I noticed this potential exploit last night and alerted the 'powers that be'.

From my understanding of the rewards system (which I admit is still quite limited), the exploit could've been averted if the voting window (Vote Window Days parameter in scotbot) had been switched from the default (full window) to 5 or 6 days.

That was my recommendation late last night, anyways. That would have allowed downvoting and/or other mitigation measures to be put in place before the exploit became fully instantiated.

I have my own thoughts on how to 'fix' the problem now that it has occurred, which I will detail in a separate post.

In particular, I have two thoughts, a simple one about 'making whole' those whose pending rewards got wiped out by the exploit and a complex one about how to improve the overall POB system itself (to make it less susceptible to whales and bots dominating the voting process).

Stay tuned!