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I'm a regular participant at Video Production and have contributed dozens of answers, many concerning FFmpeg, over the past few months.

Yesterday, one of the maintainers of FFmpeg, who is apparently a rare visitor to SE, judging by their profile, visited Video Production site and answered a couple of questions. I also contributed to one of those questions. They then must have visited my profile, or scanned the FFmpeg tag activity and proceeded to upvote many (but not most) of my answers.

Today morning, I see that there's a Voting Corrected activity along with a mass reversion of those upvotes. I don't know the maintainer and haven't interacted with them before yesterday. This isn't "stalker" upvoting. Only some of my FFmpeg answers were upvoted and over an extended period of time. This user also contributed multiple answers to old open FFmpeg questions. Basically, this is a false positive detection.

Can this be audited?

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2 Answers 2

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As Shadow Wizard already said, those votes can't be reversed, and I don't think they should.

The behavior describe is exactly what is being discouraged and prohibited. Going through someone's profile in order to 'find' good posts to upvote is not the way to go. If he only upvoted the post he ran into, that would have been fine. If he upvoted you 15 times, that would be too much.

I trust he did it in good faith, and he really judged your posts on usefulness, given the timestamps, but the pattern is classic for serial voting.

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    Nice, I considered adding such reasoning to my answer but was too lazy. Thanks! :)
    – Shadow The Spring Wizard
    Feb 10, 2016 at 8:22
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    I don't believe this is the behaviour being discouraged. The doc says that they want to discourage targeted voting i.e. channeling gratitude through unearned upvotes or rage/revenge through unearned downvotes. The serial voting detection is being used as a proxy to detect such behaviour. It's not serial voting per se which seems to be targeted. Note that VP is low activity. I usually end up fielding most questions regarding FFmpeg, so anyone upvoting replies in ffmpeg Qs from past few months will be voting on my posts.
    – Gyan
    Feb 10, 2016 at 8:32
  • An update: another user who used to field ffmpeg Qs before I became a regular, also had a dozen of their answers upvoted on the same day. Since that must be just under the detection threshold, those votes weren't reversed.
    – Gyan
    Apr 15, 2016 at 9:57
  • It happened again.
    – Gyan
    May 22, 2017 at 6:44
  • It happens all the time. Nothing we can do about it.
    – Patrick Hofman
    May 22, 2017 at 7:01
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No, it can't be reversed/undone/overriden.

This is an automatic process, that remove the votes.

If you think you know who made it (and you can only guess, you can never know for sure) feel free to post a comment under one of his/her posts (or invite to chat if the user has more than 20 reputation) and explain what happened, then the user can think carefully before upvoting again, and maybe pick only your best answer to upvote.

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