The reason I ask is that apparently some idiot out there has been running a script against me once a night (for about the last 45 to 60 days) to lower my average score about ten or twenty points per day, and I figured my only recourse is to make sure all my votes are spent helping other people, in spite of the fact that this idiot is trying to hurt me.

Just out of curiosity: are you sure that it is a bot? Some time ago I began being consistently notified at every login about XP loss. Appearently someone I must have argued with must have taken the deliberate effort to downvote posts of mine ad personam, which is as you know, sad because regardless of your own XP it's not nice to see a post in which you invested your time and which may be useful to others, having a negative reputation. However, in a few days it went away.

If OTOH there's really a bot running against you, or anyone else, well sorry to repeat what others already pointed out and should be well known and clear to you in the first place, but it's plainly forbidden, and if there's any evidence that that's what's going on some action should be taken.

I'll bring that further: ad personam downvoting should be strongly discouraged in any case. One can clearly disagree with others in voting a single node, but if there's a strong discrepancy in this sense relative to posts all of a specific user, then there should be an algorithm to easily detect it. Of course no automatic action should be taken, but the output may be of interest to the gods for further investigation.

In any case fighting against ad personam downvoting by means of random bot-voting seems the worst solution for at least two reasons:

• in and of itself, because it's only slightly less irresponsible;
• it would cure only one part of the problem, which is personal XP (the one one should not care about), but it doesn't cure the other one, which is reputation loss on single nodes.