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When I downvote questions by ripper234 my votes mysteriously vanish, but when I upvote his questions the upvote stays. Must be pretty easy to get a huge rep by spamming the site with dumb questions and then deleting all the downvotes against you, no?

The votes are rigged -- abandon ship. Trust has been broken.

This site is a cesspool.

Goodbye.

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    Wow. You triggered the abuse script not once, not twice, but three times within about a day? That's dedication!
    – Shog9
    Feb 1, 2012 at 23:18
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    Yes, it took dedication to do all the experiments needed to figure out that this only applies to ripper234 and only to negative votes. Feb 2, 2012 at 0:22
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    Did you also "experiment" on the mods? I notice an awful lot of ScheduledController.InvalidateVotes() on all three of our profiles, as well as Ripper's, all in the same timeframe. I'm sorry to inform you that all you've managed to prove is that the SE equivalent to spam filters are working as designed. Far be it from me to dampen anyone's scientific/experimental spirit, but this is also the reason controls are important. Had you also attempted your experiments on a random user, even on a different SE site, the results would have been the same, thus invalidating this entire "experiment". Feb 2, 2012 at 0:44
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    David, no, I did not. So apparently nobody, including the moderators, fully understands the voting system -- or else it's being manipulated or has gone berzerk. Not encouraging. Feb 2, 2012 at 1:58
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    We understand the voting system just fine. The problem here is in your behavior. First you accidentally triggered a filter designed to protect against revenge downvoting - not a problem, happens to a lot of people. Then you attempted (successfully) to recreate the issue - still not a problem. The problem is that you immediately jumped to a ridiculous conclusion without bothering to ask or research your issue first. Feb 2, 2012 at 16:16
  • Hmm, I should check out Meta more, there's an entire post about me, and I didn't even know it :) Maybe The Manipulator (a mythical Bitcoin puppet master supposedly controlling the price by whim) is the mastermind behind the voting on my questions as well.
    – ripper234
    Feb 20, 2012 at 20:29
  • FYI, Revenge Downvotes: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/28756/…
    – ripper234
    Feb 20, 2012 at 20:31
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    Also, as a note for my future self - before renaming, this user was known as @eldentyrell. (Just because I hate user renames)
    – ripper234
    Feb 20, 2012 at 21:15
  • As much as this post wasn't really intended to be useful, it actually probably is useful. Maybe some upvotes would be sensible? Mar 30, 2012 at 2:46

1 Answer 1

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I'm going to go ahead and pretend you said this:

Why are my votes disappearing when I downvote the same user repeatedly, but the upvotes remain? Is he somehow canceling out my votes? I don't want to jump to any absurdly paranoid conclusions, I'm just curious what's wrong

The engine has a number of ways to try and detect vote fraud. One of them involves a single user downvoting another user repeatedly in a short time span. The site assumes that user has pissed you off and you're just downvoting them to be mean, so it cancels out the downvotes automatically:

If you irritate another user, they might be having a bad day and decide to take it out on you by methodically going through and downvoting every post you’ve made. The impact of this is pretty limited on Stack Overflow, as you only get 30 votes per day, and upvotes are +10 while downvotes are only -2 (and -1 to the votee).

... it’s unacceptable behavior, and I’ve been getting several reports of this sort of revenge downvoting now, enough that we needed to take action to combat it.

Individual users don't have the ability to cancel downvotes against them, that would kind of defeat the point. Neither do moderators; they can't even see whether or not you downvoted a post. I'm assuming that's what happened in your case; it's hard to know for sure without you providing more details

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    History confirms that the serial-downvote trigger was fired multiple times recently, but we have no ability to confirm whose actions fired it. In any case, Occam's Razor says Michael is probably correct. Feb 2, 2012 at 0:25
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    Excellent answer. Feb 2, 2012 at 1:34

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