Perhaps I'm just being an old codger, but I don't like this. First off, XP is designed to be a general idea of the community's overall reaction to your node, not a true reflection of its quality or your popularity. Like anything that's unscientifically sampled, there's little point to over-analyzing the results. Sure, you get numbers, but they're not really worth much.

Second, since this would require at least one additional query (if not two, for performance reasons) in order to present each node, I don't see why the minor benefit would outweigh the additional overhead. Sure, the performance might seem negligible for single nodes or smaller threads, but since we've had threads with dozens of messages before, it seems like it would really impact thread view and section views (like The Monastery Gates).

Finally, I can imagine a host of new "whinging" about "OK, which two of you voted me down today?" We've had such witch hunts before and I, for one, would rather not go through them again.

If you want to track the voting progress of your nodes, you can always use some of the classics.

--f