How to deal with indiscriminate and spiteful down-voting (trolling)

Question

I am rather new to Physical Fitness Stack Exchange, but it initially seemed that this forum was less affected by the trolling and childish behaviour that plagues other fora such as those on Reddit. Discussion seemed civil, and there appeared to be a number of good contributions and contributors. In short, the forum seemed to be being used in the manner and spirit in which it was conceived.

Just recently, however, I have noticed a lot of behaviour that I would describe simply as trolling. On one occasion, for example, ten of my posts were down-voted within a space of one minute! No discussion, no comments. And I have since had tens of comments down-voted within similarly short time-frames. Clearly, this is unconstructive and delinquent.

Although the forum caught the first bout of activity and reversed the voting, similar attacks of inexplicable down-voting continue. And I have noticed the same behaviour with other well-considered and often excellent posts.

I am not concerned so much with my forum reputation, but this kind of behaviour tends to undermine the mechanics and value of the forum.

Is there any mechanism through which indiscriminate down-voting can be reported and addressed?

Answer 1

More or less, all we can do is rely on Stack Overflow's voting fraud code to catch and reverse it.

If the voting fraud is in the progress of happening or just happened recently, don't worry about it. You should wait at least 24 hours after noticing before becoming concerned. The system should detect it and reverse it for you. Please do not try to get help on this issue on meta or by flagging for a moderator. All they will do is tell you to wait for the voting fraud script to run (they can't run it for you just this once).

If the 24 hours has already passed and the suspicious votes have not been reversed, you can then flag one of your own posts and explain what happened so a moderator can look into it. It is generally preferred that you avoid asking about them on a site's meta, since details of the investigation cannot be divulged and you won't actually get any information that will be useful to other members of the community.