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If you have enough rep to get the association bonus on one site, then on any site which you don't yet have a profile on, you can upvote or flag (sorta) comments as many times as you like. Normally, if you vote or flag a post, that forces you to wait 24 hours to recreate your account, which is a barrier to abusing your ability to vote or flag posts multiple times. However, for comment flags and upvotes, they do not cause to you need to wait the 24 hours, so you can just upvote over and over by deleting and recreating your account.

Flagging is slightly different: You can create an arbitrary number of mod flags, however other flag reasons will be removed upon account deletion.

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  • I can definitely see an issue with upvoting comments infinitely, but I tried to test this out and I wasn't able to delete that comment by repeatedly flagging it through deleted and recreated accounts. Commented Jul 18, 2019 at 20:56
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    Did you try this for real, or is this a theoretical attack? I'm not entirely sure, but I assumed that those votes and flags are deleted along with the user, which would invalidate this attack Commented Jul 18, 2019 at 20:56
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    Real test, @MadScientist - the flags got transferred to Community, but were still active.
    – ArtOfCode
    Commented Jul 18, 2019 at 20:58
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    Yep, just tested with @ArtOfCode on Hardware Recs Commented Jul 18, 2019 at 21:00
  • @ArtOfCode How many flags were necessary to delete the comment in the end? (Or did you not test that out?) Commented Jul 18, 2019 at 21:00
  • Not tested, @Sonic
    – ArtOfCode
    Commented Jul 18, 2019 at 21:01
  • @ArtOfCode I tested it out on this comment posting it myself, and using deleted and recreated accounts to flag it three times. Per the documentation, this should have deleted the comment (since it didn't receive any upvotes), but it didn't. Commented Jul 18, 2019 at 21:04
  • @SonictheAnonymousWizHog Just edited to correct myself after a bit more testing with ArtOfCode Commented Jul 18, 2019 at 21:23

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