Ask HN: Why does my vote on posts not count sometimes? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why does my vote on posts not count sometimes?

31 pointsbrianclintwud21 comments

I have observed that some times when I upvote a post I like, the vote does not change. Does that happen to anyone else too?

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Someone will probably correct me, but does it have something to do with your average karma per post? I remember reading something about being under 2 average effects your voting.

If the arrow is back after reloading the page, the reference ID of the upvote URL timed out. This occasionally happens to me with long articles - I'll open the HN comments page in one tab, read the article in another, then come back to upvote it after the page has been open for a while, especially if I ended up doing something else in between.

Yes, that's another possible cause. What happens in that case is that the ajax script will receive an error underwater, but it never gets displayed.

Yes, that's by design.

Not all votes are counted, and not all votes that are counted are displayed (for instance, when you downvote someone even if they are at -4 the votecount seems to be stuck at -4 but the karma of the person is still decremented).

This question and a bunch of others I've written up in this article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1755533 .

Not that I'm dying to do it, but I don't see how you down-vote. I only get a little 'up' triangle next to posts; no option to down-vote.

Your karma has to reach a certain threshold before you have the option of down-voting. I believe that number is 200.

Funnily enough, my karma recently crossed the 200 point threshold, but I didn't recall the down arrows appearing for comments. I just logged in to tell you all that there must be more to it, since I've got 200+ karma and no down arrows. But lo and behold, there they are. I'm not sure if those are actually new or if I simply never noticed them before. If the threshold is not 200, it must be close to that.

Yepp. And, by the way, the source of HN is open, everyone can read how it works =)

Though is the "secret sauce" relating to HN specific voting fraud detection, etc, open source too? As I don't "do Arc" I've never bothered to look but pg has mentioned a few "techniques" they have for detecting fraudulent voting and accounts, and I can't imagine that's part of the core code..?

> Though is the "secret sauce" relating to HN specific voting fraud detection, etc, open source too?

No, then it wouldn't be secret anymore.

Security by obscurity is not perfect but in this case having that knowledge out there would only benefit the spammers and the 'gamers'.

Link?

From http://www.jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ :

Is news.ycombinator.com open source ?

Yes it is, the code is written in a language layered on top of scheme called 'Arc', you can get the whole package here: http://arclanguage.org/ , the package includes a slight variation (the 'secret sauce' is missing) on the code running HN.

Nobody can downvote posts. Only comments can be down voted.

It happens when you are not logged in and you click the arrow.

It redirects to the login form, and then when you return, the up-vote arrow is gone but the vote isn't counted.

Not necessarily.

It also happens to me when up- or downvoting comments.

I think there are safeguards in place to prevent us from voting too rapidly. E.g. when I go through a thread and "adjust" it to my liking (up/down vote as I see fit) and then reload, then usually half of my votes didn't make it.

I'm trying to get into the habit of voting immediately, but keep falling back to "buffered I/O" when I'm not paying attention...

I stopped voting when I discovered this little secret. I don't like to be played.

Ironically, people who agree with me won't upvote my comment.

This should make it to the front-page. :)

So many down-votes? I'm surprised.

Although of course I did not answer the original poster's question, don't you agree it is a bit humorous that by trying to answer most people probably will try to vote up to check if they have the same problem?

There's perhaps even something to learn from that.

people on HN don't take kindly to non-contributing, off-topic, and (usually) purely jokey types of comments.

Yes, true. I could've hinted that this kind of post could also be interpreted as an attempt to game the voting system in a creative and thus perhaps interesting way. But I didn't.

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