Hey Chris, the system as it is set up now is subject to this type of “serial downvoting” abuse, so this doesn’t surprise me a bit. Downvoting, of course, is a part of the system, and every member has the right to downvote a comment when they feel inclined, and there is nothing wrong with that. Unfortunately, until now there has been really no explanatory dialog regarding the post voting process anywhere on the site, at least to my knowledge. In other words, if someone doesn’t like a certain poster, they may feel they can go hogwild downvoting their every comment, no matter how innocuous.
I agree that this is a form of internet stalking / bullying, and an abuse of the system. I just thought that after the introduction and subsequent modification of the miminum points / post voting process, there would be some dialog. I attempted to get a conversation going when the subject came up on the moderator’s page, but to no avail. So kudos to you for posting this thread in General Discussion, it’s good to get this out in the open, and I am completely with you on this point: “going through a thread (or multiple threads) and downvoting all of a single posters comments will not be tolerated.”
As you say, one can click on a member’s profile and see how many downvotes they have given, and in which topic. But what you can’t do, unfortunately, is track each downvote to the specific post, specific downvoter. It seems counterproductive to me when you get a downvote that will show on your points page, and there is no way of knowing who downvoted, or even which comment was downvoted, unless you can find the post with the minus vote showing, and then still don’t know who did it or why.
But if you receive a series of downvotes, and you find a member’s page showing they repeatedly downvoted in that very thread, then yes, you have no doubt found the culprit. Can take a bit of detective work. I know, because I went through this myself, but that issue has now been resolved, so I’m not gonna re-hash it now.
Another simple workaround for the members is, if you see a downvote or a series of downvotes (to someone else) that you feel is clearly unfair or unjustified, just click a quick upvote. Easy peazy.
For some reason, several people have accused me of devising / implementing the voting / points system, even 'tho as moderator I have no authority to do anything of the sort. I have even received some hate mail from one of our resident nut cases on this topic. For the record, I DID NOT COME UP WITH OR IMPLEMENT THE POINTS AND / OR VOTING SYSTEM ON SWAYLOCKS. I just defended it from this standpoint: Its part of this great, free forum with a wealth of information readily available to any and all, with just a minimum of rules, so why bitch about it when we can just accept it and work with it, no harm no foul.