I suspect that as with site modifications, those of us suggesting ways to find downvote stalkers would do best to figure out how LW works and do as much of the work as possible ourselves. So in this case, that'd probably mean downloading LW source code, figuring out the database structure, thinking of approaches to finding downvote stalkers, formalising them as database queries, then trying to get someone with database access to security check then run those queries. I suspect this because from what I gather Eliezer and those with database access (e.g. presumably Trike) tend to be busy enough or doing important enough other things that they are not willing to or it is not worth their time to do all this themselves, so we should do as much of it as possible to make things quicker for them.
Small amount of money to mouth: I did read through some of the webpages surrounding LW's source code, downloaded it, and spent a little time trying to figure out how the site and database work. But by the time I got to the point of looking at the code, I had little enough temporary motivation left and the relation of the scripts to each other and the difficulty of figuring out where to start was enough that I didn't get very far before I burned out for that night and haven't looked again since. :z
A guide to (learning) LW's code and database (even if just a few paragraphs along the lines of 'Start by looking at the main article display script, then move on to...' or commenting the scripts or something) might be higher leverage at this point with respect to improving the site than submitting small code improvements, since it might encourage several others to submit improvements. On the other hand, part of me suspects that the set of people held back just by that might actually be quite small (polarisation of would-be contributors into hardcore and indifferent with few in the middle--'if they were going to do it, they would have done it by now').
Given the distribution of coding ability here, it certainly seems ridiculous how slow stuff like this gets done, and I think it's due to trivial inconveniences, ugh fields, etc., of which figuring out the site and how to submit code etc. is possibly a large part.
Since Eliezer's response, I have slightly decreased my distribution over the level of downvote stalking, but there is still way too much evidence for me to honestly believe that there aren't any downvote stalkers; it would take at least an explanation of exactly what had been tried and possibly significant knowledge of database structure to convince me it's not happening at this point. So at present I defy the data.
To whoever has for the last several days been downvoting ~10 of my old comments per day:
It is possible that your intention is to discourage me from commenting on Less Wrong.
The actual effect is the reverse. My comments still end up positive on average, and I am therefore motivated to post more of them in order to compensate for the steady karma drain you are causing.
If you are mass-downvoting other people, the effect on some of them is probably the same.
To the LW admins, if any are reading:
Look, can we really not do anything about this behaviour? It's childish and stupid, and it makes the karma system less useful (e.g., for comment-sorting), and it gives bad actors a disproportionate influence on Less Wrong. It seems like there are lots of obvious things that would go some way towards helping, many of which have been discussed in past threads about this.
Failing that, can we at least agree that it's bad behaviour and that it would be good in principle to stop it or make it more visible and/or inconvenient?
Failing that, can we at least have an official statement from an LW administrator that mass-downvoting is not considered an undesirable behaviour here? I really hope this isn't the opinion of the LW admins, but as the topic has been discussed from time to time with never any admin response I've been thinking it increasingly likely that it is. If so, let's at least be honest about it.
To anyone else reading this:
If you should happen to notice that a sizeable fraction of my comments are at -1, this is probably why. (Though of course I may just have posted a bunch of silly things. I expect it happens from time to time.)
My apologies for cluttering up Discussion with this. (But not very many apologies; this sort of mass-downvoting seems to me to be one of the more toxic phenomena on Less Wrong, and I retain some small hope that eventually something may be done about it.)