Back to the old blog commenting system

This is just a note that I've disabled the Google+ commenting system for this blog, which really wasn't worth it.  The regular system uses a authentication with any Google account and OpenID or a bunch of other options, so it should be easily accessible to just about everyone.  Maybe now I'll see a flood of comments!  Dare to dream.

Several Stack Overflow Contributors Suspended for Voting Irregularities, Again

Voting fraud on Stack Overflow is a common problem that the site administrators deal with constantly.  Typically, one or more "sockpuppet" accounts are used by the same person to vote on their own posts. Fortunately, the system is good at detecting these voting patterns and stopping the abuse, but it certainly can go on for long periods before they are stopped.  It's a manifestation of one Stack Overflow's many design flaws, but that's a longer (and ongoing) discussion, that has been an issue since the beginning of Stack Overflow.

I've seen users get suspended for a variety of reasons, including "low quality contributions", need for a "cooling off" period, and voting irregularities.  This week, one or more Stack Overflow contributors were recently suspended for voting irregularities.  Based on my reputation history for October 4, there appears to be at least 5 different accounts involved (or the corrections rolled out slowly as the system sifted through just one user's votes).

Aftermath of the removal/suspension of multiple Stack Overflow users.

What this shows, I believe, is that these users hung around the [matlab] crowd, where I've posted 99% of my own answers, and they occasionally up-voted answers belonging to people such as myself.  (Note that I was an active contributor for about 9 months, with over 600 answers, so it's actually surprising how few votes I accumulated from these users).  Anyway, when the users are either removed or suspended, the rep gained from their up-votes is removed also.  This "penalty box" state is standard procedure according to mods and I've seen it in the past as users have deleted their accounts.  If this was a single user, there would be one entry in the reputation history, but there are multiple, so that could mean multiple users or the system took it's time computing the corrections.