[Phil]

I hardly ever downvote. (what goes around comes around, etc.., golden rule, etc..). When I do its because I am part of the self-appointed A/E police and goon squad. Or its because someone posts something really inappropriate in the B/I and we have to look out for dem kiddies.

As far as upvoting, I personally think its moronic to go down a thread and upvote everything you agree with or upvote your buddies who you also agree with. I think one, best post should be upvoted, and if it occurs early in a thread, so much the better.

[wickedbid1]

 gwnn, on 2011-June-20, 14:55, said:

Elianna: you can click on the little green arrow or square to the right of any name. There will be a little pop up window that shows their reputation, and some helpful buttons.

Thanks for providing this info, I was oblivious to the little green boxes.

I am not sure at all how I feel on principle upvoting/downvoting. There are plusses & minuses hee hee.

One idea tho: since people seem to want to use voting buttons for a wide variety of purposes, perhaps we could discuss a modification, if it hasn't already been rejected.

The idea is THREE possible vote buttons to disambiguate some important meanings. How about "agree", "disagree" and "i like it" for the vote buttons, with "i like it" being usable in conjunction with either of the other two. This way the vote could function as a mini-poll for, for example, a new convention, but then one could vote to like the post even if one did not like the convention.

Presumably, if one voted "dsagree", but did not vote "i like it" at the same time, that would function sufficiently as a downvote. One would not want the buttons to start multiplying like ACBL convention card boxes

[MrAce]

How about everyone being limited to make 1 up and 1 down vote per day ? (or 2 total votes of his/her choice ) But i don't know if thats technically available even if considered.

- This way none of us wanna waste our vote to justify someone else's vote

- No one can go on a downvote spree, or upvote everything his/her buddy says for that matter.

- And this increases the value of it to a degree.

@ Roger : I am so sorry mate, i wanted to upvote you but it went downvote. You shd be +2 instead of zero. I owe you 2 votes (probably 3 with the interest rate)

And i have a question, how do you all seem to know who down and upvoted (Lurpoa's name for example) ?

[BunnyGo]

 MrAce, on 2011-June-20, 19:55, said:

And i have a question, how do you all seem to know who down and upvoted (Lurpoa's name for example) ?

See gwnn's post above. If you click on the votes received for a post (the little green or red number) it tells you who voted which way. So in particular, it was easy to see the pattern with Lurpoa that every time I checked a post that had been downvoted once, it was Lurpoa who had done it.

[ArtK78]

 MrAce, on 2011-June-20, 19:55, said:

And i have a question, how do you all seem to know who down and upvoted (Lurpoa's name for example) ?

Click on the number. You will open a window which shows all of the upvotes and downvotes.

[MrAce]

 ArtK78, on 2011-June-20, 20:06, said:

Click on the number. You will open a window which shows all of the upvotes and downvotes.

Thanks.

[mtvesuvius]

 655321, on 2011-June-20, 17:43, said:

If Artk78 is just talking about voting to cancel out a malicious Lurpoa downvote I don't think anyone could object, it seems to me that is entirely reasonable in such extreme cases as the Lurpoa attacks.

On the other hand, if he is talking about following the jonottawa/hotshot strategy of voting to cancel out normal votes just because he personally wouldn't have made that vote, I agree with Roger that this just seems pretty egotistical, 'nobody is allowed to vote on a post unless I myself approve' ... whatever.

Anyway at the end of the day this upvoting and downvoting is not such a big deal, I do think however that if the plan for votes was to advertise posts with high votes in BBO that this will not work. It doesn't happen that posts with excellent bridge content get many upvotes, the funny posts or posts making a non-bridge point people agree with seem to get the most votes.

As usual, I agree with 655321, even on some non-bridge matters!

In any case, now that a few of the Lurpoa votes have been neutralized, I hit 100 rep!

[MrAce]

 BunnyGo, on 2011-June-20, 20:05, said:

See gwnn's post above. If you click on the votes received for a post (the little green or red number) it tells you who voted which way. So in particular, it was easy to see the pattern with Lurpoa that every time I checked a post that had been downvoted once, it was Lurpoa who had done it.

Ok ty, i saw the one about green arrow, but i must have missed this one.

[the hog]

Personally, I think this downvoting of all Lurpoa's posts is ridiculous. It seems to me to be getting "even" for her downvotes ; how childish this is.

[mgoetze]

It's funny how posting mainstream opinions in a thread about up-/downvoting is more likely to get you upvoted than posting mainstream opinions in a thread about bridge.

