I have a series of puzzles, my 'Clues' series, starting with this one.
Yesterday, somebody went and upvoted all of the questions in the series, including two that I didn't post.
However, now the 50 rep that I gained from it has been reversed, probably due to an automatic script that I remember reading about.
Is this really serial upvoting, or is it just 'series' upvoting?
Even if it's not "serial voting" in the truly bad sense (e.g. sockpuppets), it may still be serial voting in that it goes against SE's policy of "vote for the post, not the person".
Obviously the automatic algorithm to reverse serial voting isn't perfect: there will always be false positives and false negatives. It's possible to serially upvote someone and not get caught by the algorithm, if you're clever enough about it: e.g. see this recent scandal on Ask Ubuntu. It's also possible - though much less likely - for a well-meaning person to go through a bunch of your questions not because they're yours but because they're closely related (e.g. a sequence of puzzles) and find them all good enough to upvote, and for this honest voting to be reverted by the system.
The serial upvoting reversal algorithm is meant to encourage "vote for the post, not the person", and to deter people from going through the profile of someone they like and upvoting all their posts. This may or may not have been what happened here, but in any case the voting pattern was suspicious enough that it was reversed by the system. From the canonical main meta post about serial voting:
Most often when you get unexpectedly serial upvoted, believe it or not, it's just a user trying to give you extra reputation. They saw a post of yours that was extraordinarily helpful to them and they feel that going through your posts systematically and upvoting them is the appropriate way of granting you additional reputation (apparently they've forgotten about the bounty system).
Should I be concerned about reversal statements on my profile?
No, not at all. It's only an indication of reputation change. After all, we can't control the actions of other users. It's very rare where we'd run across a user who was committing the voting fraud themselves on their own account, and in most instances of that, they will have already been dealt with accordingly. You should in no way be concerned with reversal statements in your reputation history.
