Today I encountered a very strange behaviour. A comment of mine had its vote status changed, but I realized that the original post where it was had already been removed (or hidden, left as a draft) before the change. In this state, noone should be able to see the original post, or only the OP should be able to, if it were just changed back to a draft. Therefore, the vote status cannot possibly change multiple times, as the only one who can possibly access the post is the OP. So I came to think, is the system account manipulating the vote status? Of course, there are unknown parameters that affect the contribution score, and I don't really mind that. I don't really mind my contribution dropping either. (actually I would tolerate it dropping to somewhere near Sparky_Master_WCH1226's score even) Still, I think the contribution system, or at least the vote system, should be as transparent as possible, reflecting actual votes made by actual human beings.
Hence, the question. Is the vote system rigged?
I heard that each rank on Codeforces has a different "voting power"; e.g. an expert's upvote is worth 3 "regular" upvotes, CM's upvote is worth 5 points, master's 7 (I think) and GM's 10. But these voting points aren't suddenly released/shown at once: for example, if I were master and I upvoted your blog, my 7 points would gradually get released over a couple of hours. This is perhaps why your comment's score was changing even after your comment became hidden, there may have been higher rated people whose votes hadn't yet fully taken effect.
While I think this is yet just a myth as for now, it's quite a tempting hypothesis to believe. It would be nice if we could find an objective evidence (or disproof) to these myths.
I think that there are people who tested this on private gym groups on Codeforces. On my side, I upvoted some comments from some very old blogs on Codeforces and have seen the comment score gradually rise. The probability of someone else upvoting the exact same comment at the same time as me on a random blog from 7 years ago was basically 0, so I think this hypothesis is true. Also, the comment's score increased exactly by the number of upvote points supposedly corresponding to the rank of my main account, which I used to upvote that comment.
Yes, Chromate00, the system is rigged. Chromate00, let's become -121 together
well I don't mind