Please contact the moderators at moderators@mathoverflow.net

Oh, Harry, you are a card!

MikeBlackmon, To convince regular readers of meta/mathoverflow of Harry's immaturity it is not necessary to do anything. Better to see him as a sort of running joke and not take anything he says too personally. He has been suspended several times for bad behavior on the main site, but here on meta it seems more latitude is given.

Storkle,

I find his behavior repulsive, and throughly degrading. But if you say that he is considered as much a joke here, as he is in other forums, then I can take that, and live with it. Thank you.

My main concern is that he continues to do these things no matter what I do or say, insulting my field and everything in it, including me. I know this behavior will continue, and will only get worse.

Harry: put a lid on it, please.

Yemon Choi,

Thank you, I will do as Francois and you suggest.

To all:

Either come on IRC and be a part of this other community, or reserve judgement. Mr. Blackmon is not to be taken at his word. Please hold yourselves back.

Dear Qiaochu,

I respectfully ask that you reconsider your previous post and reserve judgement. I have neither said nor done anything so far in this meta thread that is in any way disrespectful. Apparently, as only Todd noticed, my first comment was added simply due to the part of Mr. Blackmon's comment where it is mentioned that he "would like to make a complaint". The other part of my comment was explaining to Mr. Blackmon that I do not have two accounts, just that he misread the display.

Dear Yemon,

Regarding Mr. Blackmon's motives, I tried to contact him via IRC earlier this morning, after he posted his comment here. My messages were ignored. If there was any question that Mr. Blackmon wanted to use this as an excuse to try to embarrass me, it was answered when he decided to ignore my messages.

MO is not for settling scores, and I hope that you will apply the same standards to both myself and Mr. Blackmon.

This is not an MO IRC channel, which makes things more absurd. That's why this doesn't belong here.

Regarding the wording of your post, I take issue with the assumption that I have done something wrong. I have not.

Dear Qiaochu, I see which posts I downvoted (there are three).

Number 1, which, as you can see, displays a complete misunderstanding of how category theory works. It is argumentative and linked to an IRC discussion where Mr. Blackmon was trying to make some kind of point that category theory is completely useless as a tool and a language.

Number 2

Number 3

are questions that I voted down because I did not find them interesting.

That's it. That's the extent of my "downvoting spree".

I should note that Mr. Blackmon has voted down my question about Vopenka's principle (as well as my question about pushouts of fully faithful V-functors (the answer is nontrivial even in the case V=Set (the pushout of categories is quite complicated and related to the amalgamation of two groups (although substantially more complicated), so you should vote it up!)).

Do other people downvote questions that are not interesting to them? I only downvote questions that are inappropriate. I upvote the questions I like or that I think would be interesting to a lot of people. If you don't care about a particular question, but it is appropriate for MO, then just don't vote on it at all. If we all did that, the appropriate (but uninteresting) questions would have low, but non-negative scores.

A noble goal, but apparently that's not how things work on MO. I regularly receive downvotes on questions because people think that they are not interesting (either that or they don't like me, I dunno!). I vote for other people's questions the way people vote on my questions.

@ Harry: I think your first comment, while amusing to me personally, can be interpreted as you not taking the person making the complaint seriously. It also could be misconstrued as implying that his complaint will be handled in a similar manner, which surely was not your point.

@MikeBlackmon: If Harry had in fact systematically down-voted your posts on multiple accounts the proper course of action would indeed be to contact a moderator. In fact, a moderator should even be able to determine if this is the case. I have not had any personal confrontations with Harry, but I think I might have witnessed a few. My impression is that he makes comments without fully determining whether or not they could be misconstrued as personal attacks. Other times, they are ill posed personal attacks. I don't think that posting logs is the right thing to do now. Maybe you should contact a moderator to in fact determine whether or not Harry did use two separate accounts to down-vote your posts, simply put, it might be best to have third party corroboration.

As to people not respecting your field, I don't know what your field is, but certainly there are many people that don't respect many fields. So I suggest you try to not take too much of this personally for that reason, and because it is Harry.

Lastly, Harry, please refrain from posting such comments, ie monty python quotes, in serious discussions. I do enjoy them, but I think I might be in the majority. They have the effect of derailing serious conversations.

I've made a cursory inspection of the logs, and find no evidence of sockpuppet downvoting again Michael Blackmon. Harry's claim above about his downvoting activity seems to be essentially accurate, barring the omission of some voting on community-wiki posts.

I would prefer to close this thread, as it doesn't appear to have produced anything productive whatsoever, expect perhaps, to give François, and now me, the opportunity to reiterate the moderators plea:

If you have a complaint about an individual user on MathOverflow, please contact the moderators directly via moderators@mathoverflow.net

I think this thread makes abundantly clear why we prefer this over meta threads.