When voting rights are removed... what brings them back?

[hacker]

I've been wondering for a few years now, at least the last 2 years... why I can no longer vote.

I'm at Curate level, so in theory, I should have 24 votes a day. In reality, I haven't had a single vote in a few years.

In speaking to tye very recently about it, it seems there was an "incident" years back with some mass downvoting that involved suspicion of my account.

I don't think it was ever resolved, but I did change my password and (to my knowledge) it hasn't happened again, but... I've had the ability to vote striken from me.

How long does a penalty like this last? 5 years? Forever?

Is there some sacrifice I have to leave to the gods to get that ability back?

If its permanent, I'll stop asking... but if not, I'd like to be able to vote again.

[tye]

I was waiting for the person who took the original action to take up dealing with the situation. But since you choose to make a public plea, I'll add to the public record some information.

it seems there was an "incident" years back with some mass downvoting that involved suspicion of my account.

"involved suspicion of [your] account"? Well, the abusive votes were cast via your PerlMonks account. On several occasions over a period of several months. When I saw speculation as to the possibility of someone having hijacked your account in order to cast those votes (due to some access to your account being via a foreign IP), I checked that the abusive votes were in fact cast from the same IP address that was used to post nodes via your account.

My recollection of my impression of your response upon learning this was that you seemed only mildly worried that someone appeared to have hijacked your IP address. And when you brought up your current situation recently, you appeared to have forgotten that your voting privilege had been revoked (and that you had said that you "didn't mind" at the time), and, more startlingly, had forgotten that someone had hacked access to your IP address at the time. When I reminded you recently that the votes had come from the same IP as you posted nodes from, you didn't appear at all worried (indeed, you didn't even touch on that point in your node above, despite mentioning that you remembered that you had changed your PerlMonks password).

So I personally find the most plausible explanation for these observations to be rather obvious. But none of it matters since we are in agreement that 2 years w/o voting ability is sufficient punishment (even with you having been "inactive" for much of that time) for a first offense (even assuming the least flattering explanation) and so your voting privileges will be restored quite soon.

[NovMonk]

I'm not clear on something-- if someone uses all their votes to downvote nodes, or downvotes lots of nodes over a period of time, this is abusive? Or was there something else going on?

I don't think I'm ever likely to transgress in this particular way, and I assume if I did I'd be warned to stop voting as a stress relief mechanism. But I am curious.

In any event, I'm glad to see some monkish charity and forgiveness going on, and I hope that there are no future incidents.

Pax,
NovMonk

[moklevat]

I have no idea about the particular incident in question, but examples of abusive down-voting are mentioned from time to time. The practice of targeting several nodes from a single monk for downvoting would seem to be the most abusive way to cast votes. For example, merlyn apparently recently experienced this.

Update: By a couple of down-votes it has received, I gather that this node is somehow controversial. Let's see, follows Monastery guidelines...properly formatted...tries to be polite and informative...provides links to support assertions. I must therefore conclude that it violates an unwritten rule of the Voting/Experience System, "you never talk about the Voting/Experience System". Either that or I have discovered an undocumented feature of PerlMonks; discussing down-voting begets down-voting.

Update2: Based on a helpful /msg, it is perhaps best to make clear that I am not advocating the (clearly prohibited) "vote bot" solution that merlyn discussed in this node, rather I was using it as an example of an apparent incident of abusive down-voting.

[Marza]

It probably depends on your crime.

If you were acting like an ass and told the mods/gods to piss off, then it's probably lost for good.

I would probably start making good contributions for starters. Helpful people working towards improving the experience of the community could probably get a second chance.