The Official Authors' Hangout Halloween 2022 Contest Support Thread

[Lifestyle66]

Purely based on my history, if your final post-sweep score isn't above 4.8 you're not in the hunt. But, you won't know beforehand if you are in it. Sweeps cut both ways, hitting dodgy high and low scores.

My Amorous Goods story lost two 5's within the last two days. And it's nowhere close to 4.8. It won't even make 4.5 due to the 1-bombs I'm sure to receive when getting close.

 

[Duleigh]

We've been Swept
My Amorous goods dropped 3 unobombs and shot up to 4.79
my wedding in the woods lost 4 but didn't quite make it to 4.7

 

[DarkRaven13]

I now know what you all man about the sweep thingy. My story went up in score.

HOWEVER....I got a weird anonymous email earlier stating that the person liked my story a lot and voted for it multiple times with 5-stars. Like 4 or 5 times.

I just wrote Laurel and told her about it ....so I think they will look for those and take those off.

(I'm not in the running anyway .... so I'd rather have a "correct" score than a artificially inflated one.)

By the way ... I just read a couple other stories in the contest ....omg some of you can write sooooooooooo incredibly well. To say I am impressed would be a total understatement.

 

[Duleigh]

I now know what you all man about the sweep thingy. My story went up in score.

HOWEVER....I got a weird anonymous email earlier stating that the person liked my story a lot and voted for it multiple times with 5-stars. Like 4 or 5 times.

I just wrote Laurel and told her about it ....so I think they will look for those and take those off.

(I'm not in the running anyway .... so I'd rather have a "correct" score than a artificially inflated one.)

By the way ... I just read a couple other stories in the contest ....omg some of you can write sooooooooooo incredibly well. To say I am impressed would be a total understatement.

Go over your vote counts, keep track of them. You'll see that the number of votes on your story whose that went up in score probably went down in total votes

Across 4 different stories I lost 7 votes and my stories bumped up high enough to raise my rating average across 33 stories!

 

[Bazzle]

Definitely a sweep, my story now lost it's qualifying vote numbers and jumped from 3.8 to 4.2

 

[Trionyx]

But the real sweep is still to come, at least in the past the final scores have had the biggest change right before the announcement. It’s my belief stories with fewer votes are hurt/helped the most with the final sweep. Those with many hundreds of votes remain more static.

 

[TxRad]

I just lost 24 votes from my Halloween story. It went up a whole .2.

 

[Bazzle]

I just lost 24 votes from my Halloween story. It went up a whole .2.

I only had 25 votes to start with

 

[Voboy]

I think I lost five? Six? Under ten, anyhoo.

Nice little jump. It's now back up to where it has spent most of the contest, before it dropped these last few days. Par for the course. Every contest tends to go like that.

 

[Rustyoznail]

Mine's gone from 4.37 to 4.55. I'm happy about that. It wasn't a winner but a niche story that I had fun writing and that attracted a few nice comments.

 

[DarkRaven13]

I did a second look at mine later, and it was really wow ... I finally started looking at how many people voted. I lost 14....and my score climbed a lot.

 

[Emotional]

I did a second look at mine later, and it was really wow ... I finally started looking at how many people voted. I lost 14....and my score climbed a lot.

How did you attract that many haters?

 

[DarkRaven13]

How did you attract that many haters?

I have no idea. I looked at my score each day, but was not paying attention to the number of readers or how many voted. I started to just today when I saw the weird number movements.

I suspect, after reading what a lot of you have been saying .... that there are those that read this particular forum thread and decide to hate everyone equally? *shrugs*

Or ... maybe they hate birds?

 

[Duleigh]

I have no idea. I looked at my score each day, but was not paying attention to the number of readers or how many voted. I started to just today when I saw the weird number movements.

I suspect, after reading what a lot of you have been saying .... that there are those that read this particular forum thread and decide to hate everyone equally? *shrugs*

Or ... maybe they hate birds?

They see you as a threat.

Me, I'm just a little dog, we don't threaten anybody.

 

[Emotional]

What shocks me is how many scores dropped by A LOT

 

[Duleigh]

What shocks me is how many scores dropped by A LOT

That confirms my suspicious that the sweep is looking for votes that are outside of a pattern. If you post a story that attracts 4s and 5s and a troll or two posts 1s, those are out of the pattern. If you post something that attrats a lot of 3s and 4s, 1s and 5s are out of the pattern.

Then again, there may be other factors, a vote could be tagged by the MAC address (hardware name) of the users's NIC (network interface card) that would give each vote an origin and the sweeps could be looking for duplicates. I'm sure there's other ways of determining legitimate votes vs others.

 

[NotWise]

That confirms my suspicious that the sweep is looking for votes that are outside of a pattern. If you post a story that attracts 4s and 5s and a troll or two posts 1s, those are out of the pattern. If you post something that attrats a lot of 3s and 4s, 1s and 5s are out of the pattern.

Then again, there may be other factors, a vote could be tagged by the MAC address (hardware name) of the users's NIC (network interface card) that would give each vote an origin and the sweeps could be looking for duplicates. I'm sure there's other ways of determining legitimate votes vs others.

Please don't even speculate publicly about how the sweeps work. Right or wrong, you're just giving the trolls ideas to work with.

 

[DarkRaven13]

They see you as a threat.

Me, I'm just a little dog, we don't threaten anybody.

Uhm, I don't think I am a threat to anyone.

Well, unless you have coffee and I don't. Then yeah, watch your back lol.

 

[Duleigh]

I think my stories got swept again, my entries both lost 3 more votes each and the score for Amorous Goods: Black Pearls just shot through the roof

Maybe little dogs are a threat... how do they see Zebras?

 

[Emotional]

So is this a midnight announcement like stories post?

 

[TxRad]

It is whenever Laurel gets around to it.

 

[NotWise]

So is this a midnight announcement like stories post?

Like TxRad said, it's when Laurel gets to it. Recently it's been mid-morning Pacific time, but I've seen it done by the time I got up in the morning, and I've seen it done after noon.

Check in when you have time.

 

[Rustyoznail]

Hey, I just noticed there were four audio stories! A special congrats to those.

https://www.literotica.com/stories/contest.php/halloween-2022-audio

 

[RejectReality]

While someone spamming fraudulent 5s they know will be swept is a tactic that is believed to have taken place before, I'll once again say to never underestimate your fans — or that you have them. We've got an example right here of someone admitting to the author that they were casting multiple votes. For every one who admits it, there are probably a half dozen more who will do so silently.

If you're consistently seeing your scores fall after sweeps, it's time to let people know you don't want that sort of "help" in closing notes. Let them know you don't want anyone spamming multiple 5s, or 1-bombing other authors. Most of them are trying to be supportive, and when you tell them you don't want that sort of support, they'll stop, and your scores will stop plummeting every time the Hoover comes around. The probability is that they're doing more damage than good, because the sweeps on contests are bone-cutters, and the cheerleading they're doing on your behalf is likely costing you legitimate 5s that get caught in friendly fire attracted by their antics.

 

[Duleigh]

The probability is that they're doing more damage than good, because the sweeps on contests are bone-cutters, and the cheerleading they're doing on your behalf is likely costing you legitimate 5s that get caught in friendly fire attracted by their antics.

I agree heartily, but I would really like to find out how they determine what a fraudulent 5 is. They must be saving meta-data for each vote cast, but if they were doing that, a fraudulent 5 should never make it to start with, not unless the story really sucks that bad to begin with, then it would make its presence known just like a 1-bomb