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
view the rest of the comments →
8005107? ago
@PuttItOut
This is a good point, can we get a clear definition of brigading so people can make sure they don't do it?
PuttItOut ago
Yes, I will provide more info on this before I initiate any further bans for this reason.
It is not my intention to ban anyone but those that are abusing the system for malicious reasons.
Broc_Lia ago
Fair enough. There are some users who I downvote a hell of a lot, so I'd like to see this myself. Whatever rule you make I'll stick to it.
One more possible loophole you may have missed: Old comments can currently be upvoted but not downvoted. It might be better if the moritorium on downvoting affects upvoting too.
Fambida ago
Nah, SpamGoatISwear actually has a point on some of this shit. It's only worth sticking with rules that are GOOD rules. For instance, I will not stop downvoting SpamGoat's spam just because his constant spamming ends up meaning he gets far more of my downvotes than anyone else these days. The rule could quite easily say you can only give 1 given person X% of your downvotes. I will not abide by that. I downvote as I see fit.
And I'll give this thread as an example of times when I don't downvote the SpamGoat, because his comments in this thread are highly relevant (for once).
SaneGoatiSwear ago
and i fight for your right to downvoat me freely, just so you're perfectly clear on that.
voting up and down are self-expression, and are protected in the u.s. the right shall not be abridged. -ccp and now secret vote bans (200 of the 260 banned accounts had given less than 10 votes total ever, each) scream sjw takeover.