[1eyedjack]

 TWO4BRIDGE, on 2011-June-20, 15:32, said:

I see I had one post where I suggested a SPLINTER instead of jumping to game.
I thought it was brilliant, but ----- it cost me - 4 ... downvotes.
Either they hate me or they hate splinters .... or both .

In the past (before voting, at least before downvoting) the forum "experts" would come down hard on posts made in the beginner/intermediate forum which they deemed too complicated for the tiny intellects of the beginners to handle. It is possible that they now use downvotes as a substitute. I only speculate, but there is a third possible reason for that post being downvoted, being that it was deemed too elevated for a poor B/I to grasp.

Also there is a difference between "hating splinters" and "hating to splinter on that hand".

It is my observation that while the voting system might be (or have been, in utopia) effective in cutting out superfluous posts of "I agree", "LOL" etc, the facility does provide an incentive just to vote when a poster might have said something a bit more informative in a post. Sure, he can still do that, but will he?

[Antrax]

Lowering the number of up/down votes can be done per profile, so whoever feels strongly enough about wanting to go on a downvote spree can just register new accounts. Granted, that can be worked around as well, at the cost of further segregating new members from the existing member base.
I agree that there should probably be some official guideline as to when and how up/down votes should be cast, since in this thread several opinions have been cast, all valid. Combining them is unwieldy, as would be defining several types of votes.

[1eyedjack]

 the hog, on 2011-June-20, 22:42, said:

Personally, I think this downvoting of all Lurpoa's posts is ridiculous. It seems to me to be getting "even" for her downvotes ; how childish this is.

LOL @ the downvote included in this post

[cherdano]

 the hog, on 2011-June-20, 22:42, said:

Personally, I think this downvoting of all Lurpoa's posts is ridiculous. It seems to me to be getting "even" for her downvotes ; how childish this is.

Downvoting Lurpoa is not a good solution, but in any reasonably moderated forum Lurpoa would have lost the rights to upvote or downvote long ago.

[hotShot]

 rogerclee, on 2011-June-20, 13:17, said:

Why are you the downvoting police? Do you also think you should be able to upvote/downvote a post twice, just because your opinion is more important? Maybe we should give you the power to just cancel out any number of reputation on a post that you feel is not particularly noteworthy in one way or the other.

You should only upvote posts you want to upvote, and downvote posts you want to downvote. If all we do is upvote or downvote when we think a post is neutral but has strayed from neutral reputation, then the integrity of the reputation system gets compromised.

Obviously people have a lot of reasons to vote and even more important people have a different understanding what a post's reputation should be.

If many upvotes of a post mean that it's content is a valuable read for someone interested in bridge, while many downvotes suggest it's bad advice, what's wrong if I have an opinion about the votes in correlation with the post?
There are a lot of "above average" posts, that I usually won't upvote as outstanding, that in my view should not have a negative reputation.
There are also posts "below average", that I usually won't downvote as bad advice, that I don't want to be seen as recommendation just because they have a positive reputation.

Usually people post a problem on this forum, because they had a problem, what does downvoting an opening post mean?
- ignore this thread
- don't ask stupid questions
- RTFM
I don't think that this is a good way to welcome people to the forum and to keep them inside this community.
The number of posters that deliberately posted nonsense has always been very small and most of these kind of posts have moved to the water cooler.

[whereagles]

Well, this up/downvote thing is basically a political tool. It allows voters to express an opinion about a post. It may, and frequently does, have nothing to do with the technical merit of a bid/play.

Reputation serves to give a weight to someone's opinion, but reputation comes from practice, not from some random popularity index. Besides, some people like to push buttons. Others don't even know it's there (I for instance never used it). This makes it even more meaningless.

[whereagles]

DBL post

[Zelandakh]

There is a very simple way of preventing someone from downvoting too much. Simply make it so that a user can only downvote as many times as they have plus votes. Of course it would be possible for someone to create proxy accounts to give themselves upvotes to artificially increase their quota but this should be easy to spot for our Moderator team. This method would also have the added advantage of encouraging our semi-lurkers to contribute. FWiiW I have not downvoted anyone yet - if I disagree strongly enough I prefer to write a post. This way I have more chance of learning something too!

[Antrax]

You know what else is easy for the mod team to notice? Someone downvoting "too much" for illegitimate reasons.

[gwnn]

ArtK78 just wanted to break the record of most controversial post (most plus and minus votes combined). Looks like he has succeeded admirably.