I noticed my rep went down by -70 points, and is the first have heard of that, what does it mean?

Edit: I am a StackOverflow user and has never come across it before!


The system basically detected a series of upvotes on your account within a very short timeframe all from a single user. This is not an assessment of your behavior, but rather the behavior of a "fan" that you may have acquired. Similar to targeting a specific user for serial downvoting, serial upvoting is reversed automatically by a script that runs about once a day (IIRC).

The idea here is that it's intended to help prevent sockpuppeting (note that I am not saying that's what you are doing, simply that it is the purpose of the algorithm).

There are also some discussions on MSO that you may find useful. There are more than these few questions, but I think they are the most relevant:

  • Ho, you mean, there's someone that is actually, downvoting my answers in a kind of "stalking" way, perhaps, maybe (I have no idea) out of "revenge" or something like that? – t0mm13b Jun 26 '12 at 13:57
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    The opposite: they're serially upvoting a lot of your answers/questions. Since they're all coming from one person in such a short period of time then the system automatically "rolls back" those votes because they are not "natural." It's more likely that someone just really likes you :) – Bryan Denny Jun 26 '12 at 14:02
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    @t0mm13b: What Bryan said. If you look at your rep history yesterday, you'll see that you received 7 upvotes on 7 different answers from 3:26 to 3:27 (UTC). The assumption the algorithm makes here is that nobody could have read and assessed all of those posts in one minute, so they were not upvoting the content, they were simply upvoting everything they could on your account. – eldarerathis Jun 26 '12 at 14:07
  • @BryanDenny err... your last line made me laugh! – t0mm13b Jun 26 '12 at 14:12
  • @eldarerathis ok, thanks for the insightful explanation, this answer is marked accepted :) – t0mm13b Jun 26 '12 at 14:13

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