Vote Removal

[LexxRuthless]

Just checked my story stats again, and I'm STILL losing votes -- LOTS of them. It made sense that they might simply be running more sweeps as a result of the contests, but those have closed. Over the past three days, my stories have lost nearly a hundred more votes. Down 1435 votes in the past month, and my stories appear to have lost votes every single day over that span now that I've been paying attention to it.

The stories losing the most votes are my older, standalone stories from two years ago or more. They had been accumulating votes at a pretty steady pace after their initial release, so it's not like any of them had some suspicious spike recently. And it's not simply a "big" sweep, like the program found some suspicious bot behavior and deleted a big chunk of votes -- this loss has been steady over the past month, stripping a handful of votes from every story, every day as far as I can tell.

What the hell is going on?

 

[LexxRuthless]

It's actually worse than that, though. Here's a chance for me to actually use Simon's "Views/Vote" stat. I have consistently gotten one vote for every 75 views. There has been a little variance, but less than a point either way for two years. My stories are down a cumulative 1435 votes from July 9th, but that's a NET SUM. Over the same span, my stories have gotten another 179,771 views.

That means I should have 2,397 MORE votes on my stories over the past month. [179,771 / 75 = 2,397]

That means I have had approximately 3,832 votes removed over the past month!!!

 

[NotWise]

Just checked my story stats again, and I'm STILL losing votes -- LOTS of them. It made sense that they might simply be running more sweeps as a result of the contests, but those have closed. Over the past three days, my stories have lost nearly a hundred more votes. Down 1435 votes in the past month, and my stories appear to have lost votes every single day over that span now that I've been paying attention to it.

The stories losing the most votes are my older, standalone stories from two years ago or more. They had been accumulating votes at a pretty steady pace after their initial release, so it's not like any of them had some suspicious spike recently. And it's not simply a "big" sweep, like the program found some suspicious bot behavior and deleted a big chunk of votes -- this loss has been steady over the past month, stripping a handful of votes from every story, every day as far as I can tell.

What the hell is going on?

For me there seemed to be a hiatus over the last weekend, but it's continued since. Still not at the rate you're seeing.

 

[Ginlover]

On my most recent story I've been losing 1-2% of the votes every day. It also praised over the weekend and restarted Monday.
It's now impacted the score which has dropped 0.03. New votes added or removed seems to only be sending it downwards. It's getting pretty upsetting now watching it keep going down over a month after it was published

 

[BelleCanzuto]

Has anyone asked Laurel about this? I know she won't explain how they decide which votes are invalid, but this does seem different in magnitude and duration. Maybe she'd at least explain that part?

I, personally, haven't noticed a loss of so many votes. But I only have 25 stories and none are more than 2 years old.

 

[bushyTrail]

I wrote in the relevant Tech Support thread in the hope that, if many of us report it, it will be taken into consideration. It seems to me the only way, besides writing to Laurel.
My stories keep losing votes too, even my oldest one (published more than a year ago). One of them has lost a third of its votes (not that they were so many, just 20 something) and that has changed its rating to 5.0, which is preposterous. This, if I'm not mistaken, means that even some 4 star votes have been deleted!

 

[RejectReality]

Looked at the three I checked in the last post, and I've lost a grand total of four votes off all of them in the last week. Scores are unchanged on two, but Closing is up .04 since the end of the contest.

If I assume everything in those two names lost 1-2 votes, that would be about 300 some-odd votes. Doubt everything lost votes, though.

Like I said earlier, there's probably a bot-net or a particularly active multi-voter/group of them that's been discovered. Being discovered doesn't mean it's quit either. The sweeps could very well be still removing the existing damage, and acting on new attacks from the perps.

"But... But..."

No.

If the activity matches, whether it was fifteen minutes ago or fifteen years ago, it's going to vanish. The fact that the story has been out for months doesn't matter.
The fact that it's been stagnant doesn't matter.

It's entirely possible that this does cause "friendly fire" of legitimate votes. In most cases, unless you're paying for a static IP, it changes on a regular basis. That means the IP of someone who cast a legitimate vote in the past may now be in use by a malicious voter or bot, and could get flagged for removal.

Unfortunate, but there's no way to prevent multi-voting without severely disrupting the experience of legitimate users. The only controls that can really be put in place are already there, and they can be circumvented with ease in a multitude of ways. ( Even accidentally ) That leaves detecting and removing them after the fact as the only option, as imperfect as it is.

It's not the first great purge. It won't be the last. It's not going to last forever. It may feel like it while it's happening, but it will come to an end, and things will go back to normal.

I'm going to grab all my numbers and see what's happened in a week.

