Re: rating manipulations on www.vim.org have taken place

Marc Weber wrote:

[...]

> > He wrote a message stating it was fixed on Sept. 2.
> I've found the followings scripts which got dowvoted after Sept. 2.
> I searched for scripts having 10 or more down votings in sequence
> since Sept. 2.
>
> SCRIPT_ID / downvote count / time range
> 3695 / 40 (2011-10-23 from 09:09 till 09:23)
> 2140 / 117 (2011-10-29 01:34:49 - 2011-10-29 02:07:53)
> 1435 / 100 (2011-10-23 08:28:59 - 2011-10-23 10:05:42)
> 670 / 17 (2011-10-23 09:05:14 - 2011-10-23 09:09:59)
> 294 / 191 (2011-10-23 07:43:33 - 2011-10-23 11:43:03)
> 122 / 134 (2011-10-23 08:22:55 - 2011-10-23 09:07:22 )
>
> SCRIPT_ID / NAME (AUTHOR) => voting result

[...]

> If Bram fixed the issue on Sept 2. then its very likely that someone wrote a
> script or some other magic is going on I can't imagine - maybe search engines
> do follow forms as well? If so why didn't it happen more often?

The IP addresses are all different (one can only submit a vote from an
IP address once). That's the weird thing.

> Sample data for script id 3695:
>
> TWO RELEASES
> +---------------------+
> | creation_date |
> +---------------------+
> | 2011-08-20 16:57:40 |
> | 2011-08-28 03:20:10 |
> +---------------------+
>
> is not related to votings IMHO:
>
> ID | VOTING | DATE
> 3695 1 2011-09-23 19:06:32
> 3695 4 2011-10-21 03:48:14
> 3695 -1 2011-10-23 09:09:23
> 3695 -1 2011-10-23 09:09:24
> 3695 -1 2011-10-23 09:09:26
> 3695 -1 2011-10-23 09:09:30
> 3695 -1 2011-10-23 09:11:30

[etc.]

The mystery is that these happen in sequence from different IP
addresses. That doesn't point to a crawler (it would it the URL only
once per day at most). It might point to some botnet script.

It's going to be very difficult to automatically distinguish these
down-ratings from what happens to a really bad script that gets posted
and deserves these down-ratings.

Since it doesn't happen frequently, we can write a simple PHP function
to enter a date range and script number and remove the negative votes in
that date range. Simply removing the negative votes from the table has
the problem that the total count for the script still has to be updated,
which is a hassle to do manually.

--
hundred-and-one symptoms of being an internet addict:
191. You rate eating establishments not by the quality of the food,
but by the availability of electrical outlets for your PowerBook.

/// Bram Moolenaar -- Bram@Moolenaar.net -- http://www.Moolenaar.net \\\
/// sponsor Vim, vote for features -- http://www.Vim.org/sponsor/ \\\
\\\ an exciting new programming language -- http://www.Zimbu.org ///
\\\ help me help AIDS victims -- http://ICCF-Holland.org ///

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