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I received 8 down votes within a 30 min timespan on answers back to 2010.
It seems that either down voters should be revealed or there should be some recompense for trolling for trouble.
It is not so much about losing 8 reps.
It is more about a rogue user with no check or balance.
It is obvious that spending 30 mins to look at the diversity of questions here is not ME making a habit of writing "BAD" answers.

downvote
But someone researching a single person and nitpicking (in my opinion bullying).
None of my answers were the highest rated. And maybe one of them even deserved a downvote in respct to the quality of the answer. (still not my point). Here are the links.

compressing map algebra answered Feb 10 2011.
Manually reclassify OP didn't specify if they knew what was needed. answered Dec 7 2012.
Business trends OK pretty lame for an answer (plus I didn't ever go find the link). answered Dec 14 2010.
Historical rainfall I state that it is not rainfall data but can be correlated to rainfall. answered Nov 16 2012.
All of this aside...
from 23:23 to 23:58 this user was not researching how he could get rainfall data and use it to detect business trends for reclassification using map algebra and arcpy.
This type of activity seems to promote the reverse of what this community is about.
Following tags is acceptable. Following users is extracuricular.

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  • sometimes the system corrects some rep, I notice this before a couple of times, underdark also had some rep correction. If was a user with this kind of activity it should be flagged to moderators attention. do you know of a question that has been impacted? – Mapperz♦ Jan 22 '13 at 14:31
  • not sure what you mean by impacted. – Brad Nesom Jan 22 '13 at 14:48
  • do you know a specific question that has been down-voted? moderators can see users actions and link to ip addresses if required. – Mapperz♦ Jan 22 '13 at 14:53
  • @Mapperz (1) Brad has listed the downvoted questions. (2) Moderators cannot see specific voting actions by users. We have some summary tools to show certain forms of voting patterns, to help us detect possible collusions etc. – whuber Jan 22 '13 at 17:47
  • Thanks for updating the post - here is another site with the same issue meta.english.stackexchange.com/questions/2703/… – Mapperz♦ Jan 22 '13 at 19:04
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    Downvotes can be calculated Data StackExchange API: data.stackexchange.com/gis/query/1718/… (but dbo.CachedResults' is FULL) – Mapperz♦ Jan 22 '13 at 19:12
  • @Mapperz That's right--but the API gives a summary based on out-of-date results; it will not give up-to-date results for individual voters. – whuber Jan 23 '13 at 14:53
  • @Mapperz wow, that data explorer is cool. Unfortunately though, it seems to hide UserIds of votes, except for favoriting. data.stackexchange.com/gis/query/93450/… – Kirk Kuykendall Jan 23 '13 at 22:30
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Moderately severe instances of such systematic voting are automatically detected and undone by the SE software. It works both ways: if you have a fan who goes around upvoting lots of your Q's and A's at once, that will be detected and deleted too.

I see nothing wrong with investigating a user's answer patterns: perhaps that's because it's something I have to do all the time as a moderator. (When a user writes one really bad or off-topic answer, then perhaps he is doing it a lot and could use some guidance.) Remembering the SE philosophy that this is a community site and that we are all moderators, insofar as our reputation extends those privileges to us, in all fairness I would have to condone the same kind of investigation by any other community member. (I will not, however, defend the lack of helpful comments, which ought to accompany such downvotes.)

In a spirit of finding some constructive outcome to this experience, you might consider interpreting these downvotes as a message (however crudely delivered), think about whether that message might have some validity, and consider whether they indicate some way in which you might be able to improve your answers generally: that's probably the best defense against any such voting in the future.

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  • I notice there is a sportsmanship badge. gis.stackexchange.com/badges/63/sportsmanship I'm not suggesting "bad" badges, but maybe a shadow or a mark for excessive downvoting, or no votes, or non acceptance. ok the non acceptance is too much – Brad Nesom Feb 6 '13 at 13:44
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    There used to be an indication of acceptance rate for people who have asked a sufficient number of questions--I don't know what happened to it. – whuber Feb 6 '13 at 16:39

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