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Is there anything in place to discourage or prevent rapid voting across the site. I know there is one vote per five seconds limit on comment votes, however is there anything like this for questions and answers.

I'm mostly asking this because I just received one downvote on a question and one downvote per each of a few answers I gave over a month or two ago. While I may be wrong, I feel its odd for this to happen over the course of a minute or two. No comments were left with any of the downvotes. Consequently, I feel like I was targeted by someone that just decided to give me a bunch of downvotes on as many things as possible. I have no way of finding out who--not that it matters...

The question is, if there isn't, should there be something in place (such as a time limit) to prevent, or discourage, these sorts of voting sprees?

Not only to prevent what I'm describing but also to prevent people from just going through and voting on random things quickly to get their vote count up quickly.

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There are a couple of things that discourage this:

  1. You only get 40 votes per day in UTC time.
  2. There are anti-voter-fraud detection scripts that will cancel out revenge votes (if they are bad enough).

If you were to limit voting enough to prevent rapid revenge votes, you would have to make the timing so bad that it would interfere with normal votes.

(As a side note - I once had someone hit me with a revenge spree that spanned two days.)

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  • understandable, just thought i would inquire, i mean (if it was revenge) if could have been much worse, i only got hit on a handful of items. – bimbom22 Aug 18 '10 at 21:45
  • Wow! People are weird. Illidan is out there somewhere. – bobobobo Aug 18 '10 at 22:02
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    I've been downvote bombed at least twice. I think it auto-corrected, and I know I've read about auto-correcting mechanics on the site. Obviously the details aren't laid out, or people would just circumvent them. – Kara Marfia Aug 18 '10 at 22:16
  • Just a clarification, it's not just revenge downvotes, but adoration upvotes as well are caught by this script. Usually. – Grace Note♦ Aug 19 '10 at 12:42
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I don't think that's such a bad idea, though.

A 5 seconds limit for normal votes would be consistent (since it's the same behavior of comments) and somewhat useful. When do you legitimately vote a post (which is much longer than a comment, usually) before 5 seconds than the previous one? It means you haven't even read it.

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  • ...or it means several people all posted the same one-line answer at once... – Shog9 Aug 18 '10 at 22:13
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    Some people read really fast ;) – NullUserException อ_อ Aug 18 '10 at 22:14
  • @Shog9 You vote them all up when that happens?I vote up the first one and resist the urge to downvote all the others for not deleting their dups – Michael Mrozek Aug 18 '10 at 23:14
  • @Michael: well, i just hate down-voting so much... You know my motto, "Everyone should get a prize for playing!" – Shog9 Aug 18 '10 at 23:38
  • @Michael: That's fine when the answers are at least 5 minutes apart so you can actually tell who duped, but one-liners are usually posted all at the almost same time, so if one deserves the upvote, all do - too bad the 5min-edits cannot be seen at least for some time... – Tobias Kienzler Aug 19 '10 at 14:54
  • @Tobias I'm not saying one person got it right and the rest copy/pasted his answer; I'm saying the question was so easy that 8 people got it right at about the same time. If I post an answer and see that somebody else got the same answer in 3 seconds before me, I delete my answer. And it annoys me when other people don't do the same; there's no need for 8 answers with the same text – Michael Mrozek Aug 19 '10 at 15:46
  • @Michael: It might however happen that the answer was so easy that those guys posted and never looked back... it however be nice to add a feature to merge almost identical answers and distribute the rep-gain fairly - of course only if all answers were indeed posted in the same 10 seconds – Tobias Kienzler Aug 20 '10 at 8:05
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    I don't always vote on posts right after I read them. If a question has four short answers, I might read everything and then cast five votes in quick succession. – Pops Sep 13 '12 at 17:26

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