never really looked at it. I downloaded another today and compared my numbers.

My totals over the last almost two weeks...

Average score across all 50 stories increased from 4.444 to 4.447 (+0.0027 points)
My total Views increased 46,836

Vote count increased by 134.
Based on my math below, my votes should have increased roughly between 500-650. So there are a lot more votes unaccounted for than people realize.

One story gained 72 votes. This story posted on 8/2 so it was new.
One story lost 16 votes. This was a Cuckold story in LW.

When I look at the story that lost 16 votes...

It's a cuckold story in LW so it got slammed by the trolls. It's also currently my lowest rated story and only one of three that are under a four.

The score increased from 3.72 to 379 (+0.07 points). It lost 16 votes despite an additional 1,034 views. Based on my view to vote ratio calculations below, this story should have gained about 12 votes. So it may have lost as many as 28 votes, give or take a few.

View to vote ratio this story:
8/02 46,593:618 view to vote ratio. If I did my math correctly that's a 75:1 ratio
8/14 47,627:602 view to vote ratio. If I did my math correctly that's a 79:1 ratio.

Overall view to vote ratio is:
8/02 942,438:10,780 views to votes. If I did my math correctly that's a 87:1 ratio
8/14 989,184:10,914 views to votes. If I did my math correctly that's a 90:1 ratio


19 stories had scores go down.

2 stories had the same number of votes. One lost .02 the other lost .06 points.

4 stories that lost points gained votes.
+11 votes -.02 points
+01 votes -.02 points
+03 votes -.01 point
+01 vote -.01 points
+04 votes -.04 points

13 stories lost 1-5 votes and lost .01-.07 points.

My biggest loss was one of my highest rated stories that dropped 0.13 points from 4.71 to 4.58. None of my stories lost or gained the coveted HOT

Based on an in depth review of all my stories, votes lost and score changes, I have come to several conclusions.

1- I wasted way too much time doing this instead of working My next great American Erotic story

2- Older stories lost more votes than newer ones. LW stories lost more votes than other categories. Trolls infest LW like Rats in NYC subways.

3- This is either a deep sweep upgraded algorythm, or fraud was discovered and targeted.

4- No matter what peop;e will believe conspiracy theories.

5- All these numbers are meaningless.

*****TL;DR*****​

Pointless math with meaningless numbers that won't convince anyone of anything because people will believe whatever they want to.

 

[RejectReality]

Let's see what it looks like after a few days of not looking.

RR, 27 visible votes gained, 48 visible votes lost. 3 scores down .01, 2 scores up .01

Les, 13 visible votes lost. 2 scores down .01, 1 score up .01

Dark, 8 visible votes lost. 1 visible vote gained. 2 scores up .01, 1 score down .01, and one score down .02

All of the score gains were on stories that lost votes. Most of the score losses were on stories that gained votes, or had no change in vote total. Where the score went down and there were vote losses, it was almost exclusively incest stories.

Upon looking back at the previous snapshots more carefully, that loss on incest stories is there to some small degree as well. That hints that a large part of the "cheerleading" fraud is happening in that category, at least for me. I'll be adding a stronger statement to my end note of any stories in that category for a while.

As for the losses on votes gained, that looks like 1 and 2 bombing. It will interesting to look in a few days to see if the next pass of the sweeps have come along and reversed that.

 

[lovecraft68]

I don't watch my numbers so have no idea if anything is going on with them

But I've been watching the one that went up two weeks ago. It keeps losing then regaining, the losing votes. This isn't just daily its early am and at night.

In addition to that I was looking for a comment on a story I wrote a few years ago to show someone. It's missing, a quick scroll through showed at least two more, I know because they were registered users and I'm not seeing them.

They are still here, so its not a case of deleted account. None were hateful or even negative, certainly no spam. They're just gone. Again, no idea if this has happened to other stories, but I don't know why that one would be special

Further more...in the last three weeks I have received seven comments that said 'new' but had dates ranging from early May to last month.

One more...my latest story is exactly what I'd expect for views/favs, score is better than I'd thought it would be(also this is the story with the yo-yo voting, but th total is pretty close to what I feel is normal for what it is.

The comments are not right. There is no way a story in that category with the following it has, and the following I have would only get 18 comments in two weeks and not a new one in a few days.

The two I released before that are just as low. They're low all the way around numbers wise because its a story I usually don't write, but its still a large category with the most readers and the comments just don't match, if anything I should have gotten more trolling ones for not sticking to what I usually do.

Bottom line is something is awry. A program gone rogue? A Glitch? I don't know. I know this is nothing personal against anyone. I know the site is not looking through hundreds of thousands of comments and picking which to keep or boot.

We also have the duplicate story glitch showing up again.

