To be clear, I’m not just speculating, I’ve been testing! I’ve had it go into effect three separate times, and it’s clearly tied to an IP address (or, more likely, a userKey, which is tied to IP address.) When I switched to another internet connection (and thus IP address), my votes lost their power and had no visible effect, but I could switch back to the original connection and continue consistently having stronger votes that would move things significantly up or down in the gallery–until eventually it wore off, for reasons I don’t have a theory on.
One theory I debunked is that maybe if you get upvoted a lot, your votes would carry more weight, but that didn’t pan out because the next time it happened to me was on an IP address that I hadn’t even posted anything on, while the IP address from which I had posted quite a few fairly popular images had no voting power.
So I 100% know this is a thing that happens. Maybe it IS a bug (though that seems farfetched); maybe it’s just for fun; but at this point I can’t think of a way to discover under what conditions it happens without getting that answer from someone on the inside. 😛
Regarding people with too much time on their hands voting multiple times - no, I’m 99% sure there are server-side measures in place to prevent vote spam. There is eventually a timeout after which it will accept another vote, but I think it’s on the order of hours, so obviously not a viable way to move anything significantly up or down the gallery.
To be clear, I’m not just speculating, I’ve been testing! I’ve had it go into effect three separate times, and it’s clearly tied to an IP address (or, more likely, a userKey, which is tied to IP address.) When I switched to another internet connection (and thus IP address), my votes lost their power and had no visible effect, but I could switch back to the original connection and continue consistently having stronger votes that would move things significantly up or down in the gallery–until eventually it wore off, for reasons I don’t have a theory on.
One theory I debunked is that maybe if you get upvoted a lot, your votes would carry more weight, but that didn’t pan out because the next time it happened to me was on an IP address that I hadn’t even posted anything on, while the IP address from which I had posted quite a few fairly popular images had no voting power.
So I 100% know this is a thing that happens. Maybe it IS a bug (though that seems farfetched); maybe it’s just for fun; but at this point I can’t think of a way to discover under what conditions it happens without getting that answer from someone on the inside. 😛
Regarding people with too much time on their hands voting multiple times - no, I’m 99% sure there are server-side measures in place to prevent vote spam. There is eventually a timeout after which it will accept another vote, but I think it’s on the order of hours, so obviously not a viable way to move anything significantly up or down the gallery.