Re: Put your mouth where your money is?

[imp]

I generally downvote nodes for these reasons:

1. Excessive rudeness
2. Answer that isn't at all relevant
3. Bad advice
4. Unreadable one-liner given to obvious novice, without accompanying documentation and warnings

In each of those cases having one comment on the node that points out it's flaws is sufficient. We don't need 20 people saying "That was rude", or suitable responses to the above mentioned list.

That said, it would be nice to know why people vote a node down. In most cases I can see the problem but occassionally a node has downvotes for no reason that is obvious to me.

One way to address that issue would be to provide an optional one line text input on the voting line where you can record a concise comment. This line would not be visible to anyone but the node's author, and would be anonymous. This way constructive feedback could be given. It could also be treated as an anonymous message for the author, that way they wouldn't have to check each node to find out what the issue was.

On a somewhat related note I would love to see the vote distribution on my personal node list, so I can see at a glance how many down/up votes each of my nodes had. When I get an XP loss message it makes me curious which node got downvoted, so I review the most recent 10 or so.

[eric256]

Hey, The comment on votes has been talked about several times but your idea sounds quite good. In fact when you said "it could also be treated as an anonymous message" you came up with a way to implement it quickly and probably painlessly. Simply add an option in the user preferences to display a text input box to message authors. Then update the voting code to check for these message boxs and send the message on the users behave. I think that the messages shouldn't be anonymous but thats neither here nor there. It would provide a nice simple feedback mechanism using mostly existing parts and could address what I see as a legitimate issue. You'd get my ++ if i wasn't suddenly out of votes for the first time in what seems like a year!