Weird

[RejectReality]

As to why any vote of X value might be considered invalid, there's the one of two elements that have ever been openly revealed: Additional votes from the same IP/ID are removed.

So it doesn't matter what the value of those additional votes are. They're going away.

There's plenty of other reasons to sweep a vote of any value, but that's the one that's known without a doubt. It was one of the two primary elements of the sweeps since the beginning, and still is.

 

[GroverLang]

Are sweeps infallible?

As we know once a story has settled down, whether it’s months or years old, the rating, more or less, stays the same. So I, like many others I assume, only look at stories a few weeks old.

My most recent story, back in February, was on a very pleasing 4.84 until ten days ago. Within the space of 24 hours it received 4 votes. One was a 5 and three were 1’s. Very suspicious but no problem. The next sweep will take care of it. There was a sweep a few days ago. It removed two 5’s and one 4. It’s still red on 4.57 but what happened to removing the 1’s?

 

[RejectReality]

There's no such thing as infallible, but people who are purposely manipulating your score are probably taking more care to fool the sweeps than the average person trying to "help you out", forgetting that they voted on the story before, or just voting again every time they read it.

So, the generally benevolent but still illegitimate votes are almost always going to be the first to go. You have to wait until the sweep after the troll has gotten cocky and slipped up before that bomb will go away.

 

[UsuallyPresent]

For those who care about it, the Wikipedia article on distributed databases is pretty well written, IMO.

 

[RejectReality]

The problem with the distributed database theory of weird score/vote incidents is that your author control panel has been tested many times to show that it updates in real time. The only statistic that doesn't is views, and that only happened a few years back, when it changed to a 15 minute update schedule. It was originally real time as well.

Those are the numbers most people are referring to when they see something odd with relation to their own scores. Pulling in new data from distributed databases doesn't seem likely there. Those observations are almost certainly due to new votes + sweeps that have arrived since the last time the person looked. Unless you're sitting on that entry refreshing constantly, 24-7, you're not going to see everything that happens.

When it comes to the toplists, there's a couple of weird bugs in those. One causes individual tabs to freeze and stop updating. It sounds like Manu may need to hit them all with a hammer again, because this happened in the past, and he was able to kick them all back into shape once informed, and the fix lasted for quite a while.

Another is that sometimes the entry for a story in the toplists will not update if it's been swept and has a lower vote total than it did the last time the toplist was generated. That entry freezes until it attains more votes than are currently listed in the toplist.

Finally, an entry in the toplists can sometimes vanish into the void if it happens to fall within a page transition. As often as not, that resolves by the next update with new stories. With older stories that aren't getting as much action, or toplists with narrow score ranges, a story can get stuck in the crack for quite some time.