Stack Overflow attempts to discover and reverse serial voting with a script that runs daily. It seems likely we can do a similar thing.
Very much this.
Undo the problem.
I think I would just zero all the votes on any account caught doing this. If you’re going to game the system, you can’t play, and your prior votes get consigned to the bit bucket.
The Stack Overflow script basically looks like a rate limiter. If we don’t want to bother with reversing votes, we can just put the rate limiter upfront, similar to how many login programs would start to throw in delays and time limits for repeated bad-login attempts. Something along the lines of “You are allowed 8 votes within one minute, 32 votes within one hour, 64 votes within 24 hours, and 128 votes within a week”. These numbers are arbitrary, of course, and the real limits should come out of the statistical analysis of actual voting patterns.
SO also has direct rate limiting (40 votes a day). I do think that it makes sense to have a separate rate limit for user-user links; maybe I can vote 100 times a day and have it be normal, but voting even 10 times a day on a particular user might means something funny is going on.
Yes, it would be reasonable to have separate per-user/user link limits. Though the limits could be a function of the number of comments that user made recently—if someone gets into a manic mode and posts dozens of trash comments in a few hours...
Right now, users with sufficiently high karma have access to the vote buttons on the userpages of users with sufficiently low upvote percentage, as far as I can tell to enable this sort of downvoting. It seems likely that exemptions could be baked it to these rate limits just as easily.
Stack Overflow attempts to discover and reverse serial voting with a script that runs daily. It seems likely we can do a similar thing.
Very much this.
Undo the problem.
I think I would just zero all the votes on any account caught doing this. If you’re going to game the system, you can’t play, and your prior votes get consigned to the bit bucket.
The Stack Overflow script basically looks like a rate limiter. If we don’t want to bother with reversing votes, we can just put the rate limiter upfront, similar to how many login programs would start to throw in delays and time limits for repeated bad-login attempts. Something along the lines of “You are allowed 8 votes within one minute, 32 votes within one hour, 64 votes within 24 hours, and 128 votes within a week”. These numbers are arbitrary, of course, and the real limits should come out of the statistical analysis of actual voting patterns.
SO also has direct rate limiting (40 votes a day). I do think that it makes sense to have a separate rate limit for user-user links; maybe I can vote 100 times a day and have it be normal, but voting even 10 times a day on a particular user might means something funny is going on.
Yes, it would be reasonable to have separate per-user/user link limits. Though the limits could be a function of the number of comments that user made recently—if someone gets into a manic mode and posts dozens of trash comments in a few hours...
Right now, users with sufficiently high karma have access to the vote buttons on the userpages of users with sufficiently low upvote percentage, as far as I can tell to enable this sort of downvoting. It seems likely that exemptions could be baked it to these rate limits just as easily.