Hello marinersk,

I remember reading some time back that bots are not sanctioned here.

The FAQ How should I spend my votes? -- General Voting Guidelines says:

One issue concerning voting is not a matter of opinion but of site policy: votebots are not allowed.

And in the root node of the referenced thread, vroom says:

If you have a votebot that's smart enough to evaluate the quality of a post on criteria other than the node's author I'd be very interested in seeing it.

— which nicely sums up why votebots are disallowed: Voting on a node should be based on its content, not on its author.¹

...not all who are logged in show in the "Other Users" nodelet; I suspect it has something to do with cookie expiration as seen by the browser vs. the site...

It’s also possible to log in “Cloaked,” as explained in Logging on to PerlMonks. Apparently, if you are “cloaked” when the Vote Fairy does his rounds then you won’t receive your daily allocation of votes. But whether it’s possible to cast votes while logged in “cloaked” I’m not sure.

¹Ok, I also up-vote nodes in Worst Nodes when I feel the downvotes were undeserved, too harsh, or likely to discourage newbies. And I’ve noticed that other monks do the same. Ironically, this often has the result that the node’s author gains more XP than he or she would have gained if the node hadn’t been downvoted in the first place (because the first downvote is guaranteed to produce no loss of XP, and the first upvote is guaranteed to give the author +1 XP — see Voting/Experience System.) Go figure.

Hope that helps,