Can something please be done about the targeted harrassment of prolific reviewers?

Hi,

When this issue was bad during 2019-2020 for me, I really made an effort to move on and not talk about it as much (even resorting to apologising on my profile for worrying so much over it), but with it being worse than before and getting worse and worse  I just had to say something. Especially since it has been affecting others too. It has been a recurring problem since 2018 for several  prolific reviewers, though some more frequent than others, and it has been raised awareness of here by some of them over the years. It has never been this bad than as since a few weeks ago. Some prolific reviewers have had our reviews/profiles targeted by serial down voters (a person or group of people with sock puppet accounts),  and in the cases of MartinHafer and me (TheLittleSongbird) in particular it has turned into pretty much daily harrassment and for I feel for no reason. Regardless of whether people think it is harrassment in my case, it is definitely that in Martin's case and it is definitely the same people/accounts responsible.  I know this from admiring the other prolific reviewers' work and regularly looking at it when writing my own reviews. It has been happening nearly every day since it started again this year and in some cases just hours after the review is published. All my reviews since last Tuesday have been downvoted up to 3 times, including those written yesterday, and same goes for a lot of reviews when sorted by helpfulness.

Last Thursday up to 300 of my reviews were downvoted twice on the same night within a window of 15 minutes. On all the occasions it's happened, and this was true for all the numerous times it happened between 2018-2021 until the suspicious activity was finally detected and dealt with, none of the other reviews for all the titles were affected and most of the reviews were for films, episodes, cartoons etc that are non recent (so for examples  golden age films, 40s cartoons and episodes of something like Alfred Hitchcock Presents), which has always made me suspicious. I actually saw some of the activity happen last Thursday live and it is abundantly clear that those responsible are clicking no without even reading the reviews. I just want to say that I don't expect everybody to agree with all my reviews all the time, I can't count the number of times I've disagreed with other prolific reviewers while still appreciating hugely their work and some of us do have opinions that raise the eyebrows. But if someone disagrees with a review, just downvote that review. I find it immature and dishonest when someone goes to the reviewer's profile and downvotes for example 50 reviews in 2 minutes and then organises some form of hate campaign. I am disabled and have anxiety and autism, so this problem has really unsettled me and to me it's the equivalent of being stalked, but if people for some reason are trying to bully me off the site I'm going nowhere.

Please can this be looked into as this is not normal activity? I have contacted IMDb directly about this more than once in the past couple of weeks, not just on my behalf but also the other prolific reviewers affected, and haven't found anything that was said to me helpful. You detected suspicious activity finally around September time last year and did something about it then by removing the yes and no votes from all the offending accounts that spammed reviews for many titles on the site. With the problem being more pronounced this time, please can you do the same (removing the non helpfuls and taking further action against the accounts responsible)? As I said in previous private correspondence to you, I  do strongly recommend that the ability to vote yes and no via user profile function is removed, since that was implemented shortly after the review layout changed that has clearly been abused and if it was removed it would make it more difficult for the abuse and harrassment to happen again or at least as much. I also strongly recommend that the primary sort by function on reviews is changed from prolific reviewers back to helpfulness, since the sort by function changed that's when more  prolific reviewers started getting targeted and more frequently which gives me the feeling that our work is not appreciated.

Thank you