Vote Removal

[KeithD]

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.

Check back in when you have 1,000 stories here. Even getting to one that starts with an "M" then is a major chore on the new author's page--after you've hummed through the entire "Bohemian Rhapsody" while your work pages are thinking about loading.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Check back in when you have 1,000 stories here. Even getting to one that starts with an "M" then is a major chore on the new author's page--after you've hummed through the entire "Bohemian Rhapsody" while your work pages are thinking about loading.

Or, you know, just click to order them by date.

 

[KeithD]

Or, you know, just click to order them by date.

Yeah, like I can remember the titles and dates of 1,000 stories I've written over the last fourteen years.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Yeah, like I can remember the titles and dates of 1,000 stories I've written over the last fourteen years.

Why do you need to remember the name and date of your new story? It’s, uh, new.

 

[KeithD]

Why do you need to remember the name and date of your new story? It’s, uh, new.

Where does this thread say it's only about checking on someone's new story? This seems to have gotten down to "not getting it" in terms of posting here in volume and over time. Let's just drop it. I'm not posting stories here to obsess and preen over voting as loose as the voting system is here. I think those who do are more than a bit silly, bordering on delusional. It gets to be dabbling more in fantasy personal vanity than in creative writing.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Where does this thread say it's only about checking on someone's new story? This seems to have gotten down to "not getting it" in terms of posting here in volume and over time. Let's just drop it. I'm not posting stories here to obsess and preen over voting as loose as the voting system is here. I think those who do are more than a bit silly, bordering on delusional.

You were directly replying to my comment about checking the score on my new chapter. You may have misread that, what with looking all the way down your nose at me.

 

[RejectReality]

I'll take that as a flat refusal.

No, I'm not going to harass Laurel to come out and explain something that happens all the time, and just happens to be more pronounced right now.

I don't have any more of an "inroad" than anybody else does. I studied and tracked how things worked, and figured out most things myself. Being able to code in PHP and understanding how databases/queries work is of tremendous value in that regard. What information I do get in replies from Laurel about is probably a direct result of not harassing her all the time. ( And not subscribing to all the conspiracy theories/maligning the site all the time )

In this case, I strongly suspect the reason Laurel isn't saying anything is because what's happening behind the scenes to trigger the ongoing sweeps is a type of activity that she'd rather as few people as possible are aware of, in order to avoid giving other asshats bright ideas on how to reverse-engineer the process to become the next giant problem.

 

[LexxRuthless]

No, I'm not going to harass Laurel to come out and explain something that happens all the time, and just happens to be more pronounced right now.

I don't have any more of an "inroad" than anybody else does. I studied and tracked how things worked, and figured out most things myself. Being able to code in PHP and understanding how databases/queries work is of tremendous value in that regard. What information I do get in replies from Laurel about is probably a direct result of not harassing her all the time. ( And not subscribing to all the conspiracy theories/maligning the site all the time )

In this case, I strongly suspect the reason Laurel isn't saying anything is because what's happening behind the scenes to trigger the ongoing sweeps is a type of activity that she'd rather as few people as possible are aware of, in order to avoid giving other asshats bright ideas on how to reverse-engineer the process to become the next giant problem.

I PM'd Laurel this morning, but not because I wanted an explanation. Oh, that would be nice, but I don't expect it. I just wanted to be sure the site administration was alerted because this could very well BE the "next giant problem" engineered by some clever asshat. I was unaware it was going on until I read this thread early on, but I have been paying attention since and it is alarming. Not because my stories are losing votes, but because of the way they are steadily and continuously losing them.

My concern is that this could be some malicious software that is designed to gradually strip away hundreds or thousands of votes from older stories on the site, leaving them all vulnerable to a sudden barrage of down-votes. I posted repeatedly on this thread because the more I paid attention, the more insidious this appears.

If you rarely check the statistics on your stories, you probably wouldn't even notice it was happening. Laurel and Manu might likewise have missed it, since it is subtle. It's not like every one of my stories is suddenly losing 50 votes a day. However, my stories are losing an average of 2-3 votes every day. If that had stopped after a couple of weeks, particularly right around a couple of contests as you initially pointed out, then your explanation would have made sense.

