Serial upvoting reversed

Question

Two days ago, I received a Serial upvoting reversed adjustment to my reputation:

It is referring to this activity at 19:22:

I know what it means when serial upvoting is reversed, and even why it is done. However, in this case I would like a moderator to review it in my case because of special circumstances:

• I had questions and/or answers in the top 5-6 questions on the Top Active questions feed at that time because:
  • I was one of the few people active on Christmas (since I was on a trip away from home).
  • This is a new site with relatively low traffic, which kept my activity at the top of the list.
• It is possible that someone came onto the site after being away for a bit and upvoted all of the good questions and answers, with mine just happening to be at the top and close together.

I would greatly appreciate it if a moderator could look at the logs for the user and see if they were only upvoting mine (in which case it is justified), or everything that they felt looked good at the time, and make an appropriate informed decision as to whether or not it actually was serial upvoting.

Thank you.

Answer 1

I did some investigating in the database for you. On December 26th, the user who upvoted your questions attempted to cast 39 upvotes in 78 seconds (1 upvote every two seconds), which is clearly not the action of a responsible user. Common sense would indicate our reversal algorithm acted appropriately in this case.

Answer 2

If you look closely at your reputation history you'll see that you received 6 upvotes in less than 30 seconds. Those are almost certainly the votes that triggered the vote reversal script.

There is no plausible way someone would naturally encounter six of your posts, read them and upvote them in this very short time. With less than 5 seconds per post, the user that voted can't have actually read them.

The script, as well as SE employees investigating manually, can't read the mind of the voter. They have to go by the pattern of votes, and that looks very, very suspicious in this case. There are some rare scenarios where the script reverses valid votes, but without knowing what the intention of the user voting was it is impossible to avoid such false positives.

There is also no way for a moderator to reverse the script, and I'm not sure if even SE employees could do that (aside from directly manipulating the database by hand), there hasn't been a case in the whole network where the vote reversal was itself reversed that I know of.