Safeguard against artifically increased download-numbers?

[notsaying]

I was just wondering if there was any safe guard against people pushing their own mods to show up higher in the "most downloaded" statisitc?

More specifically i stumbled over this mod - https://mods.factorio.com/mod/CJs_QoL_R ... /downloads - which has kind of a weird download history. Has been around for over a year with pretty low download-numbers, than suddenly 4 months ago was downloaded ~90.000 times in a single month, with a single version being actually downloaded almost 50.000 times. I dont think any one version of the most played mods has ever been downloaded 50.000 times in a single month. So either there was some mistake in the counting, or somebody used a script or something to artificially increase those numbers.

There isnt really any harm done there, besides giving a slightly wrong picture to people browsing the most popular mods. But this might get problematic once more people do stuff like that.

[Oktokolo]

So either there was some mistake in the counting, or somebody used a script or something to artificially increase those numbers.

Maybe it got showcasted by a famous youtuber - in China.

[slippycheeze]

So either there was some mistake in the counting, or somebody used a script or something to artificially increase those numbers.

Maybe it got showcasted by a famous youtuber - in China.

History tells us that is extremely unlikely, compared to someone cheating the system in the hope their work gets more attention.

By "history" I mean that is what played out in more than half a dozen games I've personally seen this happen with a mod. Usually followed by someone explaining that they think it is entirely reasonable to have done to their own mod because mumble mumble vanish from the thread.

Truth be told, though, it really doesn't matter. Making your terrible mod artificially popular will probably get it a brief period of attention, but it will not work out well in the long term because ... the cause of the "not being popular" problem isn't that people didn't *find* your mod.

[steinio]

Very wise summary. Thank you.