

Ask HN: Is my account flagged? I don't earn upvotes - kurtvarner

I noticed that for my last few posts to HN, I am not earning any upvotes. I tested this with two friends today and asked them to upvote my link from the new page. No points were registered.<p>Any ideas as to what is causing this, or how I can correct it?
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pg
No; there is no code that can do that. There's a lot of code for ignoring
voting rings though. That's probably what's happening.

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A1kmm
Code to ignore voting rings would be very interesting - I would imagine the
way to do it might be to occasionally do some kind of maximum flow analysis on
the graph between users (with arcs between u_i and u_j representing the
proportion of upvotes for user u_j by user u_i as a proportion of u_i's total
upvotes). Users with a high maximum flow between them could be considered part
of the voting ring. The trouble is that this would be very computationally
expensive, even to do offline - and the cost of storing a matrix of size n^2
for n users might be prohibitive.

I was curious about what Hacker News does so looked at the code from the Arc
tarball.

I found this: (def biased-voter (i vote) nil)

I presume this is a case of security by obscurity and the live Hacker News
site has a non-public definition of biased-voter to stop people working around
it?

Or are you referring to the code that guards (++ (karma i!by) (case dir up 1
down -1)) (on lines 1368 to 1370)?

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pg
None of the anti-abuse code is published.

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jordhy
I have the same problem. Seem to comment and the karma doesn't increase except
when the points surpass my average commenting threshold. Maybe this is the new
karma system.

~~~
jerrya
So I upvoted both yours and kurtvarner's posts so you can perhaps determine if
your vote counts changed.

