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Possible Duplicate:
Serial Downvoting Victim

I checked my rep today and I noticed I was down 50 points. Then when I looked at my reputationI saw this:

alt text link text

Mind you these questions weren't terrible questions and none of them (I don't think) have down votes besides the ones this person gave.

Someone has something against me =( Is there a way to find out who or why the person went on a down-vote spree?

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  • I thought I remember Jeff talking about how there were some sort of controls in place to discourage this type of behavior. It is obvious that these all happened in rapid succession, which makes me question my memory about these rate limits.
    – Strozykowski
    Feb 17, 2010 at 16:57
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    @Worthless - there are vote anomaly detection jobs that run, though exactly how they work is somewhat hidden. I'd bet that if this question had never been posted Baddie's rep would have been restored anyway.
    – Dominic Rodger
    Feb 17, 2010 at 16:59
  • @Dominic Ah, I see. Never sure how often the batch jobs run on the site. So my memory isn't as bad as I thought.
    – Strozykowski
    Feb 17, 2010 at 17:04
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    Linking to your rep tab doesn't really help the significant percentage of people who aren't you. This is better: stackoverflow.com/users/160823?tab=reputationhistory#tab-top.
    – mmyers
    Feb 17, 2010 at 17:10
  • I think it was a bad idea linking my profile period. I just received 6 more down votes, fun!
    – Omar
    Feb 17, 2010 at 17:18
  • Have you given it a little thought as to what you did to deserve it?
    – juan
    Feb 17, 2010 at 19:29
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    This is a dupe of many similar support posts. Do what the other posts say: mail [email protected] or flag for moderator attention. Talking about it on meta is just spam.
    – Ether
    Feb 17, 2010 at 19:47
  • @Downvoter - Whether or not they down votes are warranted, there were several red flags for the down votes. The majority of questions were old, had already been answered, had previous up votes and were in similar order as to my questions when filtered by votes. Also, each downvote was within a minute of the previous one.
    – Omar
    Feb 17, 2010 at 19:56
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    I haven't looked at your posts, so this isn't aimed at you... However, one could find a person with a bad answer, downvote, look at their history, find out they have a track record of bad answers. Then, the right thing to do WOULD be to downvote all of those. It might appear personal, but is actually in the best interest of the community. Wondering if the downvote reversal mechanism takes that into consideration? I've run across a couple of (relatively high rep), yet chronically incorrect, users before that really NEED a bunch of downvotes (yet I won't do it for fear of retaliation).
    – Brian Knoblauch
    Feb 17, 2010 at 20:03
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    Don't questions need question marks?
    – Arjan
    Feb 17, 2010 at 20:05
  • Duplicate of meta.stackexchange.com/questions/23005/… (and many others)
    – Perpetual Motion Goat
    Feb 18, 2010 at 1:24
  • @Brian Knoblauch - I understand that, but the majority of the down votes were towards legitimate questions, not answers. Those questions were around for months with no down votes (some had multiple up votes).
    – Omar
    Feb 18, 2010 at 1:52
  • @Baddie - Your point may be valid, but your argument is not. The whole concept here is that the community decides if the question/answer is legitimate.
    – Brian Knoblauch
    Mar 2, 2010 at 19:46

5 Answers 5

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Apart from what Dominic said this will be reverted within 24 hours.

There is a set of anti abuse scripts that run periodically which removed these types of votes and detects them quite easily. This happens quite often on some moderator accounts and we normally just wait until the next day.

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    Seriously, people go punishing moderators like that? Does that have any consequences or is it just ignored?
    – balpha StaffMod
    Feb 17, 2010 at 17:55
  • I think it would be wrong to inflict consequences. The down-votes are removed, so they don't exactly damage the site.
    – Tyler Carter
    Feb 17, 2010 at 18:32
  • @balpha. Personally. Ignored. I don't have the energy or the time to go through a list of down votes. Honestly when your a diamond moderator rep is really just a value which offers no specific additional extras to the site.
    – BinaryMisfit
    Feb 17, 2010 at 18:53
  • I wasn't thinking about putting them into the bin; more like a pre-phrased email that gets sent or something like that. Not just for downvotes on moderators' questions, but in general.
    – balpha StaffMod
    Feb 17, 2010 at 19:30
  • @balpha Rarely if ever. It is not simple to track these guys, and even we sometimes need to e-mail the team if really serious.
    – BinaryMisfit
    Feb 17, 2010 at 21:38
  • You're a moderator. You can close a dupe with one click. And yet you answer this??? -1.
    – Perpetual Motion Goat
    Feb 18, 2010 at 1:24
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    @Perp. To be honest at the time it didn't come to mind that it is a duplicate, and there is various awesome MSO users like yourself that make sure it gets closed anyway. Does seem strange however that it did take 8 hours for someone to list the duplicate. The crew must be on strike :)
    – BinaryMisfit
    Feb 18, 2010 at 1:30
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    @Diago, Not like myself. I don't have 3K rep on meta. And getting rep on meta involves agreeing with the majority of users so that's not going to happen :-)
    – Perpetual Motion Goat
    Feb 18, 2010 at 2:07
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We have several algorithms in place to deal with this type of activity that run daily. When you wake up tomorrow this pattern of serial downvotes will be gone.

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Is there a way to find out who or why the person went on a down-vote spree?

No, voting records are strictly anonymous and as such you will not be told who did this. Such a person, and their supposed reason, is not worth knowing anyway.

Flag one of your posts for moderator attention and they'll fix the problem and deal with the problem user if needed.

Voting records are kept, and diamond moderators can find out who did this so they can take appropriate action, but the site's policy is not to release that information so people feel free to vote.

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    Voting records can't possibly be anonymous. SO knows which questions, answers, and comments I've voted on, or it wouldn't be able to show me when I return to a post. They may not be available to the general public, but they're far from anonymous.
    – ceejayoz
    Feb 17, 2010 at 18:52
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    Yes, the internal system tracks who votes for what and when. But they do not pass out that information, even in cases such as this, so while voting is tracked, it is still anonymous, as enforced by policy.
    – Pollyanna
    Feb 17, 2010 at 19:06
  • @ceejayoz - but I've edited my answer to clarify this point.
    – Pollyanna
    Feb 17, 2010 at 19:20
  • -1 for answering such an obvious dupe question
    – Perpetual Motion Goat
    Feb 18, 2010 at 1:23
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Yup. Somebody has it out for you. We'll review this.

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Flag one of those questions for moderation attention and explain what's happened, or e-mail [email protected]. They'll fix things up for you - that pattern certainly looks as if someone's got angry with you.

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