Seeing who gives you a positive on a post

[Apterigo]

I thought it would be really neat to see who voted my posts positive. I'm not necessarily concerned with seeing who voted negative, but the positive people I would definetly like to say thank you to. I was thinking, instead of always showing the name of the person who voted your post positive, an option could be added that would allow the voter to choose if they want their vote to be viewed by the owner of the post they voted for.

Apterigo

[neshura]

Just post a message that says "thank you" or something. Voting ought to be anonymous, for lots of reasons, most of which have been hashed out in the real world.

(I mean, if it weren't anonymous, nobody would EVER give merlyn or vroom a -- for fear of retribution)

:-)

No seriously, if you want somebody to know that you thought they had a really great post and you voted it up because it was so well-reasoned or whatever, it's trivially easy to just /msg them. I've done it before, it works well.

e-mail neshura

[cciulla]

Actually, I've been mulling over something like this...

Keeping with the monasterial theme, shouldn't all votes be public? This would (possibly) foster more discussion...

Just my $0.02.

[chromatic]

I'd rather the discussion focus on Perl instead of who voted for what. Seems to me that the more meta-discussion something generates (this site or this one or especially this one can be examples), the less interesting it is. Having lots of XP is nice, but it's more interesting to find good and unique solutions to uncommon problems. I think that's why vroom started the site.

Of course, that's just my opinion. :) You'll have to ask the head guy himself.

[Ozymandias]

In keeping with the Monasterial theme of the place, there should be fewer distractions from our worship of the goddess Code and her chief priestess, Perl.

If votes become public - aside from the two extremes, Best Nodes and Worst Nodes, then voting becomes a personality contest. Who would want to see this in the chatterbox: "<jcwren> /msh neshura But I thought you liked me, neshura, why did you vote -- on my post?"

(Last time, jcwren, promise. <G>)

- Ozymandias

[muppetBoy]

I think voting should definitely be kept anonymous for all of the reasons it is in the real world. The monastery is a peaceful place and I would hate to see that spoiled by a 'Monk War' sparked off by seeing someone persistantly voting you down.
The knowledge of who votes you up or down can/will affect your opinion of that person and how you react to them in the future. We could see a group of monks just voting for each others posts - which mould make a mockery of the XP system. I'm not saying everyone would behave like that but a minority probably would.
A better solution would be, as has been suggested, to send a msg to the author or post a reply if you think what you've got to say would be of interest to other monks. IMHO, a reply should only be sent if it contains useful information, not just a "You're great" or "You suck" message as this will just decrease the S/N ratio.

[tenatious]

epinions.com has something like this for their reviews system. Each member of epinions only gets one vote. The voter gets to choose (in their user preferences) whether his/her votes are anonymous or not (at least that's how it used to be).