When is vote manipulators getting addressed?

Eedat·7/6/2019, 10:44:02 PM·12 votes·9,532 views

Its at the point where HUNDREDS of threads have been completely ruined at this point. Nothing like actually watching someones comment go from -1 to +8 over the course of a couple minutes while simultaneously watching the comment below it go from +4 go to -5 in the same timespan. Oh, now its happening to everything in the thread? Wow, must be some weird coincidence.

This board is so tiny. People even doing this with 10 accounts easily destroys thread after thread after thread after thread. Are there any plans to do anything about this? It's been going on for so many months now

19 Comments

DuskDaUmbreon7/7/2019, 12:28:09 AM7 votes

It might just be hard for the boards mods to do, depending on how it's set up.

Sure, it's easy to see vote manipulation happened, but it's not necessarily easy to see who did it.

ModThe Djinn7/7/2019, 4:42:45 PM4 votes

Realistically, given the tools the Volunteer team has at our disposal, there are two options:

We deal with the occasional vote-bot / multiple-account incident and try to manually lock voting if we see something we believe is truly egregious.
We remove voting entirely.

Of these, the former gets much less backlash from the community.

I'd love to say we have the resources and bandwidth to put through a system that can actually tell when someone is using 10 accounts vs. when someone just posts a popular topic vs. when someone is using a bot, but that's not realistic.

Imperial Pandaa7/7/2019, 2:52:29 AM1 votes

Only real solution would be to disable voting. Which has been discussed and usually a lot of backlash when tried occasionally.

ModPrandine7/8/2019, 12:43:23 AM1 votes

Something I personally think could help fight vote manipulation is to display who liked and/or disliked a post. For example, say I liked a particular post, you would then see that that post was liked by me. It's not a perfect solution & may open up the door to more flame wars over people agreeing/disagreeing with a particular topic or point, but it is something to think about at the very least.