832985 - Contributor got "Top 25" badge with 0 solutions and 7 answers

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(support.mozilla.org :: Forum, task)

Description

[madalina]

Contributor profile: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/user/830852

This contributor got a "Top 25 contributor" badge although his profile lists 0 solutions and only 7 answers. Karma dashboard lists 116 helpful votes and 36 unhelpful, 7 answers, 0 solutions and 2100 points in total.

Is this a bug or did the contributor manage to get that badge by voting on his own post as helpful?

More context here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/708886?last=50072

Comment 1

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

I checked the helpful votes and while there is technically no bug (in that he did not upvote those posts from his own account), the activity is rather suspicious. All helpful votes happened within a 3 minute window, while the negative votes came in over time. The anonymousID that each voter gets is different each time. That could mean that whoever did the upvoting put some effort into getting that, eg. clearing the cache between upvotes, switching browsers, etc.

Unfortunately I can't check for the IP as voting is counted using POST data, and we are not instrumenting this in GA yet (coming though)

My recommendation: removing the points for the upvotes. The chance of them being collected organically is rather slim. That would take care of the top contributor badge. Also, it seems like he was rather spamming than really participating in discussions. That might warrant a ban or a at least some downtime.

As for technical changes: We'd need to implement rate limiting (bug 783262) to deal with this kind of spamming, but unless we see this become a big issue, there are many more things affecting us more that we need to spend development time on.

I'm closing this as WORKSFORME, but feel free to keep the discussion going in this bug.