I'm just concerned that this is something sinister because it "feels" different from anything I've seen on the site before. I hope you're right -- that this is just a minor adjustment and it will end soon. My concern is that it won't end soon, and that it is just the prelude to something that will really suck for all of us.

 

[KeithD]

You were directly replying to my comment about checking the score on my new chapter. You may have misread that, what with looking all the way down your nose at me.

No, I wasn't posting directly to the aspect of you or your new chapter at all, and as you led me down the garden path, you didn't either. Your last sentence is totally uncalled for--certainly a civil discussion stopper.

 

[KeithD]

I PM'd Laurel this morning,

Do let us know if you get a response, please/thanks.

 

[LexxRuthless]

Do let us know if you get a response, please/thanks.

I just got a response a few minutes ago, but it was a generic one:

"Thanks for writing, and I hope you are well. 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 lost votes and your score went up, chances are that fraudulently placed lower votes were removed. If your score went down, it's possible that overzealous fans were attempting to "help" you by submitting multiple up-votes on your stories.

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.

Thanks again, and take care!"

I just took another snapshot of my stats, and I'm down another 33 votes over the past 19 hours. In that time, my stories had 4769 views, which should have resulted in ~64 additional votes. I know, that sounds obsessive. I don't normally check my stats anywhere near this often. It's just really...troubling.

 

[RejectReality]

Suffice to say that the odds of someone who could remove votes doing something so subtle is unlikely, at best. It's nothing so insidious or involved.

I've got a snapshot of all three pen names, so we'll see what happens over the next few days. I honestly expect little change.

I PM'd Laurel this morning, but not because I wanted an explanation. Oh, that would be nice, but I don't expect it. I just wanted to be sure the site administration was alerted because this could very well BE the "next giant problem" engineered by some clever asshat. I was unaware it was going on until I read this thread early on, but I have been paying attention since and it is alarming. Not because my stories are losing votes, but because of the way they are steadily and continuously losing them.

My concern is that this could be some malicious software that is designed to gradually strip away hundreds or thousands of votes from older stories on the site, leaving them all vulnerable to a sudden barrage of down-votes. I posted repeatedly on this thread because the more I paid attention, the more insidious this appears.

If you rarely check the statistics on your stories, you probably wouldn't even notice it was happening. Laurel and Manu might likewise have missed it, since it is subtle. It's not like every one of my stories is suddenly losing 50 votes a day. However, my stories are losing an average of 2-3 votes every day. If that had stopped after a couple of weeks, particularly right around a couple of contests as you initially pointed out, then your explanation would have made sense.

I'm just concerned that this is something sinister because it "feels" different from anything I've seen on the site before. I hope you're right -- that this is just a minor adjustment and it will end soon. My concern is that it won't end soon, and that it is just the prelude to something that will really suck for all of us.

 

[KeithD]

I just got a response a few minutes ago, but it was a generic one:

Thanks. Yep, that's a generic "didn't note you were suggesting activity out of the norm" nonresponse.

I haven't noticed unusual changes in my various accounts--but they are too voluminous to check comprehensively, so I'm unlikely to catch unusual activity.

 

[RejectReality]

That's an awfully good vote per view ratio. My most recent track is the best it's ever been with RR pulling down 1 for every 98. With that view number, I would only expect about 2/3 the votes you're expecting.

I just took another snapshot of my stats, and I'm down another 33 votes over the past 19 hours. In that time, my stories had 4769 views, which should have resulted in ~64 additional votes. I know, that sounds obsessive. I don't normally check my stats anywhere near this often. It's just really...troubling.

 

[LexxRuthless]

That's an awfully good vote per view ratio. My most recent track is the best it's ever been with RR pulling down 1 for every 98. With that view number, I would only expect about 2/3 the votes you're expecting.

I started looking at that "Views / Vote" statistic after a post from Simon about a year ago. I get a lot more votes and fewer views on my Romance and subsequent chaptered submissions than on my standalone I/T and Anal stories. Since I have started tracking it, my overall count has been pretty consistently around 75 views per vote.