ETA: Since the last time I did a full numbers run back in December, Dark ( no new stories released since 2017 ) is up 429 votes. Les ( One story released since the track and one shortly before ) is up 708 votes. RR ( 5 stories since the track and 7 shortly before ) is up 7892.

I'm defining "shortly before" here as the previous two months before I ran the track.

That puts me a little behind pace for typical annual growth, but not by a huge amount.

 

[SimonDoom]

I've lost a significant number of votes in the last 5 days. So that brings to 23 days the period of time over which I can tell the Site has been deleting a significant number of votes.

Hasn't affected my scores much.

It's not a big deal, for me, because it hasn't affected anything in terms of story scores or visibility so far.

 

[bushyTrail]

Like I said earlier, there's probably a bot-net or a particularly active multi-voter/group of them that's been discovered. Being discovered doesn't mean it's quit either. The sweeps could very well be still removing the existing damage, and acting on new attacks from the perps.

The fact that the number of votes keep going down sounds more like a bug to me.

 

[ElectricBlue]

The fact that the number of votes keep going down sounds more like a bug to me.

It seems to be hammering those writers with high vote counts - I've not noticed a thing. It's probably a penguin mite, some little critter like that .

 

[RejectReality]

The fact that the number of votes keep going down sounds more like a bug to me.

Like I said, this isn't the first great purge, nor will it be the last. It's happened before, and it wasn't a bug then, so I don't see why the pretty much identical observations would indicate something was wrong this time.

Let us all remember that bad actors had a couple of months of being stuck in their houses to go apeshit with manipulating things.

 

[NotWise]

Like I said, this isn't the first great purge, nor will it be the last. It's happened before, and it wasn't a bug then, so I don't see why the pretty much identical observations would indicate something was wrong this time.

I haven't been here for quite five years, but I haven't seen anything like this. Its gone on for at least three weeks now, and for me it's been at a very slow, regular pace. It doesn't "feel" like a sweep, or even like repeated sweeps.

I've had a few scores tick up and a few scores tick down, but it's probably a net zero for me. That's part of why it doesn't feel like a sweep.

 

[RejectReality]

I haven't been here for quite five years, but I haven't seen anything like this. Its gone on for at least three weeks now, and for me it's been at a very slow, regular pace. It doesn't "feel" like a sweep, or even like repeated sweeps.

I've had a few scores tick up and a few scores tick down, but it's probably a net zero for me. That's part of why it doesn't feel like a sweep.

I've been here since 2006 and I've seen long term vote hemorrhages like this twice before. Everybody freaked out, then it stopped after a month or so, and everybody went on with their lives.

You can either believe there's something wrong and wallow in anxiety over it, or keep calm and carry on.

 

[Salacious_Scribe]

Not to disparage anyone, but how does anyone have the time to track how many votes and views and favs they have. There are multiple threads about votes RN and I don't understand the preoccupation with them.

Scores are meaningless. Random people click a star. you don't even know if they read the story or not. Who cares. After the NEW Icon comes off a story I don't even look at the score anymore. I generally have about 50% of my stories over 4.5 and most are at or over 4.

Can anyone explain why you are spending so much time and energy on something that doesn't give you money or food or love? It makes no sense to me.

 

[NotWise]

I've been here since 2006 and I've seen long term vote hemorrhages like this twice before. Everybody freaked out, then it stopped after a month or so, and everybody went on with their lives.

I don't think something wrong. I think they're doing something, and I'd like to know what it is.

You seem to have an inside track on site administration. I don't think it's a good thing for a bunch of overwrought authors to start pummeling Laurel or Manu about what's going on.

Would you ask them?

 

[RejectReality]

It doesn't do any good. Laurel flat-out explains something, and half the people refuse to believe it. Half of those end up assigning some sort of malicious intent which the public statement was intended to cover up.

Besides, ferreting out and removing bad actors + their garbage is so much more effective when the asshats don't know for sure that they're the target.

I don't think something wrong. I think they're doing something, and I'd like to know what it is.

You seem to have an inside track on site administration. I don't think it's a good thing for a bunch of overwrought authors to start pummeling Laurel or Manu about what's going on.

Would you ask them?

 

[KeithD]

Not to disparage anyone, but how does anyone have the time to track how many votes and views and favs they have.

One does so by spending more time husbanding a few stories than one does writing stories. If you've got a lot of stories posted here, you certainly don't have time to coddle them all like precious babies.

 

[KeithD]

It doesn't do any good. Laurel flat-out explains something, and half the people refuse to believe it.

Well, no, not really. Laurel explains practically nothing to the general users. In many cases, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's not really true that the Web site is transparent about much of anything.

 

[Enchantment_of_Nyx]

Not to disparage anyone, but how does anyone have the time to track how many votes and views and favs they have. There are multiple threads about votes RN and I don't understand the preoccupation with them.

