It is pretty much every day when I see on my reputation page serial downvoting, when within minute or two several downvotes are recorded for my posts. Usually the next day I see serial downvoting reversed, but some days it is not reversed.
Maybe silly question - what should I do and what should moderators do about it? It is annoying and certainly unfair.
I think you have already done the right thing just by bringing here to Meta, and thus bringing to the attention of people who care about this sort of thing. Not only are you making others (and hopefully mods) aware that there is a person harassing you, but you've also shown that there is a serious issue in the system that has been put in place to prevent this sort of abuse.
You have an interesting way of answering questions. By interesting I mean unusual. By unusual I mean it's going to irk some people.
You tend to post code without much discussion. Sometimes it appears (for example in the linked question) that you don't seem to answer the question exactly, instead just provide a working example of code. Although your code might work, it doesn't tell the reader how it answers the question.
Don't expect people to make leaps like this. Put 2+2 together and completely explain how your code answers the question.
In your answers, try not to post just code, but explain what the code is doing/supposed to do.
I have yet to see a better-than-mediocre answer to Perl questions from this poster. I will continue to downvote answers I do not consider to be good Perl regardless of the identity of the poster.
As a case in point, consider this answer. While the answer seems to work, module names starting with a lower case letter are reserved for Perl pragmas and, as such, his answer clearly constitutes bad Perl. The answer is incomplete in that it does not link to Perl documentation on modules, use, and require.
Or, how about this answer which is in PHP and contains a typo that makes the code suspect. I decided not to vote that one down, because I can't tell if the code would work or not, but it is not an answer that clearly deserves to be voted up, and I would not see a problem with someone voting it down.
If one's answers range consistently from meh to awful, it shouldn't be surprising when one's answer get downvoted.
stackoverflow) Please learn to separate your identity from the points on your posts. I have downvoted your posts many times as well. It's not about you. We don't know you.
Commented
May 1, 2012 at 17:15
It is not about me. I don't care if you going to reverse my downvotes or not. I am trying to say that the system needs improvements.
But that's the problem: you're using yourself as evidence that the system needs fixing.
As it stands, it seems very much like some of your answers are... junk. Things that should be downvoted. I took at look at some of your most recent answers, and you have a consistent style of "Code: [] Test: [] Output: []". Only half of the answers I saw had anything remotely resembling text.
Quite frankly, I now want to serially downvote you ;)
You are contributing a lot of junk to the site in the form of poor answers. You're getting downvoted a lot.
The fact that you're getting downvoted a lot doesn't doesn't mean the system needs fixing; it could just be crappy answers from you being downvoted. That's the system working, not the system being broken.
In short: you need to find someone else, someone who posts better answers, who is still getting serially downvoted. Then we can use that as legitimate evidence of a problem that needs solving.
From a quick look at your profile, the votes do look suspicious. I haven't looked in detail at your answers, so I won't say whether the downvotes are justified, but the pattern looks unusual to me.
The primary defense against serial downvoting is the daily script that reverses those votes. In this case it looks like it wasn't triggered on many days.
If the automatic tools fail to reverse the downvotes, you'll need to get a moderator or even the SE team involved. The common way to do that is to flag one of your own posts and explain the situation, but a meta post works as well.
The reversal script is the primary defense against malicious downvoting, but it isn't the only one. Moderators can detect if a user is targeting another user specifically for downvoting and such behaviour is not acceptable and will result in a suspension.
java, c#, php, C++and C), the serial downvoter got only two days suspended, so don't be so sure!