Edit: I just went back and looked at the very first "snapshot" I ever took of my stories, just over a year ago. My views/vote score then was 69.8. The one I took an hour ago is almost up to 78.

 

[RejectReality]

Ah, okay. 3 years. That sheds some light.

If I nuke everything but the last 5 years, I get a little closer at 81. Everything I've seen says they added new bot filters to the views a few years back, so those older stories with the less filtered views really drag me down.

 

[NotWise]

I PM'd Laurel this morning, but not because I wanted an explanation.

I PM'd her last night and had the prepared response this morning. That seems to mean that the declines are just the result of running sweeps over and over and over, without many changes in rating, for no apparent reason.

 

[TxRad]

I PM'd her last night and had the prepared response this morning. That seems to mean that the declines are just the result of running sweeps over and over and over, without many changes in rating, for no apparent reason.

Maybe it is tied to the fact that a certain person and his friends are no longer being gamed with large number of favorites. Maybe those fake profiles are being phased out. Whoever it was up voted and favorited incest stories and three voted everything else from what I could see. I noticed it starting to change about a month ago. It may have been going on longer as I only noticed when a certain person dropped a spot in the top ten of the favorites and didn't immediately jump back up like normal.

Like someone said up above, there are some crazy people around with way too much time and agenda on their hands. And like RR said, it has happened before a couple of time but not quite to this slow and large a scale.

 

[SimonDoom]

It's just really...troubling.

Why are you troubled?

The same thing has been happening to my stories -- significant deletion of votes since around July 15. I don't understand why it's still happening to old stories. But I'm not troubled by it. The number of votes is just a random number, isn't it? It doesn't mean anything unless it is affecting your stories in some way, and you have so many views and followers that it can't possibly affect you.

 

[LexxRuthless]

Why are you troubled?

The same thing has been happening to my stories -- significant deletion of votes since around July 15. I don't understand why it's still happening to old stories. But I'm not troubled by it. The number of votes is just a random number, isn't it? It doesn't mean anything unless it is affecting your stories in some way, and you have so many views and followers that it can't possibly affect you.

The reason it's troubling is that this appears to be site-wide, and it is affecting stories that have been on the site for a long time more severely than newer stories. It has me checking my stats far more often than I like, and every time I am down more votes. Over the past ten hours, my stories lost another dozen votes. That was with 2251 more views, so I would expect to have an uptick in votes -- around 30.

I just don't think they run sweeps this often, and that makes me suspect something else is going on. This feels like the prelude to something nasty, like a similar barrage of down-votes on all these stories that are losing votes now.

My mind naturally wants to come up with a hypothesis to explain what's happening, and the one that sprang to mind first was of this annoyed down-vote troll who suddenly has a lot more time on his hands. He's been aggravated because despite his best efforts, he is unable to affect stories that have a lot of votes. So, in addition to his rotating IP macro that lets him down-vote stories several times a day, he has come up with an insidious little worm program that is causing the site to remove votes from every story a few times a day.

It has been running for almost a month now, and most authors don't seem to have noticed. Authors who have stopped writing but who still have popular stories on the site certainly won't notice. But, over a few more months of this, thousands of votes will have been stripped away, and those down-votes will start having a much larger impact.

...something like that. Troubling.

 

[SimonDoom]

The reason it's troubling is that this appears to be site-wide, and it is affecting stories that have been on the site for a long time more severely than newer stories. It has me checking my stats far more often than I like, and every time I am down more votes. Over the past ten hours, my stories lost another dozen votes. That was with 2251 more views, so I would expect to have an uptick in votes -- around 30.

I just don't think they run sweeps this often, and that makes me suspect something else is going on. This feels like the prelude to something nasty, like a similar barrage of down-votes on all these stories that are losing votes now.

My mind naturally wants to come up with a hypothesis to explain what's happening, and the one that sprang to mind first was of this annoyed down-vote troll who suddenly has a lot more time on his hands. He's been aggravated because despite his best efforts, he is unable to affect stories that have a lot of votes. So, in addition to his rotating IP macro that lets him down-vote stories several times a day, he has come up with an insidious little worm program that is causing the site to remove votes from every story a few times a day.

It has been running for almost a month now, and most authors don't seem to have noticed. Authors who have stopped writing but who still have popular stories on the site certainly won't notice. But, over a few more months of this, thousands of votes will have been stripped away, and those down-votes will start having a much larger impact.

...something like that. Troubling.

I don't see it that way at all.

Occam's Razor: what's the most likely explanation? What's the simple explanation?

The simple explanation is that there is nothing nefarious going on. The Site owners have adopted some new and more aggressive method of culling "fake" votes from the totals. I have no idea how it works, but I see no reason to be concerned that something weird or unseemly is going on.

From my review of my stories, it appears that quite a few old votes are being stripped away. This would indicate that it has nothing to do with some new down-voting process by a troll or someone else trying to cause mischief.

It's interesting to me that despite all the votes being removed there's been minimal change in my story scores. The total mean score for all my stories hasn't budged.

Culling fake votes is a good thing. It's better to have a smaller vote total that's more "real" than a larger vote total that consists in part of fakes.

In your case, in particular, I see no cause for alarm, because your stories have so many views and votes that they are insulated from any meaningful downside. If a story has 2700 votes versus 3000 votes, so what?

 

[LexxRuthless]

I don't see it that way at all.

Occam's Razor: what's the most likely explanation? What's the simple explanation?

The simple explanation is that there is nothing nefarious going on. The Site owners have adopted some new and more aggressive method of culling "fake" votes from the totals. I have no idea how it works, but I see no reason to be concerned that something weird or unseemly is going on.

From my review of my stories, it appears that quite a few old votes are being stripped away. This would indicate that it has nothing to do with some new down-voting process by a troll or someone else trying to cause mischief.

It's interesting to me that despite all the votes being removed there's been minimal change in my story scores. The total mean score for all my stories hasn't budged.

Culling fake votes is a good thing. It's better to have a smaller vote total that's more "real" than a larger vote total that consists in part of fakes.

In your case, in particular, I see no cause for alarm, because your stories have so many views and votes that they are insulated from any meaningful downside. If a story has 2700 votes versus 3000 votes, so what?

I don't think Occam's Razor is useful in this case, because you can't simply eliminate the scenario I outlined as impossible. (When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains--however unlikely--must be the truth.) It seems less likely to me that the site has been running sweeps six or seven times a day, every day for a month, than that some hacker has insinuated a worm into the system.

It wouldn't bother me, except it just keeps happening. If a story had 3000 votes in July, and now it has 2700 votes in August, so what? Well, that would mean it could drop to 2400 in September, 2100 in October, 1800 in November...

At that point it goes from merely "troubling" to a real pain in all our collective behinds. It isn't just me that I'm worried about, either. There are already writers who have fewer stories in less popular categories who are seeing really squirrely shit happening with their scores.

I don't want to see promising new authors bail because the site fails to protect them. I don't want to see long-time favorite stories on the site suddenly getting down-voted into oblivion. I'm troubled because both of those scenarios seem more likely in the wake of this disturbing trend.

 

[RejectReality]

Well, it's been about 21 hours. In that time, RR has lost 2 votes on 87 works. Les has lost 4 on 70 works. Dark has lost 0 on 108 works. So, 1 vote for every 44 works I have posted.

Even assuming that 1 in 81 as a guarantee ( which is extremely unlikely, as it's a year over year number, excluding older works, and the traffic has many spikes and troughs that create it. Plus it's for my best performing pen name, and I'm including the other two ) that's 26 more votes for the number of views I've had in that time, or 1 vote lost for every 4 works I have posted.

 

[BelleCanzuto]

I don't think Occam's Razor is useful in this case, because you can't simply eliminate the scenario I outlined as impossible. (When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains--however unlikely--must be the truth.)

