Looks like it was a glitch not a feature update

[ratcreature]

I just clicked a kudo button twice on AO3 by accident because my tablet was lagging, and it resulted in two kudos with my name showing up in the list, rather than one kudo and an error.

But it seems this was just a glitch because of my wonky clicking. At least when I tried leaving kudos again on a WIP I follow that didn't work. Too bad, I wouldn't mind being able to leave more than one, especially with long chaptered stories.

Comments

[melannen]

The double-kudos thing is a long-running server glitch and it tends to get worse when the servers are heavily loaded (like, after yt.)

I think the reason they don´t allow multi-kudos is to stop people from easily inflating their own kudos count by getting their friends to kudo fifty times; that would make sort-by-kudos pretty useless. (If they do ever institute it, I suspect it will either be once-per chapter or heavily rate-limited.)

[ratcreature]

But couldn't these hypothetical hordes of friends just as well inflate the kudo count through multiple guest kudos? AFAIK the guest kudos count as much as named kudos, and I assume with them being left while not logged in you can leave some as often as you like.

[melannen]

There is rate-limiting on guest kudos, I´m not sure what it is but I think it has something to do with clearing cookies - you can´t just leave multiple guest kudos by pressing the button a lot, you have to at minimum switch browsers or clear cookies or wait a few days. So yeah, there are ways to artificially inflate the kudos count, but they take at least a little work; you can't just easily add hundreds of kudos without using the kind of bots that would probably constitute abuse.

[ratcreature]

I assume you could do the same cookie thing with logged in users though, like leave a date stamp for kudo/story id in the cookies and make it so you can only leave kudos on a story once a day, which would allow you to leave kudos per chapter when they are posted as WIPs or for rereads. So I don't think that is really the reason for this.

My assumption was always that the "kudos" were originally set up as an analog to the "like" and afaik in most of those systems you can only like something once as well, so nobody thought that users might want to leave multiples.