46

I got a heap of strange undownvotes yesterday:

enter image description here

I'm wondering how this was possible. Were the downvotes not too old to be revoked?

The original downvotes that were cancelled don't show up anywhere in my list (I went back a month or so), and neither of the posts had seen a recent edit that would have allowed the user to change his vote.

How was the voter able to undo votes this old?

Or is this evidence of a removed user account? Do cancelled downvotes not show the user was removed message that you see when upvotes get cancelled?

Improve this question
17
  • Maybe a serial downvoting reversal?
    – Lamak
    Commented Nov 22, 2012 at 19:20
  • serial downvoting reversal is not marked as "undownvote".
    – juergen d
    Commented Nov 22, 2012 at 19:22
  • I've seen this happen where it doesn't use the proper reversal event at 03:00, but it usually only occurs when there's just a few events that get reversed. Never seen it for a huge block of them before. The events did occur at 03:00 so that automated script is to blame. Possibly an account merge? Who knows.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Nov 22, 2012 at 19:23
  • 11
    I decided you're not such a bad person after all and forgive you for wanting to delete my comments. You're welcome.
    – Bart
    Commented Nov 22, 2012 at 19:33
  • Normally I'd say that they ninja edited, but that's quite a bit of effort to remove a down vote on that many posts.
    – Tim Stone
    Commented Nov 22, 2012 at 19:35
  • @animuson oohh, good observation, then it's indeed an automatic reversal, didn't catch that!
    – Pekka
    Commented Nov 22, 2012 at 19:40
  • @Bart oh man, that's a relief! Does this mean I can equip any deletion or burnination related suggestions with illustrations of your contributions again? :)
    – Pekka
    Commented Nov 22, 2012 at 19:40
  • Given that most of my contributions are excellent illustrations of stuff that should most likely not be around, go ahead. ;)
    – Bart
    Commented Nov 22, 2012 at 19:43
  • 2
    @Bart naah. :) That was always a totally involuntary choice. Maybe I have a subconscious bias against Bart Simpson.
    – Pekka
    Commented Nov 22, 2012 at 19:46
  • 3
    The most likely explanation seems to be a manual account deletion by SE where the upvotes were preserved in some way. Plain user deletion hides all these unupvotes in the "user was removed" entry. Due to the timing (and the presence of similar entries in the profiles of many users here on meta) this looks a lot like all downvotes from a specific user were invalidated, but not his upvotes.
    – Mad Scientist
    Commented Nov 22, 2012 at 19:49
  • 2
    (I've cleaned up some of the comments to curb speculation.)
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Commented Nov 22, 2012 at 22:34
  • whatever it is it also happened to me.
    – Rosinante
    Commented Nov 23, 2012 at 0:48
  • @rosinante the person who left must have hated us
    – Pekka
    Commented Nov 23, 2012 at 2:28
  • 4
    Pfft. I've down-voted you more.
    – Shog9 Mod
    Commented Nov 23, 2012 at 4:30
  • 4
    @Shog I'VE DOWNVOTED YOU EVEN MORER running away sobbing
    – Pekka
    Commented Nov 23, 2012 at 10:35

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
38

This is a bug in our vote auto-invalidation task.

When we delete highly active users upon their request (i.e. they no longer wish to participate in Stack Exchange), we preserve their up/down/accepted votes by moving them to our Community User.

This is the first time we had removed a meta.SO user in this fashion, where the downvotes flow like wine :), and the invalidation task had not been updated to account for this.

We'll fix it after the American holiday, as I must return to gorging myself on turkey and ham.

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13
  • 6
    I'm sure there's real wine flowing around here somewhere. ::)
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Nov 23, 2012 at 1:02
  • 2
    Wait, so you more or less do do this? meta.stackexchange.com/questions/125740/…
    – Zelda
    Commented Nov 23, 2012 at 1:34
  • 2
    Wait, what holiday is happening in Mexico?
    – random Mod
    Commented Nov 23, 2012 at 1:41
  • 1
    @BenBrocka Basically, yes. We're working on a more general and less manual solution, too.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Commented Nov 23, 2012 at 2:27
  • 4
    Only in cases where the number of votes to be removed would be seriously disruptive, @Ben. Wouldn't want someone opening their rep page and seeing tons of votes removed... Oh.
    – Shog9 Mod
    Commented Nov 23, 2012 at 2:42
  • Wine? What about Tang soju?
    – casperOne Mod
    Commented Nov 23, 2012 at 2:56
  • @Shog9 Now that some of us know what this person's seeming rather vindictive voting pattern was, are you quite sure you want to restore them?
    – Rosinante
    Commented Nov 23, 2012 at 3:43
  • 6
    @Rosinante: well, they need to be made not visible in some fashion, regardless of whether that means restoring them or destroying them completely. Also keep in mind: the person in question cast a lot of votes here (hence the unusual vote-preserving deletion) - whatever patterns you can find in a handful of accounts, they're unlikely to be significant.
    – Shog9 Mod
    Commented Nov 23, 2012 at 4:05
  • 16
    @Rosinante "Vindictive voting pattern"? I don't think there's any evidence for that. I personally have cast around 900 downvotes here, and there are certainly many users that have cast more. There's just a lot more downvoting here on meta than anywhere else, as it carries a different meaning. Pekka has posted a lot of content here on meta, so it is not surprising that a long-time user voted on many of them.
    – Mad Scientist
    Commented Nov 23, 2012 at 7:08
  • 2
    wonder what would happen if I left Programmers. Last time I checked there were ~3500 upvotes / ~7500 downvotes
    – gnat
    Commented Nov 23, 2012 at 7:40
  • Well, whatever. It just seemed odd that two of us seemed to come in for such unidirectional activity. Maybe others found themselves leaking rep to temporarily deleted upvotes.
    – Rosinante
    Commented Nov 23, 2012 at 12:34
  • 3
    @Rosinante as far as I can tell, only downvotes were leaked because (presumably) upvotes weren't refunded, and those downvotes were done over a period of 2 years
    – gnat
    Commented Nov 23, 2012 at 15:27
  • 1
    @gnat I hadn't followed that. OK.
    – Rosinante
    Commented Nov 23, 2012 at 16:13

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