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I go to a user, scroll through their contributions to the site. If I find something I think helps users out a lot, I upvote them.

For some reason, I like visiting user pages, especially higher rep ones, looking at some of their contributions, and if they are really good, I will upvote.

Will this trigger a serial voting ban if I do it too much? I don't just blindly upvote/downvote, to make it clear, I do it based on the size of the contribution, but most top users have lots of Qs and As, and I don't want to get banned.

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  • (For very good reasons) the algorithm that detects serial upvotes, and the specific factors it considers is kept confidential. That said, one of the obvious red flags, is upvotes that come so fact that it is highly unlikely that the person doing the voting has actually read the posts in question. In other words: the mere act of reading the various contributions you're voting up is going to count in your favor, purely because it slows down the casting of votes. – LessPop_MoreFizz Jul 8 '14 at 5:58
  • So you're estimating that serial voting is triggered by a short period of time between each vote, rather than the number of votes, per se, correct? – korrasaur Jul 8 '14 at 6:47
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    I would be shocked if both of those factors weren't weighted. – LessPop_MoreFizz Jul 8 '14 at 7:02
  • Side note/question: Isn't it possible that if "serial voting" is detected, the person being voted on can be punished? – BlackVegetable Jul 8 '14 at 19:30
  • @BlackVegetable I've read somewhere that it can be the case if the ip from where the voter and the person being serial voted connect from are the same on a basis way to regular to be honnest. But it's human investigation at that point, not scripted one. And the person being serial voted is always contacted by a moderator before I think. – WizLiz Jul 9 '14 at 6:53
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    Oh, security through obscurity... – o0'. Jul 13 '14 at 14:51
11

It depends on how much you vote for a single person, and how that compares to your overall vote pattern. If most of your votes for the day are going to a single user, that will probably count as serial voting. If it's only a few, and you're voting a lot on other questions/answers, then it's probably fine.

You can check if your vote patterns counted as serial voting, sort of. If you go through a vote pattern that you think might be problematic, you can check one of those answers you voted on later to see if your vote is still there. If not, then most likely the serial voting reversal script reversed it, which is probably an indication that you went too far that day.

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