Ok, I last looked at the transformers fic sorted by kudos page around a year, a year and a half ago, and I don't remember seeing a single fic from that Annabelle Lennox series or indeed by that author. So either she got all those kudos really quickly, or she's cheating somehow. ...it's weird, though, none of her other fic has near that many kudos, and she hasn't written for Transformers since 2015. I am confuse.
My attention span gave up on the terms of service, but I reported her anyways ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Yeah, 7/8 fics in this one highly mediocre series have 1700+ kudos, and the last fic has.... 23. They're all a couple years old. Kudos count is the best way to sort by approximate quality/reception, and if it isn't a TOS violation to use bots to cheat that system, it should be. Experimentation shows that leaving and as a guest to click kudos multiple times still gives you the 'you already left kudos!' message, so something is getting cleared somewhere in the system to allow so ridiculously many kudos to happen.
Possible charitable explanation: ao3 itself glitched out and one guest kudo ballooned into many for each story as a person read through this series. Because also, if this person is using bots, what a waste to do it on an old series when they've got more recent ones that they're working on in the present that they're more likely to want attention for.
all of the fics in that series have between 1715-1750 guest kudos, and around, idk, 20-50 logged in kudos. SO THAT IS..... SUSPECT........ there are some very unimpressed people in the comments of the most-kudosed fic and the author is suggesting that maybe those 1700 kudos came from their fans on FF.net!!! it's popular there!!
I've accidentally done it multiple times before with private browsing windows, so I think it's probably either a time thing or a temporary IP address thing.
I tried looking on the Wayback Machine to see whether there was an obvious, verifiable extreme jump in kudos recently, but apparently AO3 is excluded from the Wayback Machine. Ah well. That also wouldn't rule out the possibility of it being a glitch, anyways. Author's defenses in the comment section appear to be: -I didn't know my fic was racking up a ludicrous amount of kudos, I've been paying more attention to my more recent works -Kudos may be from FFN fans / TvTropes readers -If someone is botting, it wasn't me
I weighed in as a petty, conflict-averse nonny mcnonnyson, because the contrast in kudos amounts between fics 1-7 and fic 8 is so very extreme, and also this works out to about 97% guest kudos, which is plain ridiculous. Even if this person didn't do it themself, trying to be like 'i bet it's people from ff.net? :O' is just dumb and obnoxious. Whatever's happening, it clearly isn't organic kudos growth from regular readers.
ahahaha one of my fics is second-highest kudos in the fandom to a multi-fandom drabble collection and it has 46 kudos my favorite of my fics has 21 #small fandom lyfe :::')))
it feels petty to add this but i really only noticed + brought it up because i was browsing ao3 on my phone, where i don't have my beautiful life-saving ao3 savior. on my computer i don't see their fics cause i blacklist usernames with gleeful abandon and i added their username to the list WEEKS ago. i only really noticed that something was Fucky when they showed up SEVEN TIMES on mobile......
I'm just sitting here like - if the author is innocent, then they clearly take a very different view of kudos/readership statistics than I do. I mean, I know you can turn the daily emails about kudos off, and I guess I could understand wanting to do so if you find them annoying, but... even setting aside the emails, I look at my ao3 dashboard / check my Statistics page often enough that I would definitely notice if one (let alone seven) of my fics began racking up hundreds of kudos (let alone 1700). I would be like "holy fucking shit I'm blessed" (at least at first glance.) So??? I'm not going to rule out that they could have not noticed - it just requires them to approach being a fanfic writer in a ... very different way from what I would consider to be usual. Also I just checked out their ff.net page and... not one of their Transformers fics comes close to those kind of numbers, whether you look at reviews, favorites, or follows. I mean, they're moderately popular; up to 300 or so reviews or favorites (this is just the Transformers fic I'm looking at, some of their stuff in other fandoms has more), with a rough average of 50 reviews / 100 favorites for that series... but that does not lead to 1700+ kudos, and it seems kind of ridiculous for the author to think/claim it might do so. Not to mention I checked out the longest fic in the series, the one with the 90k word count, since that seems like it would be the most likely to naturally accrue kudos. That one has only 10 non-guest kudos, which means that 99.5% of the kudos are guests.
I wouldn't normally be super suspicious of a high guest-kudos-to-registered-kudos ratio--I was curious so I just checked my most popular fic, and it has 173 kudos--100 of them from guests. But the ratio here is insanely ridiculous, especially since it has that many kudos. :/
Actually, I can't remember if this was mentioned, but how many comments does it have? If it has a lot of seemingly genuine comments it's quite possible that it just is inexplicably popular, but if it has few comments or comments that are all suspiciously similar...
the greatest number of comments any of them have is like, 17? and half of those are people going 'hey what's the fuckin deal with all these fake kudos'
One has four comments, one has two comments, one has seventeen comments (The one with most Kudos, half of which are people complaining about the weird kudo count) And four have no comments at all, despite having 1700+ kudos (x)
My highest-kudos'd fic has about a 50-50 split for guest-nonguest kudos. The entire 8 fic series has 23 comments. Total. 9 are related to the botting/kudos discussion. ETA: ninja'd by several people :P
also is it nsfw because the only reason i signed up for ao3 is because its annoying as fuck to have to keep clicking that im over 18 and i dont see that many guests doing the same.