This is a bit of pedantry, but it's offered in the hopes of easing some of your concern:

This isn't Occam's razor: When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains--however unlikely--must be the truth. It's, iirc, attributed as a distillation of Sherlock Holmes's method of deduction.

Occam's razor is: is the principle that, of two explanations that account for all the facts, the simpler one is more likely to be correct. It is applied to a wide range of disciplines, including religion, physics, and medicine.

They're similar enough principles that lots of people get them confused. But there is a fundamental difference, as shown in your response to Simon: you don't have to eliminate solutions as impossible in order to favor a different answer. In fact Occam's razor is the idea of looking at lots of possibilities but siding with the more simple explanation as being more likely.

Which, applied to the problem at hand of disappearing votes, the simple explanation is that Laurel and Manu are methodically stripping out fraudulent votes, but on some larger and longer scale than usual.

Believing that the votes going missing is part of a large, complex plot to take "good" votes away so they can be replaced with "bad" votes, is much more complicated, and (according to Occam's razor) less likely to be true.

 

[Enchantment_of_Nyx]

I don't think Occam's Razor is useful in this case, because you can't simply eliminate the scenario I outlined as impossible. (When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains--however unlikely--must be the truth.) It seems less likely to me that the site has been running sweeps six or seven times a day, every day for a month, than that some hacker has insinuated a worm into the system.

It wouldn't bother me, except it just keeps happening. If a story had 3000 votes in July, and now it has 2700 votes in August, so what? Well, that would mean it could drop to 2400 in September, 2100 in October, 1800 in November...

At that point it goes from merely "troubling" to a real pain in all our collective behinds. It isn't just me that I'm worried about, either. There are already writers who have fewer stories in less popular categories who are seeing really squirrely shit happening with their scores.

I don't want to see promising new authors bail because the site fails to protect them. I don't want to see long-time favorite stories on the site suddenly getting down-voted into oblivion. I'm troubled because both of those scenarios seem more likely in the wake of this disturbing trend.

I really feel like there are a lot of possible explanations for this, all more likely than the ambitious troll. First, take the points arguing against an ambitious troll. It would be very difficult for one person to do all of that over a sustained period of time without becoming recognizable. If the votes you've lost are representative, think of all other votes involved. Using bots or something else would also be recognizable. I think someone would have to pay actual humans to do it using lots of real IP addresses. Why would somebody go to that trouble and expense?

I don't know a ton about what a troll might do or what the limitations are, and I could be wrong about the difficult of avoiding detection, but one thing I don't need to be a tech wizard to know is that trolls have targets. There doesn't seem to be a target here. What's the motivation?

Also arguing against it is the fact that the site owners have been notified, and they're basically saying, "nothing to see here." I am quite positive that you and NotWise are not the only ones who have been PMing them. I don't think that it's necessarily true that most people aren't seeing it. Many people probably see it and aren't as concerned because there's not a huge change in their scores, or because their scores actually go up. Granted, it would be far preferable if Laurel or Manu just came out and said there were heightened sweeps or a new type of sweep going on, and for the life of me, I can't figure out why they don't, because it doesn't need to give anything away. We'll figure out far more just trying to puzzle it out than we would if they just said something. But, it's consistent with their past practice.

So, then let's turn to other possible explanations. The one that seems most likely to me is that Lit is using new software, possibly new subscription software, that's identifying bot-nets or organized activity by actual humans, and matching that to past votes. That's exactly why older scores would take higher hits than new scores. They've been in the pool of stories that have been subjected longer to this inauthentic behavior.

There are a number of reasons it might be ongoing. It could be doing things in a date order. More likely, it's doing things in ISP order. There are gobs of stories here, and whatever new thing Lit is applying, it is going back through old stories, too. It probably doesn't normally do that. Going through all of them may mean that it hasn't finished a complete cycle. It wouldn't make any sense for the sweep to go one author at a time because that wouldn't be a reasonable organization of the search. It would be expected for each author to continue to be subject to the sweeps until they were complete.

There is a motive for that, and there is a target: fraudulent voting.

I'm not understanding what it is about this scenario doesn't work.