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I returned here after a bit of an absence to discover a big (for me) reputation subtraction for "serial up-voting". I've read some other posts explaining what this is supposed to be for, but none of what's described there seems to correspond to me. What is the subtraction for?

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There have been a number of changes to the mechanics underneath the reputation system recently. You can find the details in the SO Meta Post Recent Reputation History Changes.

Serial up-voting and down-voting is the Stack Exchange version of stalking behavior. The algorithms that manage reputation irregularities now look for a series of votes in one direction to one account from one or a very small number of accounts in a short period of time.

Another post on the same issue shows an example:

That's 7 upvotes you received within 60 seconds. That's an average of 1 vote every 8.5741428 seconds...if all those votes were from a single user, then that's serial upvoting and those votes are not valid. The system was correcting that.enter link description here

It should work the other way as well - if someone down-votes a set of your posts in a short period of time those down-votes would be ignored and not impact your reputation.

A 25 point change isn't much and I looked and didn't see any particular day that corresponded, but one of the other mods may know better how to see that kind of activity.

  • That makes sense as a policy, but I don't see where in my history the upvotes occurred. – orome Mar 23 '12 at 4:12
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    That's what I meant when I said I "didn't see any particular day that corresponded." But I'll poke the other mods and see if they notice anything. – Gary.Ray♦ Mar 23 '12 at 16:25
  • After talking with other mods, and looking at the admin tools, the best I can tell you is that it looks like one particular user made 7 quick up-votes and those got removed. It doesn't look like those were all to you, so some other users had a few points removed as well. I can't see the day or the questions/answers that were affected. – Gary.Ray♦ Mar 23 '12 at 18:49
  • Hmmm, sounds broken. It's a good idea for a policy, but if it's this opaque to the people affected by it, it's not working. – orome Mar 23 '12 at 20:01
  • I suspect the opacity is somewhat intentional, so that people can't easily game the system. – freiheit♦ Mar 24 '12 at 1:15

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