...Okay, yeah, that is definitely highly suspect. Generally when a fic gets a lot of kudos, it gets more comments, in my experience--the aforementioned 173-kudos fic has 64 comments (though about half of them are me replying to comments, so that is artificially inflated, albeit not intentionally so; it's probably more like 32 real comments, which is still a fair few for me). I think that's kind of universal in my experience.
I sent in a report for 'interference with an OTW site" asking someone to take a look at the phenomena, since that is in the FAQ as against the rules
Yeah. Every fic of mine with over 26 kudos has at least one comment, so it is absurd for four 1700+ kudos fics to receive none, and for the other three to receive nine, two, and four (respectively) comments about the fic itself (and not about the ludicrous amount of kudos.)
If it's not something they're doing, I could see them just... well, really wanting to believe that it could be a bunch of new readers from ff.net or somewhere. At this point it's not terribly plausible, but suddenly getting super popular is a much nicer thing to believe in than 'someone is fucking with my stats and no one will believe it isn't me', so I could see someone plugging their ears and going 'lalala I can't hear you I guess they're from TV Tropes' when people try to point out something's wrong. But at this point I'd say it probably is either a flimsy lie or willful denial, because their explanation just doesn't seem likely.
i mean. sure, maybe they're genuinely just as confused as the rest of us? but who on this ding dang planet would go to the effort of MASSIVELY inflating the kudos of a fairly unpopular three year old fic series that they didn't even write??? it's just so fucking unlikely and weird like who would do this
Okay. not gonna lie, if I had computer skills and any focus to speak of, I probably would do exactly this
For all we know, the actual fic writer is indeed innocent of the kudo spam itself, but multiple fandoms across AO3 are now mystified by these random gen fic rising to the top of the kudos heap due to one plucky little spam program out there who is just doing its best. (Note: I have no idea what spambots are actually capable of.)
Website glitch, as mentioned, or someone with a new spambot program they've written up wanting to do a test run on something minor enough it won't get too much attention, maybe.
hmm. the thing about it being a website glitch is that you'd think if it was the result of one or two glitchy kudos on each fic it would have happened all at once? but it didn't. i remember seeing the fics on the front page before the top spot was taken. like, when i blacklisted the author, the 9k part 1 fic was not above the brave shall heed the call. and now it is Numero Uno. so. hmm.
hi i'm kintsugi user applechime and i'm unsettlingly familiar with the transformers fanfiction scene on ao3
Author appears to have replied to @spockandawe 's comment.... and has deleted the other comments questioning the kudos (including their own other comments on the matter) and turned on comment moderation. Ok. (I'm assuming the author deleted the comments, since even if the AO3 abuse team has taken a look at the issue, I don't think they would delete the relevant comments...) Quoting their reply here (y'know, since they might well delete it later):
In better news, I finally went in and installed ao3savior, so that I wouldn't have to manually filter out fics for the new Dangan Ronpa game each time I checked out the Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types tag, and it is a dream.
Then whoever's inflating that count is well on their way to making it more literally uncountable. Provided there's a point at which AO3, like Tumblr and notes, just displays a blank space instead of a number.
Someone please teach me how to blacklist things on Ao3?? i tried months ago but it didn't work and chrome nuked itself on my computer like a day later and i'm scared to try again ;A; on a side note, i recognise that fic with the ridiculous kudos, and while it is recommended on tvtropes i was pretty sure that link sent you to fanfiction.net. My most kudoed fic is 266, with a solid 100 of those being logged in users. 97% non-logged in is super sketch.
The most kudos I have on a thing is 32. With another coming in with 29 in second. I detest both works now. Heavily. They are old and horrid and flawed and serve only to frustrate me with their existence. Occasionally someone will add to their kudos counts and I'll get intensely annoyed. Which I guess is a gripe. I'm just so annoyed that the things I wrote that I'm no longer happy with or ones that I never even really cared about are the ones people seem to like most.
@Kemmasandi What were you using to blacklist things? Ao3 savior works great for me, but if that's the one that already blew up on you . . . >_>
