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Edit: There has been series of upvotes in my below linked question. The intention of this post was to confirm that there is no such malpractice which could evade the checks. However, if people have just upvoted the question because they support my case( not the actual quality of question), then it defeats the purpose.

I was just looking at my history on Stack Overflow and an interesting event happened in the past.

I asked a question about an API to a commercial tool, which happened to be a bug. The question was left unanswered for a day so I asked same on the official forum of the tool. This should be OK according to Stack Overflow policies: Asking the same question on Stack Overflow and other online forums?. Suddenly my question (which was well formed and well within Stack Overflow rules) was downvoted thrice and I was rebuked in the answer by one of the developers. No wonder that answer had two upvotes.

Similar stuff happened to another colleague who asked a different question about the same tool. He was blocked on the official forum for asking the question here on Stack Overflow.

This looks like a case of organized downvoting, where downvoting is not serial against a particular user, but against the type of questions highlighting the issues in the tool. I flagged the question too, but I guess it was rejected.

Do you think this is organized downvoting, or I am just thinking too much?

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  • 8
    It does not look like question needs organized downvoting - it refers to no longer existing problem and in case of similar issue with newer version people will naturally find it via search and potentially downvote. SO is generally not a good place for bug reporting on libraries that are expected to be updated all the time (unlike old and stable once with multiple versions like jQuery). Whether it is actually organized - is open question so...
    – Alexei Levenkov
    Commented Jan 18, 2017 at 6:32
  • 31
    I think you are assuming a bit too much by saying that it was other developers who downvoted your question. I don't see any compelling evidence of "organized downvoting" here—just the normal sort of downvoting. Aside from that, the question seems reasonable, and so does the answer (except for a small part that I edited out). It is fine to post questions about bugs in libraries on SO, and it's honestly ideal to get an answer from one of the library's maintainers. Looks like this one just bristled someone's feelings a bit; my recommendation is to move on and not worry about it.
    – Cody Gray - on strike Mod
    Commented Jan 18, 2017 at 6:47
  • 2
    @AlexeiLevenkov. I didn't know if that was a bug at that time. It was discovered later.
    – Mangat Rai Modi
    Commented Jan 18, 2017 at 7:03
  • 3
    @Cody Gray It is correct that I am assuming too much, but the assumptions was on the basis of history of the interaction of my team with the developers. I was having quite low reputation points on SO that time and this meaningless downvoting and rebuking created some bitter memories. I was wondering that if it a practice by the company to discourage such questions on SO, it is hurting the community and I think we need to have a way to catch such practices if any.
    – Mangat Rai Modi
    Commented Jan 18, 2017 at 7:05
  • 2
    If you have actually seen a pattern of behavior by the developers here, then yes, that is a problem. I don't see any evidence of a pattern, though. This is just an isolated incident. And it looks like this guy was a bit annoyed by something he at least thought you were doing. Everyone's allowed to have a bad day once in a while.
    – Cody Gray - on strike Mod
    Commented Jan 18, 2017 at 7:07
  • 1
    " It was discovered later." No it wasn't: "This has already been reported...". Please don't twist the facts like that.
    – Cerbrus
    Commented Jan 18, 2017 at 7:26
  • 14
    Your question was re-activated when the answer was posted. After which SO users might well have concluded that the question was not researched very well, given that it was a known issue. Or that there was little reason to replicate the issue in more than one place. There is no evidence that this was "organized" voting, several hours between the votes.
    – Hans Passant
    Commented Jan 18, 2017 at 7:34
  • 5
    It was discovered later by me, that I was hitting the same bug as mentioned in the comment.
    – Mangat Rai Modi
    Commented Jan 18, 2017 at 8:53
  • 3
    @Cerbrus The issue 115 and the post in that forum was posted by mangatmodi and Mangat_Modi respectively. Judging from the comment in GitHub, It seems like that OP only realized it was a duplicate after the the question had been posted for near 20 hours
    – Danh
    Commented Jan 18, 2017 at 14:33
  • 4
    @Cerbrus I think he didn't twist the facts. asked Mar 30 '16 at 7:17, posted on forum Mar 30, 2016, 2:00 pm GitHub: 30 Mar 2016, 11:20 GMT
    – Danh
    Commented Jan 18, 2017 at 14:36
  • 4
    This should be ok according to SO policies...He was blocked on the official forum for asking the question here on SO. It sounds like this other forum has a different policy on cross-posting. Have you checked their rules yet?
    – BSMP
    Commented Jan 18, 2017 at 16:23
  • 3
    @Cerbrus The issue I hit was an unhandled exception. I wasn't able to find the duplicate bug for the same. As any Developer I turned to SO for help. This issue was quite severe for us, so later I went to official forum hoping that I would get quicker response. Ony then I get to know about the duplicity of the bug. Now with SO policies I decided to keep the post there so that community could be stronger. However I got stuck and took some time to update the status. This I clearly mentioned in my comment.
    – Mangat Rai Modi
    Commented Jan 19, 2017 at 4:44
  • 2
    On Aerospike's website they direct people to Stack Overflow for support, in addition to having their own forum.
    – samgak
    Commented Jan 19, 2017 at 9:09
  • 1
    Crossposting is usually frowned upon, crossposting without linking to the other question is usually a great way to annoy people (speaking generally).
    – Mark Rotteveel
    Commented Jan 19, 2017 at 9:16

1 Answer 1

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This doesn't seem like organised down-voting to me, probably more frustration on the developers part.

You asked a question on SO, then less than a hour later you post on the product forum have a response within a hour then a resolution / workaround for your problem within a few hours.

At that point you should have come back to SO and left an answer to resolve your question instead of allowing the developers to stumble across it the very next day. If you had done, all of this would have been avoidable. The fact that you had a resolution on the forums by the time the answer was left on SO and the fact it directly references the forum links probably contributed to the votes you received.

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  • Even if an answer had been posted, there's a question as to whether or not this could have been avoided. I for one don't see how x negates y.
    – Daedalus
    Commented Jan 18, 2017 at 9:19
  • 17
    @Daedalus depends how they'd answered. If they had explained that they received a resolution through the official product forum explaining the workaround and linking to forum post, I doubt the question would have had the same reception.
    – user692942
    Commented Jan 18, 2017 at 9:21
  • Fair point, didn't consider that.
    – Daedalus
    Commented Jan 18, 2017 at 9:22
  • 7
    @Lanykymart, this I already accepted the question that I was busy in office and forgot about it. I have an excellent follow-up history on SO. I think it was too adverse to start downvoting without giving the user 24 hours to update.
    – Mangat Rai Modi
    Commented Jan 19, 2017 at 4:09
  • 1
    @MangatRaiModi I'm just stating what could be the cause instead of some wild conspiracy theory. It's just the combination of how events unfolded that stacked against you.
    – user692942
    Commented Jan 19, 2017 at 10:36
  • Yup! It all make sense now. I was just highlighting to the moderators and high ranking users in case if it true.
    – Mangat Rai Modi
    Commented Jan 19, 2017 at 10:53

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