It is what it is, there's nothing anyone can do about it. As always the site will never acknowledge it, and in the same vein won't announce when its fixed. Just as it started it will just as suddenly stop.

@Reject Reality...I don't know what your issue is. Seriously, I'm not busting your balls, but look at this thread. You keep popping in every few posts with "Nothing to see, nothing wrong, OMG how could anything be wrong here?" meanwhile just about every other person is reporting an issue

Are we all lying? We're too stupid to figure out when you start at 600 and have 595 an hour later you lost votes?

Enough with blaming over zealous readers. That has been going on since voting has been going on and yes sweeps will get a lot of those, but the point is it seems there is an ongoing permanent sweep and I doubt all votes are nefarious.

Its an issue...BFD, it happens, its a big site that they can't update all at once so they run around sticking their fingers in the holes and when they do it, another hole appears. There's nothing wrong with admitting the obvious.

But you have this at this point absurd refusal to admit there can ever be an issue... on a site riddled with them.

 

[SimonDoom]

The vote removal process, which was quite dramatic for my stories for a few weeks, seems to have stopped. I've gained votes in the last three days. I've lost a few for a few stories, but nothing dramatic. But definitely a net gain.

Re Lovecraft's remark on comments: My impression is they are coming more slowly because of the still relatively new and more rigorous vetting process. I receive very, very few comments, relative to views and votes. So it doesn't surprise me. What surprises me a bit is that I've seen comments disappear, usually negative ones, that, while negative, weren't completely beyond the pale. I mean, maybe the one that said the two main male characters of my story should be castrated was a bit extreme. I hoped to preserve it for archival purposes, but it's gone, as are some others, through no effort or request of mine.

I suspect what's happening is that the site owners are trying more assertive methods to sweep fraudulent votes, and to vet comments, and sometimes those methods, being still new, have been overinclusive, resulting in the sweeping of more votes or deletion of more comments than anticipated. I agree with LC it's hard to imagine the Site owners have the time to be going over all this stuff and making one-by-one judgment calls, but who knows?

 

[RejectReality]

I said almost from the very beginning ( with the exception of the first post or so where nobody was reporting that this was ongoing and daily, where I called out the recent contest sweeps at the time ) that I believe this is large-scale fraud removal. Rare, but not unheard of.

It's happened before, it will happen again, and it will eventually come to an end. At the very least, if this is a new, daily, aggressive sweep policy, it will run through all the possible matching criteria on older votes, and the number of votes will slow down to a trickle through simple attrition, due to the methods most bad actors are going to use to cast large numbers of fraud votes. The rest are going to be using slower methods that reduce the number of fraud votes they can cast, so it balances out if they're accessing more IPs, and most of those will be from nations that don't actually visit the site that often, therefore reducing the possibility of friendly fire on older votes.

I've also said that the odds are that some legitimate votes are getting swept. Few people have static IPs. Therefore it's likely that someone now engaged in malicious voting is using an IP that was used by someone else to cast legitimate votes in the past. Unfortunate, but unavoidable. It's virtually impossible to block malicious voting before it happens without severely impairing the experience of normal visitors to the site. The only way to deal with it is to clean up the mess afterwards.

If a botnet is involved, it's unlikely there's any of this friendly fire, as those are typically run off of servers where the IP would never be assigned to the general public.

The reason I'm not concerned about this being a glitch is because I understand how queries work. There's been more than enough bumping of this thread and direct contact with Laurel for them to check to see if they've botched the criteria somehow. Absent that, it's the same code that runs on sweeps all the time. Queries cannot go rogue and start deleting random data. They simply do not work that way.

The more likely thing to happen, even with botched criteria, is for things to be missed or absolutely nothing to happen. Even in a situation where botched criteria is causing unintended deletion, everyone would have noticed, because the most likely scenario there is that vote totals would be swirling down the drain in the range of hundreds at a time, not tens.

It's not a bug such as the forum profile bug, because that was causing database corruption, and that would be something everyone would notice as well. A bug such as the toplists freezing is caused by the cache failing to update. A bug such as stories "falling into the cracks" of the queue so they don't appear in Laurel's control panel and comments getting lost in the cracks/taking a long time to appear on a story is likely the same thing. The bug with multiple copies of a series appearing doesn't affect the database either, as evidenced by the author control panel not displaying them.

Almost every bug being discussed is a display problem. The database is unaffected. The one that isn't was eliminated by the ( admittedly inelegant and uninformative ) fix of redirecting the forum profile update page so it can't be used. The sweeps are direct database editing, and a completely different animal.

I'm seeing obvious patterns that are consistent with removing large-scale ( probably automated ) fraud that's happened in the last 3 years or so. That's why I'm saying there's nothing to see here. Everyone should be glad to see fraudulent votes vanishing, whether they're boosting or tanking your score. I see nothing to indicate that anything other than the intentional removal of fraudulent votes ( + some possible, likely minor, friendly fire ) is happening.

