Top Author Ranking (and Top Downloads too)
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Ok, as many of you have already noticed you have seen some changes in the Top Author's calculations. Let me try to explain a little bit as to what we are doing.
Let me start out with giving you an overview on the way the previous system worked. The Top Author's list was based on the total number of downloads for all the author's skins from the previous day. The total number was then divided by ten (mainly just to display a smaller number to make it fit in the box better). So if an author had 5310 downloads, we would divide 5310 by 10 to get 531. And that is the number that was displayed in the Top Author’s box.
Now I’ll explain some more of the technical aspects on how the download counts were calculated. When a person downloaded a skin we would take information from that skin and place it into a cookie. So if you were to download that skin a second time the code would check the cookie to see if you had already downloaded that skin. If you had already downloaded the skin then the download number would not increment. However, if the skin information was not found in the cookie then it was considered that you had not downloaded the skin and therefore it would increment the download count for that particular skin.
This system had some flaws in it. If a person were to delete their cookie then it would erase the information on the skins that they had previously downloaded. Or if a person has configured their browser to not allow cookies then the skin information was never saved. Therefore this allowed for people to download skins multiple times, which would unnecessarily increase the download counts for the skins.
So, as you can see, there was a vulnerability in our system and with all vulnerabilities they get abused after awhile. We have received numerous complaints from people where some skins were suspected of having abnormal download counts. After looking into this more we were able to detect that this vulnerability was being abused. And in some cases we believe bots were being used to increase download counts.
We've known about this problem for quite some time now and really haven't had the time to address this problem until now. So how do we fix this problem? How do we close the holes and prevent people from abusing the system. That's what we are trying to do right now. We are experimenting with some different ways to calculate the Top Authors in order to plug these holes in order to make the system as fair as possible. So please be patient with us while we take this time to come up with a better system.
Let me start out with giving you an overview on the way the previous system worked. The Top Author's list was based on the total number of downloads for all the author's skins from the previous day. The total number was then divided by ten (mainly just to display a smaller number to make it fit in the box better). So if an author had 5310 downloads, we would divide 5310 by 10 to get 531. And that is the number that was displayed in the Top Author’s box.
Now I’ll explain some more of the technical aspects on how the download counts were calculated. When a person downloaded a skin we would take information from that skin and place it into a cookie. So if you were to download that skin a second time the code would check the cookie to see if you had already downloaded that skin. If you had already downloaded the skin then the download number would not increment. However, if the skin information was not found in the cookie then it was considered that you had not downloaded the skin and therefore it would increment the download count for that particular skin.
This system had some flaws in it. If a person were to delete their cookie then it would erase the information on the skins that they had previously downloaded. Or if a person has configured their browser to not allow cookies then the skin information was never saved. Therefore this allowed for people to download skins multiple times, which would unnecessarily increase the download counts for the skins.
So, as you can see, there was a vulnerability in our system and with all vulnerabilities they get abused after awhile. We have received numerous complaints from people where some skins were suspected of having abnormal download counts. After looking into this more we were able to detect that this vulnerability was being abused. And in some cases we believe bots were being used to increase download counts.
We've known about this problem for quite some time now and really haven't had the time to address this problem until now. So how do we fix this problem? How do we close the holes and prevent people from abusing the system. That's what we are trying to do right now. We are experimenting with some different ways to calculate the Top Authors in order to plug these holes in order to make the system as fair as possible. So please be patient with us while we take this time to come up with a better system.
