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So I was looking at this hilarious question on Super User when I noticed that the points were going up/down up/down constantly. I asked if anyone else was seeing this they did and thought it seemed weird so I thought I would bring it here.

Point Bouncing

Any clue why this is happening?

UPDATE:This behavior has been happening for a solid 5 minutes now.

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The site hit hackernews. Something like 1000000 people are now voting on the question. Some are voting up, some are voting down. This is causing the vote spinner to go absolutely insane for you.

The best thing to do is to walk away from your computer. Go outside. Do not contribute to the problem.

whoa whoa whoa, I retract my previous statement based on the new behavior being witnessed now on this question ...

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    It's happening to my question too though and I didn't quite make hacker news.
    – Zane
    Aug 5, 2014 at 15:49
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    Unless there are thousands of votes on that question, people just spammed the vote button and casted/retracted their votes constantly. I would have expected some kind of rate limiting system to kick in after 10 votes or so.
    – Sumurai8
    Aug 5, 2014 at 15:51
  • I still vote the best thing to do is to leave the computer ;-)
    – jcolebrand
    Aug 5, 2014 at 15:52
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    @jcolebrand but I'm still at work...
    – Zane
    Aug 5, 2014 at 15:54
  • ahem I also sometimes suggest a 2 martini lunch ...
    – jcolebrand
    Aug 5, 2014 at 15:56
  • Can you please add a link to hackernews
    – Kermit
    Aug 5, 2014 at 16:11
  • @Kermit news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8136279
    – user163250
    Aug 5, 2014 at 16:18
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    viewed 38787 times... Considering that most of them cannot vote, and those that can may or not be voting, I think a million might be a little... toaster.
    – Travis J
    Aug 5, 2014 at 18:53
  • Fair enough Travis. If only there were a way to use large numbers to indicate unreasonably large values that I have no way to evaluate directly ...
    – jcolebrand
    Aug 5, 2014 at 19:16
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Firstly, it wasn't me on the SuperUser. I don't even have an account there.

Secondly, I was just testing on your question. Testing it real hard!

Thirdly, it's not a bug. You're able to vote up, then down, then vote up again as many times as you want (unless you're rate limited, which would take a lot) up until 5 minutes is up like ChrisF stated. Because votes are locked after 5 minutes, unless the post is edited.

So that can cause the bouncing around. All it takes is just 1 person to do that. But it gets even more crazy when multiple people are doing it.

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    Votes are locked 5 minutes after the first vote.
    – ChrisF Mod
    Aug 5, 2014 at 15:55
  • ...which would be similar to how votes work on much less important things (comments).
    – Aaron Bertrand Staff
    Aug 5, 2014 at 16:05
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    @ChrisF I think votes are locked if you let them untouched for 5 miutes. If you play up-and-down, then leave it on no vote, then again play and leave it on 0, you can do this all day long.
    – ypercubeᵀᴹ
    Aug 5, 2014 at 16:05
  • screenr.com/MYXN <-- There is no logical explanation.
    – Sumurai8
    Aug 5, 2014 at 16:18
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    @ChrisF I have verified that ypercube's comment is correct. Apparently I've been clicking wildly on this posts' vote buttons for 9 minutes straight.
    – Jason C
    Aug 5, 2014 at 16:19
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    This is the correct answer - a particular user was just upvoting, then undoing the vote, over and over. While this doesn't occur often, it's annoying to see in the logs. Look for some vote throttling in the future.
    – Jarrod Dixon
    Aug 5, 2014 at 21:27
  • darn @JarrodDixon, I was thinking about a feature request... :/
    – Braiam
    Aug 5, 2014 at 22:25
  • Excellent idea, @Jarrod and it will also block possible trolling aimed at specific users.
    – Shadow Wizard Love Zelda
    Aug 5, 2014 at 22:33
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    It appears that some throttling has been implemented. Reported first by @bjb
    – CRABOLO
    Oct 16, 2014 at 5:09
  • @JarrodDixon You need to throttle the accept/unaccept too! meta.stackexchange.com/questions/230996/…
    – CRABOLO
    May 16, 2015 at 2:16

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