ETA: if there are missing comments on your story pages, you might consider checking through your author control panel so see if they're visible there. I've had several instances where that is the case, though they all eventually self-corrected. They're still in the database, but getting missed when generating the comment list on the story pages. Several of them corrected by simply refreshing the page.

 

[Salacious_Scribe]

The more likely thing to happen, even with botched criteria, is for things to be missed or absolutely nothing to happen. Even in a situation where botched criteria is causing unintended deletion, everyone would have noticed, because the most likely scenario there is that vote totals would be swirling down the drain in the range of hundreds at a time, not tens.

I agree with everything you said, except what I put in bold above.

Based on my two data points I should get one vote for every 75-90 views based on which date you look at. Wtih over 45K views across all my stories that equates to roughly 520 new votes.

Over the same time frame my vote count increased by 134. So based on the math, I can't account for over 400ish votes I should have gotten.

So while I am getting votes and my vote count is increasing, my, in your words...

vote totals [are] swirling down the drain in the range of hundreds at a time, not tens.

I don't think this is a glitch or nefarious, but a short and simple statement from Laurel and/or Manu would be nice...

We found some fraud and are taking steps to remove extraneous/fraudulent votes and stop it from happening in the future. You may notice your stoiries losing votesand scores changing during this ongoing process.

That would end MOST speculation and put some of the conspiracy theories to rest.

[RANT] [VENT]I know that won't happen, never has, never will. God forbid the site owners talk to the unwashed masses that provide their content. [/RANT] [/VENT]

Time to get back to writing.

 

[bushyTrail]

The reason I'm not concerned about this being a glitch is because I understand how queries work. There's been more than enough bumping of this thread and direct contact with Laurel for them to check to see if they've botched the criteria somehow. Absent that, it's the same code that runs on sweeps all the time. Queries cannot go rogue and start deleting random data. They simply do not work that way.

Dude, nobody is questioning the determinism of SQL... The idea that I have and I suspect many others is that the program that chooses which results to remove has changed and could have perhaps not so much of a bug, but a serious design flaw, that makes it excessively selective.

 

[RejectReality]

As I've said before, assuming vote per view averages are consistent over short periods of time is extremely optimistic. There are ebbs and flows of traffic, people who discover you and read through large amounts of your work in short periods of time, etc. There's too much variance to expect a vote per view average to be valid over anything less than months, and I would argue only annually, as many of the traffic variances are seasonal.

If you've picked up a few new readers who are devouring your existing work, you could very well be underestimating the number, but it's just as likely that you're in a lull and overestimating the number. If you pull that average from a short time period ( I'm using annual numbers myself ) then you could have set the bar during a surge, and your normal activity is lower.

As to the sweeps running wild because they were flaws in the selection criteria, Laurel has been directly contacted regarding this at least three people who have said so in this thread alone, which is hardly invisible, so she's aware of the concern. If you don't believe that's enough to encourage her to look into it if it was unexpected, then a direct statement of that would be no more effective at curbing speculation.

 

[vanmyers86]

Just did my metrics again today. All my stories have lost votes, and about half have seen a slight dip in their scores, with just one rising.
But - you play the game, you take your chances, and remember that the house always wins.
And that's OK by me.

 

[KeithD]

The bottom line is that multiple Literotica authors have detected what they think is seriously "off" behavior in the voting statistics maintenance program here, and they've asked about it here and a few have directly done so to the Web site, with the only response from the Web site in nearly three weeks being irrelevant boiler plate not related to the issue being questioned. That's the bottom line; nada from the Web site. Oh, and an apologist just nattering on "nothing to see here." That's not acknowledgement that the Web site has latched onto the issue or done or said anything about it. Or realizes or cares or . . .

 

[NotWise]

The bottom line is that multiple Literotica authors have detected what they think is seriously "off" behavior in the voting statistics maintenance program here, and they've asked about it here and a few have directly done so to the Web site, with the only response from the Web site in nearly three weeks being irrelevant boiler plate not related to the issue being questioned. That's the bottom line; nada from the Web site. Oh, and an apologist just nattering on "nothing to see here." That's not acknowledgement that the Web site has latched onto the issue or done or said anything about it. Or realizes or cares or . . .

It would be nice to have a more relevant answer. I was one of the people who queried the site about what was going on, and I took the boiler-plate response to mean that the odd sort of sweep was planned.

I do hope this isn't the future of sweeps. I've lost votes, and I don't think I've gained anything. I haven't figured it out overall, but the votes swept have probably dropped my scores overall. We can only guess why they did it. It wasn't for me.

 

[jaF0]

I still don't understand why people care. Or even notice.