Serial voting was reversed

Question

Okay, so I get that the system automatically checks for "voting abuse." This is not unreasonable. But the reality of it is a bit, well creepy.

I just got a notice that I lost 35 points due to "Serial voting was reversed." And I can figure out why. My husband's a member here but doesn't read the site very often because he doesn't want to get sucked in, though he enjoys it. I'm in the habit of sending him links to posts here and on a couple other stacks that I think might interest him (at his request). In some cases, they're questions I answered, but generally they're questions I think he should answer.

I almost never posted questions until this contest started and now I'm aiming for one a day. Naturally, I talk to my husband about my questions and encourage him to read them and add anything he might wish to add. I've been asking him for a week to go look at various questions as they're things we've discussed. He put it off until this afternoon (yesterday by SE counting).

I upvote a lot of different people for a lot of different reasons, but always because I want to encourage them. If my husband chooses to upvote me, I'm not going to argue with it. I will say that he "complained" when he first joined because he kept finding questions he wanted to answer and then discovered I'd already posted the same answer he was going to post. We also order the same things in restaurants.

How exactly is this abuse? We're not gaming the system. We just seek out and appreciate each other's posts. It was sheer chance that he took so long to check out my questions (he usually pops on every 1-2 days) and that I happened to have so many to look at. I don't know what he upvoted (questions or answers) because I didn't ask him, he just told me he'd finally gone and looked at them.

So now I have to be careful not to set off the monitors? 4-7 votes will put someone on a watch list? What if someone decides to look at the contest list and spends an hour reading every question and upvoting a bunch of questions and answers?

Frankly, I find it disturbing. All the more so because a bit earlier this same afternoon, I suddenly got a bunch of downvotes here, including on old questions. It might have been a coincidence but it felt like someone was doing it deliberately.

So what's the deal?

Answer 1

The script is a mindless, soulless script. It cannot know intentions; it only notices and acts on patterns. It can't tell the difference between your husband in good faith going through a bunch of tabs and voting quickly on the one hand, and somebody running a sockpuppet ring to inflate his own reputation on the other hand.

In your reputation history I see that you received votes on five different posts in the same minute. Now, I can't tell if those five votes all came from the same person; moderators don't have access to detailed voting information. But I'm guessing that those plus a couple other temporally-nearby votes are the ones that got reversed.

The details of how the script operates are secret (even from moderators), for what I hope are obvious reasons. The advice I've generally seen is: browse the site not a person and vote as you go (including on others' questions and answers). I admit that I didn't consider the effects of the contest "concentrating" votes like that, and I'm sorry about that. If your husband is reading everything first and then voting, suggest he not do that. If he's only voting on your posts and not others, suggest he broaden his voting.

This won't be held against either of you. Mods probably wouldn't have even noticed if you hadn't asked about it. Voting accidents happen and get reversed by the script, and we move on. If it happens repeatedly then mods might take notice, but I personally have seen enough cases of innocent voting getting reversed to not worry about one case like this.