Ignore votes on answers deleted by moderators when checking for serial down-voting

Question

My understanding (inspired by this answer and conversations in The Workplace chat) is the serial-downvoting script currently does not include:

• Overall +/- votes for an answer
• Whether answer was deleted by the user
• Whether an answer was deleted by moderators
• Whether an answer was flagged
• How new a user is to a site

This is normally not a problem.

However, there are situations where new users on boards appear and post lots of bad questions/answers in short succession. It would be really nice as more active users on sites to be able to freely downvote all this material (as appropriate, obviously) without worrying about accidentally tripping any serial downvoting scripts.

We have had a couple instances on The Workplace (though this also happens elsewhere as well) recently of newer users coming and receiving a lot of downvotes in short succession due to volume of low quality answers/questions.

The problem is when bad answers/questions which were not necessarily bad enough to be deleted have downvotes removed regardless of how many other posts were deleted, heavily downvoted by others, etc.

If a user posts in short succession and all are bad enough to warrant downvotes and a large percentage of them are eventually deleted by users/moderation, it makes no sense to include them for serial downvoting purposes:

As of now, vote reversal script involves deleted posts:

Posts bad enough to be deleted should be downvoted. If someone spams a bunch of delete-worthy answers and 2 "bad but not quite delete-worthy" answers, they should all be downvoted -- and stay downvoted. Not accidentally trigger serial downvoting flags.

What can be done to fix this?

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Here is a good example from just now of a string of... downvote worthy stuff posted in short succession just today

But it's not all delete worthy necessarily, which means downvoting all them has good odds of serial downvoting being triggered since it's a rapid fire succession of terrible stuff.

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Update the vote reversal script described here to consider only content which was not deleted.

Answer 1

If someone's flooding the site with spam, don't waste your votes - just flag them as spam. That's why that flag exists - spammers generally don't care much about reputation or even the rank of their answers, but the spam flag provides an automatic down-vote anyway just to be safe. And more importantly, enough spam flags will automatically delete the answer.

Beyond that, spam flags tend to get the attention of moderators, who can quickly destroy the user and all of their posts.

Finally, keep in mind there are several different rate-limits in place. A new user shouldn't be able to post 10 things in short succession, and once a few people have down-voted (and/or spam-flagged) their first efforts they'll tend to be even further restricted.

The problem is when bad answers/questions which were not necessarily bad enough to be deleted have downvotes removed

Then we're not talking about spam anymore. If the answer isn't so bad that it can't be salvaged, take some time to leave a comment when you vote. The script catches various forms of serial voting, but tends to be a lot harsher when you're just going through someone's profile, voting on each post as quickly as you can click. And if you leave a comment describing why the post is bad, it'll possibly help others who are less informed avoid up-voting and thereby counteracting your efforts.

Answer 2

The idea of the suspicious-voting checks is to **keep** people from targeting specific users in their voting.

If a user is posting poor content, their posts should be down-voted organically. The perceived value of someone's contributions should be based on the preponderance of the voting by the community at large… not the whims of one user (no matter how well-meaning they are). It is simply not your job to single handedly vote this user into oblivion.

Consider it this way —

The suspicious-voting checks apply equally to up-votes as they do for down-votes… and for good reason. If you suddenly noticed that, hey, I'm a pretty smart guy, you might be inclined to track down and up-vote all my content. With a few other users following suit, I've suddenly racked up an astronomical reputation. But my reputation would be completely disproportional to my actual contribution.

That's why we say that you should "vote for content, not for the person." Nothing that you've said suggests that some should be exempt from that behavior. The story you're telling yourself is that, if a user is bad enough, they deserve specific and targeted retribution by a few users. But the potential for abuse (no matter how well-meaning) is simply too great.