Today we banned vote manipulators and reset their votes. As cache expires, the accounts targeted will have their point totals adjusted appropriately.

You will likely recognize many of the names now on the ban list. Some I have mixed feelings about as I considered them fun to have around or an asset to Voat as a whole, but objectively, there was no question as to their abuse and manipulation, and for this reason we had no choice but to respond to all abuse with the ban hammer.

@Cynabuns and I have finalized a new system for more efficient processing of vote manipulation bans and going forward we will be reviewing manipulation more regularly. We don't plan on allowing the hammer to gather dust any longer.

We did not send warnings today like we usually do for those in the gray area. If we come across your name again, you will be banned. Fair warning. It's not worth it.

If you feel you have been targeted by vote manipulation please PM me so I can research as we are dealing with a mountain of data when reviewing bans.

To those banned:

I personally don't judge your actions, but you know as well as I do what you were doing. Vote manipulation can not continue going unchecked and for the sake of integrity you got the hammer. If you want to create a new account and forgo the manipulation, you are welcome back. If not, I'll ban you again (and again and again). The thing you don't realize is when I ban you, I am resetting your votes against your target(s), so there is no point in continuing with these ways.

P.S. Now vote manipulators get a shiny new badge so everyone knows that they've been bad little goats. :)

P.P.S. The ban reasons in the ban log are wonky because if a user had multiple infractions, we only used the first description. In addition, the target in the description may be the banned user (which doesn't make sense) as many of these bans resulted in both users (vote farmers) being banned and the code simply reused the same description for each ban.

Banned user log:

https://voat.co/log/banned/user