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I understand what serial voting is in general, having read some of "What is serial voting...", but I woke up this morning to find the message -12 Serial voting was reversed in my 'reputation' achievement, and I don't understand what I've done. I'd like to understand so that I can avoid making the same mistake in the future.

The story so far: on a particular Stack Exchange site, a few months ago, I managed to irk a particular user. He then started going through my old questions and answers systematically and downvoting them. On a specific day, he downvoted 3 in a row, and so I searched Meta, where I discovered that "revenge downvoting" is a known problem.

I flagged those three answers, and the Stack Exchange site's moderators addressed the problem, to my mind successfully. They also said they had informed the administrators, but they didn't know if I would get my reputation back.

A week passed with no visible change, until this morning, to my surprise, the above message arrived. So I asked on that Stack Exchange site's meta site, where the moderators speculated that it might be a side effect of them having reported the downvoting. Perhaps administrators had discovered someone serial upvoting my posts and decided to reverse it.

However, this leaves me wondering if that's the actual case, or if, instead, the message was unrelated to the revenge downvoting and I had done something I should avoid doing in the future.

Also, what combination of vote reversals ends up in a 12 point change?

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    In all likelihood, you haven't done anything wrong. If you look at your reputation, it shows "+28 / -40 8 hours ago reversal Voting corrected (learn more)", meaning that it's probably just standard vote reversal (of both up and down votes), per the link you've included
    – caird coinheringaahing
    Commented Sep 15, 2021 at 19:43
  • Aha! I didn't think to click on post and didn't realize that the actual up/down counts would be there. I still don't understand why it's 28 instead of 20 or 30, but this just appears to be a case of 'no good dead goes unpunished'.
    – Marty Fouts
    Commented Sep 15, 2021 at 19:48
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    I am shocked nobody has made this clear, there is no possible way for you to know with absolutely certainty, that the person you think downvoted your contributions actually did downvote your contributions. So you certainly should not accuse that individual at any point of time of doing that. 28 is 14 downvotes. as for why it's not 30, because there were not 15 downvotes by the same person that were automatically reversed.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Sep 15, 2021 at 20:09
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    OK, I goofed, thinking 10 for down and not 2. That's dumb of me. But yes, there are possible ways for me to know with absolute certainty, none of which I'll go into, just as I did not mention any names, either in this post, nor in my discussions with the exchange moderators. I only pointed out to them what appeared to be revenge downvotes without speculating on who was doing it.
    – Marty Fouts
    Commented Sep 15, 2021 at 20:15
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    If you follow the directions here, you should be able to tell which posts were affected by the reversal and how.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Sep 15, 2021 at 20:21

1 Answer 1

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For completeness, I'm writing up the comments as an answer, since they answer the question.

  • The vote reversal was because of other people's voting on my questions and answers, not because of something I've done.

  • The totals do add up when you realize, as I kept failing to do that downvotes are 2 points and upvotes 10 points of reputation change.

  • It all makes sense now.

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