Reputation protection: Improve reputation system to prevent targeted downvoting

[bobbyiliev]

At the moment, the reputation system allows a single user to significantly impact another user's reputation by downvoting multiple posts. This can lead to unfair outcomes, especially if someone decides to downvote all posts from a specific user.

Suggestion:
Implement a safeguard similar to Reddit's approach, where if one user downvotes too many posts from the same person, their votes stop affecting that person’s reputation beyond a certain limit. Or as with Stack Overflow, where such behavior is automatically detected, the downvotes are neutralized, and the attacker receives a warning.

Benefits:

• Prevents targeted or biased downvoting
• Keeps the reputation system fair and representative of community consensus
• Encourages healthier engagement between users

[sabdailydev]

@bobbyiliev Thanks for your suggestion. We will consider it. Also a question - did you happen to face something similar in the recent past?

[bobbyiliev]

Hey @sabdailydev, thanks for the quick response on this! Not recently, but it did happen to me last year, Ido was kind enough to fix it manually back then.

I’ve noticed my reputation fluctuating between 56.1k and 56k a few times over the past few days (not saying it’s targeted this time), but it reminded me of what happened last year, so I figured I’d suggest that feature since I’ve seen a similar system on Reddit where it works well.

[idoshamun]

Hi @bobbyiliev,

At this point we have a system to safeguard from bad actors to impact the reputation system. Not just for downvotes but also for upvotes. A single user cannot yield more than X reputation events a day

[bobbyiliev]

That is good to know! Thanks Ido.