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My four top rated answers at Unix & Linux got downvoted, apparently within minutes of each other.

Here is a screenshot.

4 downvotes

I don't really mind it, as it doesn't practically affect my reputation... But I wonder if this is an user who has an axe to grind, for some reason. Also, I wonder whether the same user has downvoted other users' answers in the same pattern.

Does the site have some form of auto-detection of this situation, identifying these kinds of patterns (downvoting top answers of a same user, etc.) and having the user flagged for review by moderators or staff? (Perhaps this happened already, just wasn't acted upon.)

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    There is a script that runs once a day to detect and correct serial voting when it occurs. You can read about it on this meta.se post: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126829/…
    – n8te
    Aug 1, 2019 at 7:06
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    You, me, Gilles, mosvy ...
    – muru
    Aug 1, 2019 at 7:17
  • 1
    @muru Quite impressive as a pattern. That even looks like something a bot would do.
    – filbranden
    Aug 1, 2019 at 7:21
  • @n8te Thanks for the pointer! I'll check that this is solved within 24h then.
    – filbranden
    Aug 1, 2019 at 7:32
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    @filbranden - this type of DV'ing pattern is typically the nightly job running, hence the clustering of the votes around the same time. Happens to most of us pretty much on a daily basis. As your rep grows your surface area for becoming susceptible to this goes up (since you likely have more Q/A's).
    – slm Mod
    Aug 1, 2019 at 12:39
  • It should be reversed now.
    – muru
    Aug 2, 2019 at 6:11
  • @muru 👍 Indeed it was reversed, thanks for checking back!
    – filbranden
    Aug 2, 2019 at 6:25
  • Don't worry, someone looks disliking you. Not your content, but you, in persona. Thus, he voted your posts down. These votes don't represent the quality of your posts. Thus, they will be soon deleted. Possible, that the mods will know, who did it.
    – peterh
    Aug 2, 2019 at 20:51
  • @peterh See muru's post above, it wasn't just me, it was many of us, probably from the same account... Really doesn't look like it was "personal", or it was personal against us all...
    – filbranden
    Aug 2, 2019 at 21:26
  • @muru And me. It is fixed also. It was to "punish" people who voted to close questions on that day, I think. At the time, I reviewed my history, and had only one suspect when it happened,
    – Rui F Ribeiro
    Aug 3, 2019 at 2:40
  • @RuiFRibeiro Ah yes that's a great explanation! I usually use the site on a phone. A couple days back I accessed it through the laptop, so I saw the queues including Close queue and I went through it. So I voted to close quite a few posts this time... Oh well, glad the system is working as it should!
    – filbranden
    Aug 3, 2019 at 2:44
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    @peterh Moderators do generally not know who votes in what way on individual questions and answers.
    – Kusalananda on strike Mod
    Aug 5, 2019 at 9:58
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    @Kusalananda I suspected, if there is an automatical voting reversal, then the mods might get some extra information from the reversal script (essentially: "X was serial downed, perpetrator: Y"). No such thing exists?
    – peterh
    Aug 5, 2019 at 10:06
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    @peterh We can see some aggregated stats (including the total number of reversed votes), but no details about votes on individual questions or answers. Also note that serial _up_voting is also reversed.
    – Kusalananda on strike Mod
    Aug 5, 2019 at 10:10

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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This was fixed within 24 hours. There is an automated script to detect this kind of abuse and revert the actions of serial voter accounts such as this one.

No moderator intervention is needed, unless the problem is not corrected within 24 hours.

More details in this question.

Thanks @n8te, @muru and @slm for the comments!

UPDATE: @RuiFRibeiro (who also had downvoted answers) traced this to someone trying to "punish" people who voted to close questions on that day.

That's likely what happened, since on that day I went through the "Close" queue, which I normally don't since I use the site most of the time on the phone (where the review queues are not really visible.)

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