

Ask PG: Is voting on HN anonymous? - scscsc

Not truly anonymous, but can someone with access to your server tell what stuff an account upvoted/downvoted?
======
oldgregg
What's wrong, still thinking about that marijuana thread? Don't worry, we all
believe you have really severe back pain... ;-)

------
sirrocco
Given the fact that you have to be logged in to upvote, and after you upvote
you can't re-upvote - yes you can tell what someone upvoted.

~~~
kenver
After you've downvoted you cant upvote either, so there _could_ just be a flag
that says you've done one or the other.

~~~
cb5
Not just _could_ , but as the parent comment implied, given the nature of the
system the answer is unequivocally yes.

The system serves to record the arrows you've clicked, therefore this
information must be stored somewhere. Someone with access to this this
information should be able to determine "what stuff an account upvoted,"
unless the system has been designed to obfuscate the connections(i.e. accounts
& clicked items) at the database level.

------
mixmax
I remember a thread long ago where a user complained that someone had
systematically downvoted all his old comments. PG confirmed that it was one
user that had done all the downvoting, and as a direct result voting on
comments older than x hours was disabled.

So yes, PG can see what you voted. I'm pretty sure he won't use it against you
though ;-)

~~~
DrJokepu
Downvoting on old comments was disabled. You can still upvote them though.

------
jacquesm
Of course...

The owner of the server has the power to log each and every access to the site
and that includes up and downvotes.

That said I'm pretty sure PG & company can be trusted wrt to such things, HN
would die overnight if there ever were any question as to the ethics of the
people running it.

There would be much more worrisome things for some people here, imagine being
a VC writing here under a pseudonym and being unmasked or someone openly
critical of their employer having their posting history revealed.

~~~
andreyf
PG has mentioned that he uses (unpublished) algorithms to find "voting rings"
coming from the same IP, or someone trying to vendetta-downvote another.

~~~
sailormoon
Interesting. I'll have to think twice before upvoting my housemate's comments.

------
tsetse-fly
news.arc is open source. Go see for yourself: <http://arclanguage.org/install>

~~~
sailormoon
I know you're being facetious, but asking someone to learn a new language and
then familiarise themselves with a project's whole codebase just to answer a
simple question about privacy is not exactly helpful. Especially when the site
is served by Apache, a whole separate program which keeps its own completely
distinct logs, so the suggested course of action is not only a huge imposition
but can't actually answer the question anyway.

As others have said, the answer is obvious from the behaviour of the site. But
even if it were not, other aspects of the server's configuration would be
highly relevant, indeed central to the matter, and the source code is
unavailing.

~~~
pg
HN is not served by Apache. The Arc source includes the http server.

~~~
sailormoon
You know, I specifically checked that before posting. Where I went wrong is
that I didn't look at the HTML page itself; I looked at the images and CSS,
which I erroneously assumed to be handled by the same program.

All images and CSS for this site are served by Apache but the actual text/html
request is not. However - my point still stands, as the primary request is
_proxied_ by Apache and proxy requests, IIRC, are included, or can be
configured to be included, in the Apache logs.

update: I am going to have to eat my words here. I have no evidence
news.ycombinator.com is proxied by Apache. All the css and images are served
by Apache, but they're hosted on a different domain and a different IP at
ycombinator.com. I am kind of amazed PG wrote an HTTP server but .. apparently
he did. Kudos.

------
danielh
HN stores the links you upvoted, you can view that list by clicking on the
number of saved items in your profile.

Don't know about votes on comments.

------
tlrobinson
While we're on the subject, I sometimes see some weird behavior with voting,
in particular sometimes my vote doesn't "stick" until the 2nd or 3rd try. It
only seems to be down-voting. And sometimes on the second vote it actually
drops _two_ points.

Anyone else notice things like that?

Or maybe I'm going crazy.

~~~
mixmax
I've seen similar behaviour, but if I reload the page the score is correct. So
it seems to be a client side problem which isn't that big of a deal.

~~~
tlrobinson
I only notice it specifically if I _do_ reload the page. Or are you saying you
have to reload more than once?

~~~
mixmax
hmm, might not be the same thing then. I've sometimes been able to upvote the
same article or comment twice, but when I reloaded the page the score was as
it would be if I only upvoted once.

------
edw519
Of course. Even a user who has never seen the source code can infer that.

Vote something up or down, log out, and come back. You will _never_ see an
arrow next to that entry again. Why? Because the intersection of your login
and that entry _must_ be storing that fact that you already voted on that.

(I cannot infer from this data alone _which way_ you voted, simply _that you
did_ vote.)

