How Many Times Can a Person Rate or Read an Article?

Can someone go to a single article troughout the day and rate it or have page read multiple times in a day? Say if they go to an article a dozen times will the page reads be 12 or 1? Very good question!

Being a retired Infomation Systems Manager for a College, I can give you a very educated guess. With two exception the same person on the same computer going to your article 6 times in a day will only result in 1 page read (assuming a 1 page article). This is how I know. If you go to an article and rate it, it will record your input. If you go to the same article the second time, it will not record or allow you to rate further. This means that they keep track of the IP (Internet Protocol) adresses. Therefore. it is almost a certainty that it will recognize you for multiple reads alone and not record any more than 1 read from you.

There are apparently two exceptions which allow a person to cheat. 1) There is a bug in the system intentional or unintentional which allows a small percetage of people to vote, read, etc. continuously. Some down-raters have this ability and they can take an article rated 4.9 and just keep clicking on 1 star as many times as they want. That is why some very good articles go from top rated to 2.2 in just a mater of minutes. It works the other way as well. Someone with this ability can rate their own work or a friends work so high it goes from a 3.0 to a 5.0 (yes a 5.0 is possible) in minutes. This may have to do with variablly assisigned IP addresses but I have a feeling it doesn't. 2) If you go to a Library, school, or other venue, you can go to AC and not sign on. However, you can rate and read articles. When done with all the articles you want to rate, move to another computer and do the same thing, etc. until you are just tired of doing it.

I have seen a single person be 4.9 in every single article in the top rated group on the Home Page. Normally this would be impossible as no one is that good or has that many friends. Most likely they or a friend of theirs does have this multiple rating anomaly. If you see this you might want to comment why they have so many (usually average) articles in the top rated section. They may be up to no good.

I am making this a non-paid article to let everyone have access to this information. Most likely this article will be down-rated into oblivion by a down-rater who does not want AC to look into their ability to control what they are able to do on the sly. Hope you get to see it before then.