THE MAD THUMBER

All it would take to do that is a VPN account.

It means a VPN account, multiple A2K accounts and either an absurd amount of time clicking or writing a bot that would be specific to the A2K layout. I lean towards the latter because if it was a person, they would likely skip the games and ESL threads, but this attack was comprehensive. That's a lot more than the average A2K extremist is going to go through.

Could just be one or a couple of monkeys with a VPN account, getting a kick out of downvoting... The coding necessary to build a bot would also not be rocket science, but I note that many threads were spared so I now doubt there's a bot involved.

IMO it's just a monkey pooping around. Add to that the misguided retaliations, the petty behavior of some posters who like to downvote posts as a way to collapse them on their page, and the healthier reaction of others who started thumbing up pretty much everything in response or anticipation of the monkey... and you get one big runcus for nothing.