The details of how the conclusion was reached are available for Disc members if they PM me or reach out through Discord.

It is really likely that I misinterpreted some of Lekter statements. Even if they're real (his statements were made in a parallel Discord server for the official "News Hub" of the -FR wiki, but I quit and he surely don't want to let me in. And I understand him perfectly.), I probably misinterpreted his opinions. But I can swear to all of you that all of that wasn't made in bad faith. I don't have anybody against Lekter, or Gnath, or anybody in the two Wikis. I'm not a liar and my actions wasn't made in a malicious manner.

It was just too fast and… I don't even know how to explain that and that's horrible, because things are going out of control and that wasn't my intention. And now, I feel horribly guilty for what I've done. That's why :

I'm deeply and sincerely sorry for my actions and I want to apologise to Lekter for my behavior and to the Staffs of -EN and -FR Wikis. My misinterpretations waste the time of everybody, I think, and I truly regret all that.

I have no exact words to express the shame that I felt. I'm aware that I made a mistake that I couldn't repair easily. And probably that, now, many of you had a bad opinion of me and think that I'm not trust-worthy. But now, I'm not here for justify my errors because there's nothing to justify. I just want to apologize.

And I just hope, for all the people in the French Branch who see that, that it's not too late to talk and began to repair what I broke. I know that in this post, that sounds like an emo teenager, but I don't have better words to express that.

Again, sorry to all of you.

Also, I think it's important to note that Woedenaz was the user who made the module, sure with the input and chat promotion of kaktus, but it was Woed's code. Woed did not get the same treatment.

Maybe this person also has a personal dislike of kaktus and maybe that influenced their decision to do this, but I'm very uncomfortable with the idea of conducting full-on public investigations into people's intentions in order to punish them when what they actually did is completely defensible under our rules. Frankly I'm pretty weirded out by this existence of this entire thread and feel like it's a step down a slippery slope of trying to regulate how users respond to content. I'm pretty much in agreement with the French branch's original statement on this.

ACS is staying on all my articles forever. the kneejerks of the entrenched can only get so far under my skin, lol. vote accordingly, see if i care

Considering this screencap was included in a document that -FR staff gave to us, and knowing that Lekter was in constant communication with -FR staff, I think it's safe to assume Lekter knew CadCom added the stuff to his page. Cad even welcomed the downvotes, yet didn't get a single one.

As for the "to avoid punishment they should have tried to make a much larger mass downvote spree" bit, not necessarily. I think if they wanted to protest the ACS, they should have downvoted it on sight as they stumbled across it, not gone 1/3 of the way through one of the largest author pages on the site to downvote everything.

As such, I'm honestly also in agreement with Tuomey in that, when we decide on a new rule to cover this base, it be called something other than malicious downvoting, and I think it should carry a lighter ban.

"Yesterday, I did not care one way or the other how this turned out. While I believed that what Lekter did was wrong, I wasn't going to try to press the issue because at the end of the day this means nothing, in the larger sense of things. However, in the comment made by MrJacketBarths, he cites the following reasons that Lekter did what he did (https://usercontent.irccloud-cdn.com/file/w21Z131j/image.png). *None of these things have anything to do with the content of the page*. If MrJacketBarths is misrepresenting Lekter's words, then he should not have gotten himself involved - but if he isn't, and those were legitimately the reasons Lekter gave (I will remind you that immediately afterwards he says "That's his main reasons"), then that indicates to me that the downvoting *was* retaliatory and that makes me *extremely* uncomfortable. I don't care if he doesn't like the format - plenty of people don't like it. I don't eve really care if he downvotes those pages because he doesn't like it, even if I don't agree with the way he did it. What I absolutely cannot ever feel comfortable accepting is that he admitted to downvoting for reasons that do not line up with his original story, and that those reasons are retaliatory in nature. I must ask that you please reconsider with that information in mind. If I went around downvoting things because I didn't like the way people conducted themselves in the past, that would be harassment.

Pm-

Salutations,

I’m SoullessSingularity, admin of the SCP Foundation. I am notifying you that you have been issued a 1 week ban for targeted downvoting of a specific author. Let me know if you have questions or concerns.

Soulless

Salutations,

I’m SoullessSingularity, admin of the SCP Foundation. I am notifying you that you have been issued a 6 month ban for targeted downvoting of a specific author. Let me know if you have questions or concerns.

Soulless

Firstly, a disclaimer: I will be focusing mostly on Lekter’s actions, as I do not know enough about the Gnath situation to come to a conclusion I feel would be justified.

My understanding of the situation, both from my own research and the evidence in this thread, is that Lekter partakes in two ACS-related actions:

• They downvote essentially all articles which are posted with the ACS header.
• They have previously been on a downvoting spree of ACS-using articles, the vast majority of which were posted by kaktus.

I’ll give my opinion on the first point first. This behaviour, while something I personally disagree with,¹ is probably not worthy of disciplinary action. I am aware of several users who always downvote specific things, and I am not calling for any action to be taken over them. It’s really just a matter of personal taste.

Now, onto the second point. This one is more complicated, and I will split it further into two behaviours:

• Downvoting older articles solely because ACS is applied to them.
• Downvoting a massive amount of articles by one user in a single spree.

I do consider both of these behaviours malicious downvoting, however the first one is something I consider less severe.

For the downvoting articles that ACS is applied to after posting, it is extremely petty and entirely unnecessary, while also harming the perceived quality of writing by the affected users. And I do not consider the apology of Lekter to be a valid way to escape disciplinary action, as they have still done something I consider to be rulebreaking behaviour. It’s like if someone is accused of a crime, they can’t get out of sentencing if they just apologise for it. I am also not taking into account the FR wiki’s official response to the situation, as they are an independent site and their users should not be granted additional privileges due to the sites’ differing voting policies.

To conclude my opinion on this behaviour, I would definitely support it as a disciplinary issue as of now, however I also completely understand the opinions of people who don’t think action is necessary. This is, for me, a less severe malicious downvoting issue than the other behaviour that I will explain below.

Now, onto the targeted attack on djkaktus and woedenaz. After reading Dexanote’s observations of the scpper data, I feel that action taken against Lekter should be much more severe. While you can possibly justify downvoting for a specific feature of an article, there is no way (at least to me) that there could be any acceptable reason to target articles by only one user.

For my conclusions on this behaviour, I would wholeheartedly support severe disciplinary action. In my opinion, there is no reason that a targeted attack on specific members of the site of this scale should go unpunished.

EDIT: Addressing the information provided by Barth and kaktus’ response

If this is in fact true, it essentially proves that the actions were targeted attacks at kaktus. In this case, I would support a ban of at least the severity given to Gnath, if not more.

Community Outreach Junior Staff and active member of the French Branch here. This case greatly concerns me and I had many things to say about that.

The first thing I did was downvoting the ACS articles written by kaktus because he was the first to notably apply it on all his pages. I never went through the recently edited pages to downvote them all, just those from who I assumed to be the only one using ACS back then. A few hours after that, I decided to stop actively searching for those pages because I just didn't want to spend so much time for something that wouldn't make anybody happy.

Kaktus was the one pushing this and most widely announcing his adoption of it. No one could have known who adopted the classification format change aside from those who stated it publicly, and all of this occurred on the first 48 hours after this was introduced. We're looking at the situation with the benefit of hindsight as for who would and did make the change. The spree then ceased because of community criticism of the behavior, so he couldn't have downvoted stuff like Cadaver's articles without being a psychic.

Other than that, I'm very concerned that this line of approach is implying that to avoid punishment they should have tried to make a much larger mass downvote spree. By his own admission, Lekter says that he stopped due to the just criticism over this kind of spree that has been addressed in this very thread. But instead, we're going to punish him precisely because he didn't continue to do so? It just seems to be sending an awful message.

The downvotes themselves are startling but fine. The focus on one authors work in specific is the problem.

All I'm saying is that the boot seems to fit in both cases here.

Soulless checked scpper and apparently, of 45 across all downvotes by Lekter, 40 are on Kaktus 38 downvoted were Kaktus, 2 were to woedenaz, 4 misc (edited for correction), and all of Gnath's are on Kaktus, as of the writing of this post.

We can't know the honest intent of Lekter and Gnath, but this certainly looks like a case of targeting to me, especially when other users have also gone and added the header to every one of their articles (CadaverCommander did this iirc), yet did not get the same downvote treatment. The fact that 53 downvotes of the ~60 or so in question here are on the same user certainly raised my eyebrows.

I find little fault with Lekter/Gnath's actions¹. If a user doesn't like content or a trend, what recourse do they have other than by the downvote button? Downvoting for content should always be allowed, in all cases, for all reasons. This is the only meaningful tool in the reader's arsenal to guide site content.

The only cases that should be considered for malicious downvoting are for targeted users and downvote brigading. Whether this is a case of the former should be the core of the discussion here.

Roget: I’m of the same mind as Moose in that thread, the things like object numbers, classification and anything else is flavor/fluff and not integral to the article. But that’s really, really beside the point.

Strongly disagree, if only because many readers (and writers and members of staff) will judge articles different based on classification. There are totally articles that get downvoted rather than upvoted because they invented their own classification.

I'm also speaking as a member of forum crit rather than a disc member, so take this with a particularly small grain of salt.

I would support a week-long ban. I think that is more in line with what the users did. It's enough to show that yes, we are considering this breaking the rules. I think anything longer is unproductive.

EDIT: To clarify, normally malicious downvoting involves bad faith. It's downvoting because you dislike the writer, not because you dislike the article. In this case, they were going after Kaktus because he's one of the main users of the format, which they dislike. I believe they were acting in good faith. Poor judgement, and for that I do support a one-week ban, but good faith.

If these two had NOT stopped where they had, if they had continued and downvoted EVERY article that had this format, would they be guilty?

I don’t think laziness is a proper description, the votes were clearly targeted at the authors of the format more-so than the formatting itself.

Are they MORE guilty, because they were lazy?

See above. But also, yes. If they had targeted the works and not the authors this would not be nearly as controversial.

I'm not saying they shouldn't be disciplined. But… Well, an example from the past. Moose used to go through and read everything written by an author, and vote/comment on each. If someone goes through, say, all of my work, and downvotes every SCP because I DON'T use the new system… Does it matter that they just chose that day to go through my articles? That they didn't read other peoples articles in between?

That would be a really weird thing to do and if anyone mass downvoted anyone’s works to the exclusion of other works I’d call that a textbook case of malicious downvoting.

But this also means we have to figure out what malicious downvoting is worth. A week ban, a month, a year? Do we perma for someone using downvoting to express their opinion?

I don’t think we ban people for expressing their opinion with a vote. We ban when they use the tool we provide to express that opinion to settle petty grievances or to otherwise bring someone down. When the authors and not the work is being targeted that is where it becomes problematic in cases like this.

It IS okay to downvote based on not liking the formatting.

It is NOT okay to downvote a large majority of one persons works based soley on the fact that this person uses said format.

Hmm. No, I'm still getting tripped up.

Let me posit this.

If these two had NOT stopped where they had, if they had continued and downvoted EVERY article that had this format, would they be guilty?

Are they MORE guilty, because they were lazy?

I'm not saying they shouldn't be disciplined. But… Well, an example from the past. Moose used to go through and read everything written by an author, and vote/comment on each. If someone goes through, say, all of my work, and downvotes every SCP because I DON'T use the new system… Does it matter that they just chose that day to go through my articles? That they didn't read other peoples articles in between?

I feel like it becomes an issue of mind reading. Something like this used to be a lot simpler of a thing to figure out.

But this also means we have to figure out what malicious downvoting is worth. A week ban, a month, a year? Do we perma for someone using downvoting to express their opinion?

I'm raising more questions then I'm answering, mostly cause i really wanna know peoples opinions.

I’m of the same mind as Moose in that thread, the things like object numbers, classification and anything else is flavor/fluff and not integral to the article. But that’s really, really beside the point.

Obviously these two were maliciously downvoting in a spree and should be afforded punishment as such. Putting aside the quibbles over the formatting they targeted specific authors and downvoted their works en masse as a result of a petty dispute.

It feels to me like there’s a lot of hair-splitting going on here because many staffers don’t like BHL and are reluctant to punish users reacting negatively towards it. That’s understandable. But we should be able to put those feelings aside when people abuse the system.

Anyone else downvoting in vast swathes because of (a completely allowed)formatting innovation wouldn’t get any leniency but it’s kaktus/Woe/BHL so that makes it different. It really shouldn’t be.

1) Staff at the time considered the changing of classification system of an existing work to be a slimy move.

2) One administrator, Sorts, actively says he is going to downvote all of these works because he thinks they are ugly. No one protests Sorts.

3) Jekeled posts acknowledging he fully intended for users to notice and vote accordingly, and that he wants individual members to downvote or vote accordingly.

4) It is established here that classification systems are content and that it is acceptable to downvote based on sudden changes in them.

The question I am going to pivot to based on this is asking if we wish to change something set by staff 5 years earlier for a similar situation. In this case, Dr Lekter and Gnath's behavior would not appear out of line.

If this was a random newbie's new header it'd be a non issue. Not liking the ACS header is a valid thing. The scale of it has me questioning the logic behind it, but nobody has to like the ACS header, or NuSCP, or any other format changes like this. We tell this to people seeking crit all the time; stay in the lines, stay in the tired and true format, people don't like random changes. And that's fine, people don't have to like it.

If they downvoted all they encountered in the wild that'd be one thing. Seeking them out is kind of petty but I'm not sure if splitting hairs like this is a good way to go forward in policy.

THAT is a problem. That shows intent and vendetta. Not downvoting for the design - that's okay - but seeking it out and bombing them. That shows a lack of sportsmanship and an intent to downvote being their primary goal.

FR branch actively dislikes this formatting and hey that's fine. I'm okay with that. I'm not okay with users of any sort coming to massdownvote like this. If they were established users with 275 votes across the site and 40 happened to be Kaktus and others with weird formats (edit for bolding for emphasis), that's far more acceptable.

I'm inclined to not believe that is the case here, though.

Hello!
I just read your post on this topic and I wanted to clarify one thing:

The things kaktus and/or Woedenaz said about me were after and, in fact, caused by my downvotes. The votes did not target kaktus as an author but just the articles' content. (I asked LadyKatie to post a quick explanation about this particular point on my behalf and I hope it will make things clearer.)

The reason why I complained about them is because I don't feel comfortable seeing Woedenaz calling me "fucker" on a public channel, but it happened after I downvoted the articles and has nothing to do with it.

Sorry for bothering you, and have a nice day!

It actively alters and jarringly changes how the site looks compared to the standard design and a lot of users dislike that. It's a presentation thing; it's how the material is shown and people are allowed to dislike for that. It's still content and still part of the story that is being written, and can be judged accordingly. And many of these articles aren't being changed for an in-character-but-meta-reason, like as if they're being read off a 1980s green-and-black screen computer, or an AI's internal monologue. They're a very pretty, but very distinct, graphical change that alters how the site is presented.

It's not like downvoting for LGBT inclusion and a mass downvote for bigotry, and I can't imagine any of these people know Kaktus on a personal enough level to be seeking his stuff to hurt him. It's a content thing.

It also breaks on my phone (a blackberry, on a chrome mobile version; it stretches and chunks up a lot of the article, and makes me have to scroll in four directions to read everything) which in itself is enough for me to downvote; it actively makes browsing worse for certain users in a technical sense, and that in itself is unacceptable for me.

…

Now, the question is, have they gone and downvoted all articles in this sort of style or changed format and presentation, or only Kaktus written articles? Because if it's only Kaktus, THAT is a problem I will back investigation of.

While what Lekter and Gnath did was petty and excessive, it was votes on content and thus well within current rules. I don't believe they should face disciplinary action over this, regardless of further decisions. More pressing would be deciding if we want to amend the rules to include this kind of behavior in the definition of malicious downvoting going forward.

I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, this kind of mass downvoting is on the whole is something we could certainly do without and does not foster good dialogue. On the other, including this under malicious downvoting introduces some concerning precedents that both contradict previous events of this nature (eg a number of users mass downvoting Resurrection when it was the controversy du jour) and could be used to prevent users from voting on future content changes.

We'd need to narrow down the circumstances in which this would count as malicious downvoting. I know a number of users, including some staff, with particular pet peeve GOIs, css elements, or characters that they always downvote when they see them. If someone clicks on, for example, Wilson Wildlife formats and downvotes them knowing going in that they are likely or certain to do so should it count? Is it a question of time? Would someone downvoting those 45 articles over the course of a month be allowed but not in two days? Is it a question of what aspects of the content the downvotes are over? Would someone replacing their articles with fanfiction and people downvoting all of them be covered by this policy, or would that be okay? And if that is okay, how do we define the new "tiers" of content that suddenly exist as voting criteria. Lastly, we need to balance between this new standard and downvotes in their form as the only way for users to express disapproval over major site movements. For people who dislike a certain trend, downvoting it is their only way of meaningfully influencing whether it gains future traction since comments don't affect scores and survival. To quote ModernMajorGeneral:

I think the perception that readers have no influence on graphics contributes to a good deal of hostility to graphics and UI changes. It's understandable that there is a preference to vote based purely on writing quality, but voting is the only concrete way to influence site content, and it's not surprising that people become resentful if you tell them they can't do that. Voting is not a great system for anything but I think people need to have the ability to express their dissatisfaction with graphics by voting.

Only other thing is I'd advise we take our time to consider this instead of rushing to a snap judgement. Including content votes in malicious downvoting is a massive change and deserves the proper consideration beyond an avalanche of "yeah this seems malicious." It reminds me, a bit concerningly, of when many Chinese users decided to downvote DrSolo's article about the Mud man because of perceived racial and cultural insensitivity. Despite the votes being content based and cooler heads eventually prevailing, when it first started there were multiple staff raising the specter of it being malciious downvoting and I was even drafted by an admin into translating their forums to ensure there were no instructions to downvote. My point is when Int members vote en masse like this staff can sometimes have an instinctual "the 'outsiders' are attacking us" reaction that we need to ensure does not affect whatever policymaking decision we make.

All of that handwringing aside, I do support us making a rule change regarding this matter. We just need to do so judiciously.

It's a thin line, but I think it still falls on the line of respectable.

It is my opinion that seeking out articles that have CSS themes, or formatting changes, and downvoting them all unilaterally (as it appears the case is here) regardless as to the merits of the content or even taking the time to read the content (I'm extremely doubtful Dr. Lekter read all those articles in two days), is a form of malicious downvoting, and should be judged as such.

Tl;dr it shouldn’t be against the rules to essentially ‘boycott’ a large-scale article change with a downvote, especially if it changes the overall aesthetic of an article (we allow it for CSS changes).

EDIT I will be revising this later as new information has been given to me.

EDIT 2: So, I've been informed by various sources that this was mainly carried out on Kaktus' articles. 40 out of 45. That shows much more intent to maliciously downvote than it does intent to boycott something like I had hoped this could be.

Therefore, this thread is explicitly created to address whether or not actively seeking articles containing a specific kind of formatting or content in order to downvote them is acceptable user behavior.

It's not. Let's amend the rules.

EDIT: To be clear, I want the rules to be less specific about what qualifies as malicious downvoting, maybe call it something else so we don't argue about intent all the time.

Forum Criticism Team

I would consider this to be a generally inappropriate way to vote. As people have said above, downvoting on even the smallest minutia is fine to me, but actively looking for articles that have something you don't enjoy specifically to downvote them feels fairly malicious IMO.

Actively seeking out specific content to downvote is certainly malicious behavior. I understand that specific formatting can be a deciding factor for some, especially in the case of CSS themes and the like, but to do so without consideration of the entire piece is poor behavior. I believe that all works should be considered and judged as a uniform piece as opposed to judging them based on a singular specific component.

I don't believe that actively seeking out works with the intent to downvote for legitimate content purposes should itself be considered unacceptable user behavior. Unlike downvoting out of personal dislike of an author, rating manipulation, or other motives external to works themselves, this directly relates to the actual contents of tales, articles, etc. I would be extremely hesitant to support any additional restraints on the ability of users to cast their votes as to whether or not they believe a piece of writing deserves its place on the site based on its actual textual or visual merits, minor as readers' perceived issues may be. I would hope that users give each piece containing such an element an honest chance to change their minds, but I do not believe readers are under an obligation to approach all works from a purely neutral perspective if they have prior knowledge of its actual content. Although the classification module being addressed here strikes me as a somewhat petty thing for someone to downvote over, I understand the perspective of users who prefer a much more standardized format and are displeased by individual divergences from it.

It may also be that dislike for an element is based on dislike for a user, which strikes me as much more unacceptable, but that state of affairs seems covered under extant malicious voting policy if it can be verified.

I am of the mind that anything under a rating module is fair game for downvotes, personally. ACS falls under that category, so I don't think downvoting because an article has the ACS header is malicious. What I do think is malicious would be actively searching for every single article that included the ACS header.

Let's say I was not a fan of authors saying "Anomaly Class: Euclid" instead of the standard "Object Class: Euclid". That's content, I believe that's a fair reason to downvote (if a bit petty). But, if I were to then go back to someone's author page, realize they changed every Object Class to Anomaly Class on their stuff, and so I rerated everything they've written to be downvotes, that doesn't feel like good faith voting to me. The change did not affect my memory of the article and I would not have revisited those pages if I wasn't looking for this new thing I dislike. Now, if I stumbled on an old page and it had the Anomaly Class change, I think that is a fair revote, but seeking them out to downvote is certainly malicious in my opinion.

E: I also think that it is worth considering that these actions have an air of "brigade" about them, insofar as that, intentionally or not, the knowledge that your work will be downvoted simply for including ACS has stopped many writers from using the header. I personally would have considered using the text header, but knowing that all it will do is draw negative attention to my article over something that has nothing to do with the words I've written has caused me to reconsider this position, and I most likely will not be using any variant of ACS header in the future to simply circumvent this whole situation.

If I see an article that has something I don't like in it, I'll downvote and move on. Generally, "what I don't like" is basically "the subjective opinions of UraniumEmpire", but there are very specific cases of objective yet arbitrary standards I'll downvote for, generally "containment procedures that consist of appeasement for little to no reason". And really, if there's content that absolutely ruins something for someone, I'd say it's alright to do so; you have judged with a critical eye, and found the piece wanting.

What shouldn't be okay is deliberately seeking out content for the purposes of downvoting it. In my case, I read practically everything; however, if there were some way to make a list of things with a specific arbitrary component that would make me downvote, and if I were to use such a list in any capacity, I would have effectively shifted my focus from "evaluating what I've read" to "pre-evaluating works as shit". Under no circumstances should any user be able to condemn a work prior to witnessing its contents.

Dr Lekter

Gnath

1) These users are originally from the French Wiki. We have communicated with the French branch and have chosen to judge their behavior on EN only as EN members. The official statement from the French Wiki regarding their position, for posterity, is the following:

We are aware of the two cases since this is the reason kaktus threw a drama on the French Discord.

The banner is part of the article and as such is a legitimate reason for downvoting it.

It is the indiscutable right of every author to add the banner to their new articles and even to add it to their old articles. But in symmetry, it is the right of every voter to downvote new articles that include this banner and to reconsider their votes on existing articles.

When you edit 80 articles at once, you can't blame people for voting on those 80 articles in a short amount of time (as long as the sole criteria of voting is the content of the article, which is the case here). What Lekter admitted after several days of being pressured, publicly mocked and insulted by the kaktus gang, is that seeking out these existing pages was prone to cause tensions and could be seen as extreme and 'unfair'. An apology that I considered to be unnecessary but Lekter was the one to deal with their bullshit and he tried the conciliatory approach. We know of the messages with Woedenaz. We helped Lekter writing them. Too bad Woedenaz is an hypocrite, isn't.
(I'm still not done) Even though I consider Gnath votes to be more of an impulsive bandwagon reaction, I'm fully supportive of Lekter's actions as they do not meet my criteria for illegitimate voting and the French staff know that it was not done with a malicious intent.

Now, you have your own criteria for the assessment of illegitimate voting and only those matter in the end. However, since there is no malicious intent, it would be nice to let us know about it and to give Lekter the opportunity of canceling some of the votes before taking potential disciplinary measures.
Now, I think I'm done.

2) We do not currently have a set standard of malicious downvoting as based on actively seeking out articles of a certain content to downvote all of a specific aspect of content. Therefore it is ambiguous as to whether or not staff as a whole would consider this out of line on the offset.

Therefore, this thread is explicitly created to address whether or not actively seeking articles containing a specific kind of formatting or content in order to downvote them is acceptable user behavior. Because it addresses behavioral standards as a whole, I would like everyone's feedback on this, and am especially interested in crit, community outreach, and disciplinary team input.

(Note a related discussion here is contextually related but should be discussed on itself.