People should not be discouraged from actively reading older posts and voting on them. Quite the opposite.
My feeling is that people should be able to reply to older posts. And I think upvoting helps bring attention to good comments and posts. I'm inclined to think that there's enough downvoting in some modest number of months to give an adequate signal.
Voiceofra did over 800 downvotes to just three posters. I'm sick of dealing with this stuff. I want it to not happen. 5 downvotes per week on old posts doesn't seem like a really onerous restrictions, but I don't downvote a tremendous amount, so I might be typical-minding things.
5 downvotes per week is well below trouble, I think. 15 starts looking like karma-vampirism to me if someone is doing a vendetta.
Some people get dispirited if their karma is dropping, especially if there's no apparent reason for it.
I agree that 800 is too much, and appropriate for banning.
Since you can "unvote" any particular karma vote you've made, wouldn't it be easy enough to implement limits on downvotes of a particular person in day, week, month, year?
You reach your max, and the next time you try, you are prevented, and you get a message saying "It is a bannable offense to karma bomb other users". That could be a rollover and a triggered message sent to your account.
(Note that the limits could be parameterized in increasingly complicated ways (scaled to kar...
I've gotten sufficient evidence from support that voiceofra has been doing retributive downvoting. I've banned them without prior notice because I'm not giving them more chances to downvote.
I'm thinking of something like not letting anyone give more than 5 downvotes/week for content which is more than a month old. The numbers and the time period are tentative-- this isn't my ideal rule. This is probably technically possible. However, my impression is that highly specific rules like that are an invitation to gaming the rules.
I would rather just make spiteful down-voting impossible (or maybe make it expensive) rather than trying to find out who's doing it. Admittedly, putting up barriers to downvoting for past comments doesn't solve the problem of people who down-vote everything, but at least people who downvote current material are easier to notice.
Any thoughts about technical solutions to excessive down-voting of past material?