Voting

Voting is a feature within Bonk.io, that was first added alongside the addition of Accounts in June 2016 within the former Flash-based Bonk.io. It allows players to reflect their opinions on a certain map. It is also the main function used for the Hot List.

### **Current HTML5-based Bonk.io**

Being limited to only voting within Custom Games, players can choose whether to select between "Vote Up" and "Vote Down" or by selecting "Favorite", which just upvotes the map along with adding the map into the player's My Favs listing, within the current HTML5-based Bonk.io.

### User Voting Limitations

* Only users on an Account can vote.

* Once a player has voted within either version of the game, they are not able to change their vote or vote again on that account.
* Within the current version, there is an imposed max of 5 voting accounts per day per player, preventing most botting from occurring.
* Players cannot vote on maps published in the Flash-based Bonk.io, vice versa also once applied before when the Flash-based version was taken down.

### **Differences From the Former Flash-based Bonk.io**

* Players were able to vote within Quick Play as well, by pressing "Y" or "N", to vote a map as good or bad respectively.
* To prevent botting, instead of a daily account limit, there was a Level requirement, allowing only Accounts with Level 5 or higher to be able to vote, a measure added in November 2016\*.

\*The voting level was briefly moved down to Level 3 and moved back in January 2017 for experimental purposes.

## Voting Patterns

**This article has information that is supported by observational research conducted in Bonk.io.**
***Data from: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16XjU3rnGk4tPcPVgcKXo4oasLvOWNL0r6ghL8JB7wME/edit#gid=0***
Due to an ongoing observational study beginning on September 13th, 2021 that is collecting cote tallies on Snipers' Spot (SS) and WeiRd DeAth BalL (WDB), there is now more information into the patterns with map voting.

### Voting Slows During the Weekends

The observational study found that WDB's and SS' vote gains over the weekends tended to drop down, correlating with the player counts. In general, the slowest day for these two maps is Sunday. Meanwhile the fastest days for these maps were during the workweek (Monday-Friday).

### Map Preference Differing on the Time of Week

A trend was found showing how the workweek, SS had an additional boost in upvotes compared to WDB, while on slower days, SS aligned more closely in voting count differences with WDB. This suggests that there are players who play during the workweek but not over the weekends and tend to play SS instead of WDB. A likely explanation for this is that they are players who generally play Bonk.io at school or work.

A line graph of both SS and WDB, showing how there are slight repeated bumps and troughs while each of their upvotes increase.A scatter plot of the daily votes of both SS and WDB, showing how during weekdays, SS' lead is often unproportionally larger than during the weekends.
### Map Preference Differing on the Time of Day

Likewise to the weekly patterns, there was a continuous pattern visible in regards to the votes added for SS and WDB depending on the time of day (EST). Over a 60 hour interval, the voting margin between the two maps creates a repeated sawtooth pattern. During the traditional hours of a school or work day in North and South America, WDB's lead rapidly drops.

However, during the overnight hours in which the largest player groups in the Americas (United States, Brazil, Canada) drop, WDB's lead partially recovers. This is likely due to the major player groups in the Eastern Hemisphere (South Korea and Australia) taking over as the dominant groups. These groups visibly tend to vote for WDB over SS.

### Artificial Voting

In the line graph to the upper right, there is some artificial voting. This is where a player votes by using alternate accounts to intentionally raise a certain map's amount of votes. However, there are various measures put in place within Bonk.io to reduce the effectiveness of such voting.

This was largely due to SS overtaking WDB in votes on October 14th, 2021, becoming the most upvoted map published in the HTML5 Bonk.io. However, a decent amount of players wanted WDB to stay ahead. As a result, in hours 25-26, a small spike of votes for WDB occurred after SS crossed WDB with 1 vote.