0

This is kind of a two part ordeal so bear with me here. First of all, is there any system in place to warn an abusive voter of what they're doing, a helpful orange box informing them that they are excessively voting on a certain users questions/answers and explaining that this isn't allowed?

If so, I am sorry for wasting your time, you can stop reading here and this question can be closed. I couldn't find anywhere stating wether or not this feature existed, and I am unwilling to test it to find out on my own account.

If not, I think this could be a very beneficial feature. I'm not in any way stating that there should be a progress bar showing your "getting banned" progress, or similar. I'm merely pointing out that the kind of user who would engage in this abusive behavior is not the user who hangs out on meta and keeps up to date with the rules of SO.

I'm aware that there is a nightly script in place to automatically remove excessive votes. So I'm proposing this is kept better track of. It's one thing to just clean up the mess at the end of the day, but I think having an occasional alert pop up informing the user that they're asking for the ban hammer could help redirect users that either genuinely don't realize they are doing anything wrong or users that think it can't happen to them into more carefully following the rules.

I believe that most people do want to follow the rules, but a majority of users aren't very aware of them. Any thoughts?

Improve this question
7
  • 6
    Poor grammar/spelling.
    – Rosinante
    Aug 17, 2012 at 17:21
  • 3
    +1 this question can be saved, it is actually an interesting proposal. Many people open a user and start seeing his questions and answers, an unvoluntary reaction make them vote on these, a warning could be helpful. Note that he said: "excessively voting on a certain users" not "revenge downvoting on..."
    – ajax333221
    Aug 17, 2012 at 17:26
  • the majority seems to disagree, I think that it is how you chose certain words that made the question downvotable... A drastic edit + a miracle could change the future of this question. But I think it is a bit late, -7 is hard to recover from
    – ajax333221
    Aug 17, 2012 at 17:38
  • @ajax333221 You're right but thanks anyway.
    – Mick MacCallum
    Aug 17, 2012 at 17:38
  • 1
    While some of the down-votes may have been quality-related, note that voting is different on meta. Often the down-votes suggest that people don't agree with your idea, rather than that they think your idea is crap, poorly written, or poorly researched. Sometimes it's a combination.
    – Aaron Bertrand Staff
    Aug 17, 2012 at 20:03
  • 5
    We're down voting bad spelling now? If someone has trouble with grammar then EDIT, don't down vote. Not everyone in the world has English as their first language.
    – Jesse
    Aug 17, 2012 at 20:44
  • 3
    Oh, I think Rosinante was kidding, @Jesse. I think he was actually communicating "I'm not going to tell you why I vote".
    – Michael Petrotta
    Aug 17, 2012 at 21:10

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
16

The hardest part of the anti-abuse system is preventing abusers from gaming it. Any feedback to abusers will make it easier to game.

When abuse reaches the point of 'boxing' a user, a human being from the team communicates with them to explain the nature of their misbehavior. The automatic system undoes certain patterned votes, but does not automatically penalize anyone, nor does it warn anyone.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

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