Scores are meaningless. Random people click a star. you don't even know if they read the story or not. Who cares. After the NEW Icon comes off a story I don't even look at the score anymore. I generally have about 50% of my stories over 4.5 and most are at or over 4.

Can anyone explain why you are spending so much time and energy on something that doesn't give you money or food or love? It makes no sense to me.

While I agree with the general sentiment, you started out with, "not to disparage anyone..." then implicitly did so, then tossed your (meaningless?) scores in for good measure. I imagine you're frustrated by the ongoing tail-chasing on the subject, but I think some forbearance may be in order. I know I remind myself of that a lot, sometimes too late.

It's also one thing to point out scores' limitations (which are significant), but another to call them meaningless. They're not meaningless. They're not vetted or precise, but there's generally a qualitative difference between a two-star story and a 4.75-star story. Even if they were the most random things on earth, nobody likes to hear something they feel they've earned called "meaningless." Whether we obsess over them or not, most people have a pretty good idea what their scores are, so obviously they have meaning to the authors.

This whole subject does not seem to bring out the best in anyone. People get very uptight about their stats and then other people get aggravated by that. I don't think any comments are going to stop people from obsessing over any type of stats. To worry over them or not to worry over them is probably a personality trait that won't be disturbed absent a significant life event.

 

[NotWise]

It doesn't do any good. Laurel flat-out explains something, and half the people refuse to believe it. Half of those end up assigning some sort of malicious intent which the public statement was intended to cover up.

Besides, ferreting out and removing bad actors + their garbage is so much more effective when the asshats don't know for sure that they're the target.

I'll take that as a flat refusal.

 

[vanmyers86]

Not to disparage anyone, but how does anyone have the time to track how many votes and views and favs they have.

I do metrics twice a month just to keep track, and have a document for comments as well. I have only 10 stories here and as a new(ish) writer of erotica, I like knowing what people are responding to.

We all have different wants and needs for our writing here. A lot of you write stories at a pace that would kill me within a month. I admire your output, but that's not for me.

Getting back to the original topic, all of mine have lost some votes, and it has messed with some scores. I do know for a fact that someone who voted on all my stories deactivated his account, and I wonder if that's part of the sweep. But the fact is, I don't know and never will.

 

[Enchantment_of_Nyx]

It doesn't do any good. Laurel flat-out explains something, and half the people refuse to believe it. Half of those end up assigning some sort of malicious intent which the public statement was intended to cover up.

Besides, ferreting out and removing bad actors + their garbage is so much more effective when the asshats don't know for sure that they're the target.

But what has she explained? I don't doubt that plenty of people would still believe there was something else going on, but it would clear things up to some degree for most people if she just said that this was a sweep detecting fraudulent votes that hadn't been screened before. That reassures everyone that something deliberate is going on, that it's not a bug, and that it will eventually end. It doesn't give scammers any helpful information.

It's extremely low effort and zero cost to explain that much.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Not to disparage anyone, but how does anyone have the time to track how many votes and views and favs they have. There are multiple threads about votes RN and I don't understand the preoccupation with them.

Scores are meaningless. Random people click a star. you don't even know if they read the story or not. Who cares. After the NEW Icon comes off a story I don't even look at the score anymore. I generally have about 50% of my stories over 4.5 and most are at or over 4.

Can anyone explain why you are spending so much time and energy on something that doesn't give you money or food or love? It makes no sense to me.

It will take me longer to type this reply than it will to check the score on my new chapter, so what's the big deal?

I get good scores. I like getting good scores. But I'm a millennial, so there's that.

 

[SimonDoom]

Not to disparage anyone, but how does anyone have the time to track how many votes and views and favs they have. There are multiple threads about votes RN and I don't understand the preoccupation with them.

Scores are meaningless. Random people click a star. you don't even know if they read the story or not. Who cares. After the NEW Icon comes off a story I don't even look at the score anymore. I generally have about 50% of my stories over 4.5 and most are at or over 4.

Can anyone explain why you are spending so much time and energy on something that doesn't give you money or food or love? It makes no sense to me.

Well, just speaking for myself:

1. It doesn't take that much time. With the click of a key I can download the cumulative stats for my stories for the day. With the click of a few more keys I can transfer those stats to an Excel spreadsheet to review. It's not a big deal. I don't do it every day. But I do it on average 2-3 times per week. It doesn't take that much time.

2. I like stats. I'm a stats junkie. I review the stats for my favorite sports teams regularly. It's fun for me. Literotica stats are the same way. If you think this is nuts, I'm not going to disagree with you. But I like it.

3. I believe data is useful. It's noisy and imperfect, but I've achieved some success here, by my standards, and one of the reasons is that I pay attention to data.

 

[NotWise]

I PM'd Laurel.