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Yesterday, I had 10 questions downvoted in rapid succession. This morning, I woke up to a serial downvote reversal as I expected I would. Shortly after, three of my top voted answers were downvoted:

How can e-mail be delivered to a domain without an MX record?

What is Active Directory Domain Services and how does it work?

Networking Units: Not getting expected performance from 100Mb Ethernet

These are all excellent answers, if I do say so myself :)

I don't care about the rep, but I'm curious whether or not these three votes will trigger another reversal. Usually, three wouldn't, but if it's truly from the same user as before then it should.

So, does the serial down voting algorithm consider a voter's past reversals when determining whether there was vote fraud or not?

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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They don't release the exact numbers, but the Serial Vote detector is a pretty simple algorithm. More than several votes (down seem to be weighted more than up, but I'm not sure) in a few days period triggers the reversal.

In you case, with so many being reversed yesterday I believe even a single vote today would be reversed again tonight.

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  • Hm, looks like it wasn't reversed at 00:00 UTC
    – MDMarra
    Jan 11, 2014 at 3:36
  • It runs at 03:00 UTC, not midnight.
    – Chris S
    Jan 11, 2014 at 14:31
  • Still nope. Seems like someone sufficiently persistent can get around it.
    – MDMarra
    Jan 11, 2014 at 14:56
  • Likely... Might want to use the "contact" at the bottom of the page. See what they say.
    – Chris S
    Jan 11, 2014 at 15:24
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    Did a quick check; looks like these -3 were not from the same user as the first -10
    – Mark Henderson
    Jan 11, 2014 at 23:41
  • @MarkHenderson any chance they were sock puppets? It seems silly that they were back to back and on my highest rated non-wiki answers.
    – MDMarra
    Jan 13, 2014 at 13:49
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    @MDMarra The history doesn't show who did the 3 downvotes; there's a minimum number of votes before someone shows up. The original person did 10, they got reversed, the other person (could also be separate people) aren't from the same IP. Could be a sock, but they need 125 rep to downvote... so, that's some dedication
    – Chris S
    Jan 13, 2014 at 16:42
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There was a time when I did a lot of upvoting certain people to see if I could find patterns that wouldn't get my upvotes reversed. There didn't seem to be any "memory" in the algorithm - I only triggered the reversal if I voted too much for a single person. OTOH, this was strictly upvoting, and since I was mostly staying below the reversal threshold, there wasn't anything to remember.

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