Voting Limits

Hi Radar 📡,

Thanks for sharing these concerns!

I can confirm that we do have some rate-limit restrictions in place for program votes in order to prevent bad actors from manipulating the voting system. However, based on our analytics data, this limit should be high enough to prevent most programs from running into this issue. For example, I just checked the Hot List now, and there are no programs that are at or even near the limit.

If you (or other community members) are frequently seeing programs that have reached the limit, please share links to those programs here and I can take a look at the vote counts! If this is a common occurrence, we can take a look at raising the limit.

I understand the concern about programs that haven't hit the limit overtaking programs that have, but realistically this should not happen. The limit resets daily, so every program is able to receive up to the vote limit of new votes each day. So if Program 1 hits the vote limit on Day 1 and Program 2 does not, even if both programs receive the maximum votes every day thereafter, it would still be impossible for Program 2 to surpass Program 1. If Program 2 does surpass Program 1, it would be due to people voting up Program 2 more often and for more days than that of Program 1, not because of the vote limit hindering Program 1.

Please let me know if you have any additional questions or feedback!

Thank you both for the additional information! I'll be doing a deeper dive on this later in the week and will follow up when I have more information.

TDJ Did you receive an error message when trying to upvote the Water Simulation and Vote in 2024 programs? I just checked those and neither were at the vote limit. They also have 66 and 58 votes respectively.

Yes, I did receive an error message when I tried to vote up the programs the other day. The one that says "too many requests", or something similar. At the time they had 48 & 47 votes.

Also, why does my previous comment say "pending approval"? Is it due to the length of the comment, or because I have links to the programs I was referring to?

My previous comment also has "pending approval"

Hello again!

I reviewed our vote data for all of the programs that you mentioned above and was able to determine that only two of them have ever hit the vote rate limit. The rest of them have never been restricted from voting.

I looked at the analytics site that you linked to and was able to see that there were several plateaus in the votes graph, but all of these plateaus (except for 2 programs) occurred at vote counts well below the vote limit. Manual analysis of our program vote records also confirmed this. I did notice that most of these plateaus occur during the overnight hours in the U.S., so I'm guessing these plateaus are simply caused by inactivity at those times. The data on that analytics site was not 100% accurate either---there were some programs where it did not align with our vote records.

That being said, I was able to find a few instances where programs have reached the vote limit by legitimate means. For the vast majority of our CS program authors this is not an issue, but the limit may be impacting a very small handful of highly active users with large subscriber counts. We are going to increase the limit so their programs are no longer impacted.

After this increase takes effect, I do not expect any programs / users to be encountering this limit through normal site usage. If you do happen to see an error message when voting, please share the link to the program here along with the time that you tried to upvote so we can take a closer look.

Thank you both for raising these concerns and for your dedication to this community!

Thank you for looking into this Evan!

Hello Evan!

I released a program last night( ~14 hours ago) and I've been told it is vote locked. Here is the link: https://www.khanacademy.org/computer-programming/santa-dash/5780655792111616

Thank you!

When I went to vote up this program: https://khanacademy.org/computer-programming/wildform-game/5889458185355264 (when it was on 99 votes), I got the "There have been too many requests to this page recently. Try again in a little while." error message. Same for the program Radar just mentioned.

Hi Evan,

I think https://www.khanacademy.org/computer-programming/bee-swarm-beesmas/5917098386571264 was vote limited at some point.

Hi Radar 📡,

I just checked that one and it has not been limited