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Earlier today several of my answers got downvoted over a period of a couple of minutes in the order they are listed in my profile, which is rather unlikely to be a coincidence. Presumably someone took something I'd said personally.

Can there be a cap on the number of times a user can downvote answers by the same user in a particular time period? Something that flashes up "don't be a dick, add a comment to the question instead"

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  • I had exactly the same thing happen to me yesterday. Seventeen answers, some a year old, were suddenly downvoted. I sent an email to [email protected], and before they could reply, their automated script ran and cleaned everything up.
    – Graeme Perrow
    Commented Sep 13, 2009 at 1:26
  • 1
    +1 for suggesting the insult...
    – gbn
    Commented Sep 14, 2009 at 18:50

2 Answers 2

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Scripts exist caring about vote fraud. If it is not corrected automatically, flag the posts for moderator attention.

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  • 7
    The script runs every 24 hours. Sit back and wait and the votes will go away. I used to have this happen once a week like clockwork.
    – BinaryMisfit
    Commented Sep 12, 2009 at 19:53
  • Does it notify the cultprit that there a dooshbag?
    – norlesh
    Commented Jan 1, 2014 at 13:30
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There already is, "serial downvoting" is detected, and silently nullified. See the blog.stackoverflow.com blog post "Vote Fraud and You":

Unfortunately, for those users that do, the pattern was quite clear. As of today, we have several queries that look for unusual downvote patterns. If we discover these patterns in a given user’s voting history, we view all their downvotes for that user as suspect. They’re all silently deleted, and any lost reputation is restored to the unfortunate target of these downvotes.

Other related meta.SO questions:

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