From time to time, people think it's a good idea to go and vote down a large swath of someone else's posts. This is not a legitimate use of the voting system, and I think that, like convenience stores, which keep pictures of attempted shoplifters behind the counter, we should make it public whenever somebody does this.

That is, we should have a public "stocks", where people's names would be made public for abusing the system. To avoid starting fights, it would be fine if the person's "crime" was kept hidden.

@Andy: This wouldn't be for voting down once or twice. I get things like six votes down in the course of ten minutes. I'm sure that the following two things are true: It happens to people other than me, and also, the moderators would be very happy if they didn't have to get e-mails about this kind of thing.

These are just people who have some kind of gear to grind and are just being spiteful.

What if instead of the "stocks", we called it a "rogues' gallery"?

Haha, since a lot of my old material is community wiki'd for various reasons, now they're just downvoting all of my posts in order, and when they hit one that I failed to CW, I get an indicator in my score.

I hope that the moderators will suspend this person/group of people.

The current count is 15

I'm not even mad. I'm just giggling that people would bother to click through all of my questions to vote them down one at a time.

@Andy: Sure, but when someone else gets suspended, most people know why it happened because it happened in public. People engage in this kind of nonsense with voting because they know that they will face few to no actual consequences (such behavior does not usually result in anything more than a warning). I should also note that people who vote like that are very likely not regular participants here, so I suspect that suspensions (even if they were carried out) would be an effective way of controlling this kind of stuff.

Meanwhile, whoever voted up four of my posts, I appreciate the gesture. Thanks.

"Voting fraud" issues like this just aren't that big a deal. It's bad behavior, and it's good that moderators can and do undo such voting sprees. But it's really not a big deal. I'd say it's worse than starting an unnecessary thread on meta (like this one), but not as bad as leaving an offensive comment on the main site. I think the way that they're currently dealt with is completely appropriate.

@Noah: I don't agree that this thread is completely unnecessary. I still stand behind my idea of putting people who tried to abuse their anonymity in the spotlight. As you said, the punishment should fit the crime.

I also think that it's one of the few offenses on MO that has real malicious intent. I don't think that could be said for very many other "crimes", as it were.

Edit: He's at it again. The current count is 18 that I can see (not counting CW). I think that there must be more than one person involved.

@Harry: I like some of your comments, but others I find abrasive. Part of the blacklisting you're getting is no doubt related to your sometimes bad citizenship. Diplomacy can do wonders.

Indeed, Harry did suggest exactly this to the moderators. We didn't respond immediately (I have more important things happening this week!), but there's a steady stream of emails going on in the background. We'll eventually do something, and if anyone feels they need to know exactly what we do they should email us asking.

Dear Harry: I sympathize with your predicament, and, unfortunately, my opinion of humanity is lucid enough that I can perfectly imagine how some MO users could stoop so low. Unfortunately, your proposed solution would probably do more harm than good. If your goal is to raise the level of civility on MO and discourage abuse, the stocks is most definitely not the way to go. On the practical side, I doubt it would help much since anyone who is that determined to hurt you reputation will resort to proxies.

Mostly, I want to urge you to take the high road on this one: even if your reputation did take a hit, no one will realistically be able to bar you from your hard-earned high-reputation user privileges any time soon. You might take a bit longer to reach the fabled 10k rep, but probably not that much longer. When a user has been so active on MO for as long as you have, the numerical reputation is probably not as relevant as the effective reputation your questions and answer built.

Harry, you've been told so many times by so many people (who have signed their names) that you are embarrassing yourself and trashing your reputation, I can't imagine that anyone thinks a few downvotes will convince you. At this point, it would be rather extraordinary if you weren't concerned about how the community perceives you. I regard it as a lot more likely that the people downvoting you are doing it to piss you off, and they seem to be getting exactly what they want. In fact, at least one person started downvoting your posts after you started complaining on meta.

As a general comment: it's been said before, but I'll say it again. If you think someone is downvoting you inappropriately, email the moderators, we will investigate, and do our best to deal with it. As Scott points out, we have lives and may not do so instantly, but we will. We take inappropriate downvoting seriously, and have already handed out suspensions in connection with this incident. Keep in mind that as with any trolling behavior, responding publicly is the worst thing you can do, as it just gives satisfaction to whoever is doing it.

This is probably the worst idea I've heard on meta; it's responding to a small wrong (insincere downvote) with a much bigger wrong (shaming a mathematician in public).
In my ideal world, websites would treat contributors as customers, and would always be polite and courteous and give good service. If a contributor does something which goes against site rules, it should be dealt with super-discretely and in the most polite and sensitive way possible. In my opinion, being courteous to all users is in general immeasurably more important than site rules.

@Daniel: you misread my intentions: I was trying to get Harry to take the negative comments less seriously. I wasn't trying to shame him. See some one of my previous comments in this thread.
@Harry: if I in some way insulted you, please accept my apologies.

Daniel, I think Harry is referring to the fact that discrete and discreet are different words, while the words discretion and discreetly derive from the latter choice.

@Harry: Let us consider the push-foreword of your remarks...they are quite inciteful.

@Harry: of course, a cor. is the definition "a politician P is defined to be a principle bundle over a base manifold C, which we call the constituency", and sometimes the letter D is used for the base manifold, short for donors.