Should this be picked up by the vote fraud detecting algorithm?

Question

Some time ago, I added an entry to the SO C++ FAQ community effort, which deals with C++ operator overloading. For that piece I had spent half a Sunday I was supposed to spend building something out of LEGO for my kids, plus I butchered an article draft that I had lying around which had accumulated more than a decade's worth of experience in C++. So I thought I'd deserve the rep I might get from it and didn't make this a community wiki question.

Over time, this has become one of the more popular FAQ entries. It got reddited, and sometimes I get a flurry of upvotes for it, supposedly because somebody must have linked to it from some other question. Also, operator overloading is one of the few topics on Stack Overflow I still cannot resist looking at questions about (I rarely answer anymore these days), and when I look at one of those questions, I usually consider it worth pointing out the FAQ in a comment. The other day I even provided an answer to such a question, in which I also put links to the relevant sections of that FAQ entry. This resulted in a few upvotes to the question and the answers.

Today, when I refreshed Stack Overflow's main page, I saw my rep dropping. I had a look at my reputation page, and it turns out I lost 55 rep for serial upvoting. Looking at today's and yesterdays stats.

(Note that the consecutive upvotes on "Operator overloading" are all for different answers to the same question.)

I bet what happened is that someone had a look at that FAQ, read through it, and then went and upvoted the question and the answers, which the fraud detection algorithm considered serial upvoting.

I'd consider that an error.

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Now please don't get me wrong here. I am not at all concerned with losing <0.1% of my rep while I have done so little for raising it for such a long time. I currently have a rep of 62698, and if I wanted to up it, I'd start to answer questions again, rather than coming to the madhouse to ask to get back a meager 55 rep.

What brings me here is this question: Did that algorithm do the right thing there? I don't think it did.

I think this all boils down to whether that form of an FAQ entry, with myself giving several answers to my own question, is Ok. Because if this is Ok, then it should be fine if someone, after reading it, goes through it and votes on the question and all the answers. (The difference to fraudulent serial voting is that in this case someone votes several answers to the same question, whereas serial voting is normally considered when some user goes to some other user's profile and votes on answers that have little or nothing to do with each other, except for being by the same user.)

However, if that form is not Ok, then I'd like to know how we could organize such an FAQ in a way that it provides at least all the benefits the current one has, notably the ability to close questions as duplicates of FAQ questiions. (Please read the whole of the FAQ discussion, including the numerous comment discussions, if you're not familiar with it, in order to understand the benefits of the current system. I do not want to reiterate all of it here.)

Answer 1

However, if that form is not Ok, then I'd like to know how we could organize such an FAQ in a way that it provides at least all the benefits the current one has, notably the ability to close questions as duplicates of FAQ questiions.

Break it up. This could be at least four questions, each with one canonical answer - and it could potentially be split up even further (guidance on overloading each operator could very well be one question per operator, and drop the "common" requirement).

Then just create a directory that links to each question. I strongly recommend making this directory CW, to reduce the resistance to editing. Alternately, put the directory in the C++ tag wiki.

This preserves the ability to close as duplicates (in fact, it improves on that ability by allowing you to close with much more specificity - you can't close a question as a duplicate of an answer after all). At the same time, it reduces the danger of folks blindly voting on all the answers without bothering to actually read them.

As an aside, note that the "Jeopardy!"-style question+answer format has long been encouraged:

• if you have a question that you already know the answer to
• if you’d like to document it in public so others (including yourself) can find it later
• it is OK to ask, and answer, your own question on a relevant Stack Exchange site.

But once you want or need to break your answer up into multiple, non-overlapping answers, there's a very good chance you've asked yourself a poor question. If you wouldn't post a half-dozen answers to someone else's question, you probably shouldn't be doing so to your own.

Answer 2

Yes, I think the vote fraud algorithm did the right thing.

Why? Because there's no way to determine a voter's intent.

A sock puppet could just as easily upvote everything on one question as they could upvote multiple separate questions. (In fact it would be easier, just one page load!) You might argue that this is less likely to occur, and I agree; few users have multiple answers on the same question. But that just means that if this was made a special case and allowed, the smart people would exploit it. We definitely don't want to make it easier for the smart cheaters.

We need to do the best job we can of educating users that you can't go through someone's posts and upvote them, whether you do so from their profile or within a single question page or anything else. In addition to Shog's suggestion about breaking up the posts, I think that's the best way to avoid this problem.

Answer 3

Having multiple answers by the same user on the same question is a very unusual case. In the words of Jeff Atwood:

If it is possible for a question to have two valid answers from the same person, the odds are high that it's a bad question.

This C++ FAQ is indeed a special case. But I agree with Shog9 that you should break the questions up. You're trying to shoehorn Stack Exchange, a questions and answers platform, into something that it was not intended for. When you use software for a purpose that it wasn't intended for, it's not surprising that you'll occasionally run into undesirable behavior. The fraud detection algorithm did what it should have done. Your use was out-of-spec, so the responsibility is on you if the software doesn't behave as you intended.