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To our other Moderators:

In the last 48 hours I've had a series of rather unusual upvotes. If they are legit, then obviously I don't mind, but it seems... unusual.

Is there a way to track whether it is all the same user? Or whether they are legit?

48 hours rep activity.png

  • Are you talking about the fact that there are two groups of them that happened at the same time? – Goodbye Stack Exchange May 5 '12 at 16:38
  • 3 groups, yes, and a new vote within 60 seconds of each event. It may be normal, likely is even. I just was curious if there was a tool to figure it out for sure. Check the ip of the voting user maybe? – zenbike May 5 '12 at 18:02
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    There's a little bit of possibly helpful stuff talked about here: moderator.stackexchange.com/2012/03/march-newsletter – freiheit♦ May 6 '12 at 21:31
  • Zen, did this ever sort itself out? – Goodbye Stack Exchange May 11 '12 at 4:41
  • Nothing has changed that I can see. – zenbike May 11 '12 at 5:58
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Information about who voted for what isn't available to mods, only to SE employees.

Most of the concerns about voter fraud are obviously with revenge or serial downvoting, not upvoting. There's a script that runs to catch this stuff, but I don't know if it looks at upvotes or not. The possibility of many upvotes on the same user triggering this system has been raised. However, these votes are so close together that I suspect this isn't a case of someone liking one of your questions/answers and thinking, "I wonder what other cool stuff zenbike has written here" and checking out your content.

I suggest waiting a few days to see if these votes are compensated for by the automagic vote-checker 'bot.

  • If this is still unresolved in a few days, I'd ask the SE employees to take a look. I'm not sure what the mechanism is, though. Maybe ask in one of the moderator chatrooms if it comes to this? – Goodbye Stack Exchange May 5 '12 at 18:44
  • You can always email the address at the "contact us" link at the bottom of every page. – Adam Lear♦ May 11 '12 at 3:18
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It could very well be me... On some other sites I vote a lot (note the blurb in my profile, and Freiheit may recall some discussion of voting on the ServerFault chat), and over the past few days I've been reading a lot of the questions I missed on bikes.SE - and voting as I go.

Since you answer a lot of questions, you got a lot of upvotes. I don't pay close attention to who wrote the answer when I vote, just whether I think it's an ok answer, so I didn't realize how many times I'd voted for one of your answers.

I have no idea if the automatic vote fraud system will count them as fraud or not... if so, sorry!

I'm not sure what it indicates, but I've also read and voted on a bunch of questions on the scifi.SE site over the past week, but over there the big (very big) concern was that I voted down a couple of questions and people seemed unhappy about it.

EDIT: yeah, looking at your list of newest answers, I had voted on most of them, so it was probably me that did it.

  • It's not an issue. I was just curious, and using it to teach myself about the limits of moderating here. – zenbike May 9 '12 at 1:44
  • I'd be curious to know if the votes get reversed... they shouldn't, it wasn't any kind of "vote fraud", but the detection algorithm isn't perfect. – Ward - Reinstate Monica May 9 '12 at 2:00
  • That's part of what I'm curious about as well. Not so far, but we'll see. – zenbike May 9 '12 at 2:05
  • I think it reverses votes it deems to be fraud pretty quickly, but even that is a deep dark secret. – Ward - Reinstate Monica May 9 '12 at 2:15

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