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After taking a scroll through the latest images, I've noticed that all of the recent stick-chan images have gotten at minimum 15+ upvotes after only being up for around two hours, while the surrounding images have only gotten around 1-4. Is Stick-chan really popular around here or are there certain malicious forces at play here?

Malicious forces? Yeah. Bots? No.

I lean towards it being a lot of sockpuppets or burner accounts rather than bots. It's not hard nowadays to get a bunch of weirdos together on discord and have them organize something stupid like mass upvoting/downvoting.

hopefully one of the mods actually do something about it. Though knowing their track record when it comes to upvote manipulation, nothing will come of it.

You know they'll do jack shit
J will say it's just some anons doing their thing and that it's harmless, la la la.
Vowels man will act all smug and say it's not a problem while sticking his tongue out and calling you a poopoo peepee-head.
Jill will vow to do something, but sadly, she's powerless.

Pretty much, what Juke said
we've been bringing this same shit up for over a year now and they've done nothing

Me and the boys on our 7th monthy visit to the Suggestions or Report Problems forums to have suggestions ignored and problems downplayed

i wish man…a VERY notable amount openly like that stick-chan garbage.
(i made stick-chan harder to read for the sake of my own health)

Q: Are the "kys pedo" and "cunny" images getting upvote botted?

A: Probably a little bit, but we can't really do anything about it.

This is one of those instances where, unless we beg the admins to add like 3 new features to the site, we can't do anything about. Believe us, there are plenty of entries, mostly political, which get suspicious vote activity and create more trouble than they're worth, but leaves us with limited options for handling. We can basically do one of the following:

• Further restrict voting, either by implementing some kind of cap or increasing the timer.
  This would prevent people from mass-voting on things, but generally does nothing to stop multi-account votebombing. If a user wants a specific WMAF image at +60, it's still going to happen. Also users complain about the 8 second timer as it is.

• Manually sniff out accounts that look like sockpuppets.
  This isn't exactly a secret, but mods cannot see karma information outside the forums. A brand new member with +1000 votes and a brand new member selling CBD gummies look the same until they post. The only time we're able to actually shoot down sockpuppets is when the user doesnt bother with a VPN and is oblivious enough to post on both at once. There is no possibility to ban every account that looks like an alt, since most of you share IPs with a few dozen accounts – even when we cross-check against most recent logins. VPNs make this even more impossible-er.

• Go full inquisition and manually track vote counts for suspicious content.
  We actually did this for a bit. The process invovles quickly clearing cache and refreshing a page to check if the vote counts increase proportional to the view counts, or if the item suddenly gains a lot of views (KYM tends to IP-ban mods if we do this for too long). We resort to this since KYM doesn't have an API of any sorts – it's just a set of webpages. J gets shit for saying it, but damn near always we find it's just regular users doing the voting. We've caught plenty of instances of images/users/comments getting an instant +1 or -1 for existing, but never the large vote swings we're all suspicious of. It's fucking exhausting and a waste of time, since we still couldn't ban anyone we catch anyways, but now you know we tried.

In short: Without making heavy sacrifices elsewhere, we can't stop vote accounts because the system doesn't even show us votes. This is because:

• Admins don't give a shit about karma scores
• It makes the site run really slow
• It's been a problem for like 7 years and every time we check it's just bored losers and not aliens/the cabal/bots

I know it feels like your problems are being downplayed but, and I'm being honest here, the state of KYM is such that mods can't really stop alts. The fact that we have to answer to a "Why was X banned?!?" thread for most bans certainly doesn't help, so users just endlessly report each other in our DMs for being too upvoted, budget McCarthy-style (please stop). If the number of threads are anything to go by, the users care about this more than the administration thinks. You know where the Contact form is.

So is who upvotes and downvotes not auto tracked by the site?

This is a site so old and defunct that voting more than once every 8 seconds was cataclysmic. So no.

If we did want that, we would have to log into every KYM account that has ever existed and then check every comment, image, and video to get an idea of which users have voted where.

KYM should be killed and a new site should be made since it would be better than trying to revive this living corpse some people consider a site.

I'm all for this. Anyone else?

I think everybody with a brain in working condition.

Hot take: Don isn't a good owner of KYM, because good owners don't neglect their property.