Today Voat pushed an update meant to address three things: Vote manipulation, Archiving Data, and Feature Prep. I will keep this announcement as short as possible.
Vote Manipulation
I have been researching vote farming and brigading for about a month. And honestly, I’m pissed off. What I have found is simply unacceptable. These actions destroy Voat’s credibility and value and will be actively developed against. The following actions have been taken to increase vote integrity:
- Users no longer earn CCP in Private Subverses (Common farming technique)
- Users no longer earn CCP in Subverses with Minimum Downvote values greater than zero (Common farming technique)
- User deleted comments have their positive CCP removed (Common farming technique)
Archiving Data
- Voat is now archiving old submissions (current set to 3 months).
- Archived and Deleted Submissions, and their comments, can no longer be voted on.
- Vote counts are using individual vote counts instead of the up/down totals on comments/submissions*
- Users with High SCP/CCP should see an improvement accessing Voat when data isn’t in cache
* Please note that all point values will drop because of this new logic. Prior logic counted up/down totals on submissions and comments instead of the individual votes themselves (it was more performant this way). When a user deletes their account, their votes are removed but the up/down totals are not adjusted. Since new logic uses individual vote counts everyone’s points will be dropping unfortunately. Just heads up. @Atko was hit the worst of all, poor guy.
Future Feature Prep
- Schema changes were made to prepare for the re-release of Sets (grouping of multiple subverses). Voat will begin set development next week as we have designed many upcoming features upon this basic structural concept including categorization, new user centric functionality (more info soon), expanded and more functional blocking capabilities, and the concept of “following” users who publish feeds (more info soon).
- Naming conventions and indexing has been cleaned up in database.
Warning to Vote Brigadiers
I will shortly be banning hundreds of obvious alt accounts used to farm/brigade at Voat. While researching this problem, I noticed that no one is really innocent, meaning that we have both obvious farming/brigading going on but we also have this behavior from good solid users too. It is for this reason that I am not retroactively banning any accounts other than the obvious ones mentioned above.
From this point forward, if you brigade another users’ content your account will be banned.
Consider this fair warning that brigading and manipulating votes is no longer tolerated at Voat.
There is a new Sheriff in town.
Canary Notice:
https://voat.co/v/announcements/1330806
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8005326? ago
But that's stupid. I could make an account and get 100 CCP in about an hour by copying a few posts from reddit. It would be more work for me to do it by setting up private subverses. The more Voat grows the easier and easier it is to earn 100 CCP, it's already no longer much of a hurdle.
8006396? ago
But it can be a challenge when you're trying to make an army of bot accounts rise up to 100 CCP at the same time, so one of the "solutions" they came up with was to make private subverses with older accounts, set up some restrictions to only allow the bots, and have the bots regularly post and upvote in the private subverse (even allowing them to start spamming comments in v/all without fear of anything but single subverse bans or temporary restrictions from low CCP {until the other bots can undo the damage}).
Basically, they tried to make "safe space" staging grounds to fuel their assaults on Voat, and Putt just ripped their protection away.