13

Yesterday, a sudden loss of 6 rep led me to discover that my top 3 meta questions were downvoted:

Now, a sudden gain of 6 rep leads me to believe that the downvotes were reversed... but it looks like they were undone manually, rather than reversed by the vote fraud script:

How were yesterday's downvotes undone today? I haven't edited my questions since receiving the downvotes. Shouldn't they have been locked in after only 5 minutes?

Improve this question
18
  • 5
    Don't they put you through some sort of moderator training? Shouldn't you have every answer to every question (at least meta related)?
    – M.Babcock
    Mar 31, 2012 at 3:34
  • Perhaps the culprit was nice enough to bump-edit my posts, take their votes out and reverse the edits to destroy the revisions and make it seem as if nothing really happened.
    – BoltClock's a Unicorn
    Mar 31, 2012 at 3:38
  • Shouldn't that be visible in the edits though? And by three different people, really? Seems unlikely.
    – M.Babcock
    Mar 31, 2012 at 3:39
  • @M.Babcock: You can silently remove a revision by manually undoing the edits you made, or by saving the previous revision, within the 5-minute grace period.
    – BoltClock's a Unicorn
    Mar 31, 2012 at 3:40
  • @BoltClock: I just tried this. Rolling back doesn't work. Undoing the edit manually does. Weird.
    – Dennis
    Mar 31, 2012 at 3:42
  • 1
    @BoltClock - That screams like a bug to me. Imagine a similar situation with svn or cvs... this would not be pretty for their development teams at all.
    – M.Babcock
    Mar 31, 2012 at 3:43
  • @Dennis: That has already been established elsewhere. A rollback is considered another edit. You do have to do it manually.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Mar 31, 2012 at 3:44
  • @animuson - Is that true of rollbacks of another user's edits as well?
    – M.Babcock
    Mar 31, 2012 at 3:45
  • @M.Babcock: No, this applies only to your own edits. It doesn't matter what post you edit, but the revision has to be owned by you for it to work. As far as I can tell, this is a side effect of having a 5-minute grace period of not saving revisions.
    – BoltClock's a Unicorn
    Mar 31, 2012 at 3:46
  • @animuson: So this is by-design?
    – Dennis
    Mar 31, 2012 at 3:47
  • Then presumably each user would have had to rollback their edits seemingly simultaneously? Highly unlikely. -- I guess this would be to the point of your edit.
    – M.Babcock
    Mar 31, 2012 at 3:47
  • Hmmm... that seems a far stretch to be what's caused this, though. Possible, I guess... to remove the votes without giving themselves away?
    – Andrew Barber
    Mar 31, 2012 at 3:48
  • 3
    @M.Babcock: The moderator training is rather intensive, but it's what you might call "trial by fire".
    – Cody Gray - on strike
    Mar 31, 2012 at 3:49
  • @TheEstablishment - Again, not being a mod I wouldn't know but certainly there is a knowledgebase to leech? (Probably not though... my company doesn't have on either). BTW do you think @_Cody (minus the _) would work? I always wondered since it is an alias from a different site.
    – M.Babcock
    Mar 31, 2012 at 3:50
  • 8
    @Mayank swami: What are you talking about? Your comment makes absolutely no sense.
    – BoltClock's a Unicorn
    Mar 31, 2012 at 6:30

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
4

Looking at it now (or any time, when hovering the timestamp to see the exact time when that still displays things like "5 minutes ago"), makes clear it's the fraud script after all. It runs each night at 3:00 AM:

Still odd, as it used to be named "reversed", but then didn't indicate on which post this happened:

Improve this answer
2
  • 1
    My deduction from this is that there simply weren't enough reversed votes for them to be collapsed into a single "Serial downvoting reversed" entry. As far as I've seen, concentrated vote fraud reversals still display as "Serial upvoting/downvoting reversed".
    – BoltClock's a Unicorn
    Jun 10, 2012 at 9:13
  • Ah, that might very well be true. (I was about to tell you about another example that came up today, but now I see it's you who pointed me from that post here. ;-))
    – Arjan
    Jun 10, 2012 at 9:17

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .