Inspired by the answer to these two questions, I am a little unsure.

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There are several other grad students on the website that are taking similar specialisations to me, and so naturally there is a large overlap between their questions and ones that I have.

Twice even I have even given the exact same answer to a question as another grad student within a matter of seconds after.

Some of these other grad students I have looked up, and they have questions that I have not actively thought about before, but when I see them I thikn they're great, and upvote accordingly, read the answers, and (hopefully!) learn something.

Thus I was supprised to see in the answer to the first question, that while the action in that question was deemed

"not exactly stalking"

it did say that

"serial downvoting will be reversed"

as well as for the case of the second question

[Serial Upvotes] are reversed, just after a period of maximum 24 hours

So my question is, are we indeed allowed to look through similar people's history and read their questions, and vote accordingly? Or is this not to be done?

And what is the definition of "serial" here? If I'm upvoting their questions, because they deserve upvotes, it would be a shame if the machine came along and took all my votes back. How can I avoid this happening? If a question deserves votes I don't want them to be undone due to a mistake on my part.

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Similarly, In principle I don't see the diference between doing this, and for someone to critic another persons questions, though I understand that there is the scope for this to be done in mallace, which would of course be wrong, but doing it where 'justified' should be fine.

As it happens, this doesn't bother me too much here, but it is a quite related question.

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Note that this may also apply to a persons history of answers.

I am neither so interested in this case here, since the answers to a persons questions are ususally given by other different people, and so even if I vote on lots of answers, the votes will be more 'spread out' accross lots of different people. I expect that this would not get the unwanted notice of the vote-reversing script.

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Edit 1: I should have mentioned, I am only talking about three or four votes here and there, when I'm taking a break from my own work, by the way. It is not as if I am suggesting systematically going through every single one of another persons questions.

Either way, I still think it is helpful to try to find out the bounds for this, in order to avoid doing anything wrong.

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Thanks!