I++ tilly's nodes as I agree that things have to be enhanced and I recognize his efforts to solve problems.

However, I don't think his proposal is the solution.

To my mind we're trying to solve different problems :

• Personnality voting (systematic downvote (it's strange that FEW people consider sytematic upvotes ;-))
• VoteBots( automating voting proggies) which vote to achieve several goals (dump votes, personnality voting...)
• The low feedback we have with the actual voting system.
  You don't know why you get down/upvoted ? (Idea, Implementation, Usefulness of post...)
  

I think tilly's idea fail to adress them completly whilemaking the system sigificantly less pleasant to use :

• It won't prevent personnality voting, beccause the downvoter could altern answers like "sorry! I miss select the button" "I don't agree(general fake answer)" "I subcribe to X's point of view, and you miss something when you say...(detailed fake answer)" or just silence (from times to times just to avoid loosing voting rights)
  By the way what would you do If someone answer "I don't like you!" will you tell to wroom ? will you retaliate ? who will decide to remove his voting right ?
  
• It won't prevent VoteBots, as they could be enhanced to produce general answers to challenges...
  
• It doesn't give us enough info, as we'll get feedback only on few nodes and as it was said before, we have no guarantee that the feedback will be usefull ("it's my choice", "beccause you deserve it" kind of answers won't help...)
  

As it seems obvious to me that we CAN'T solve perfectly all those problems with one solution.
But we may try to correct some of them with specific answer.

I won't address the personality voting system,
I have some ideas to correct it, but I don't think it worths all the mess.
Ichimunki is right, we pay WAY too much attention to downvotes, even the probably first personnality voters target can't say that downvotes are significant enough to stop his XP gain.
It's a marginal problem, the few downvoters are simply drowned in the mass of all the people using the voting system properly.

You may wonder why I would adress the VoteBots problem then ?
First probably beccause I'd like to solve it in the technical ground and so it becomes an interesting challenge to me...
Let me explain : I've been thinking about ways to discriminate automated agent (mostly LWP script) from usual browsers. My goal was mainly to protect against email grabbers but also to come up with an antibot system.
I think that such protection could protect voting systems (and our in particular) from VoteBot, I already have some ideas and even results...<vr>

Now to enhance the feedback signal the old idea of different voting buttons comes into mind ("++good Idea", "++informative", "++smart", "--inneficient" "--wrong"..) with maybe a text field to submit additional comment.
(As suggested by Petdance and other monks in the CB (epoptai ? Chipmunk ?))
I'm well aware that it doesn't ENFORCE anything, someone could just downvote me and check "--wrong", but It may offer a simple way to know why I was up/down voted.
I still recall how frustated it was to get a lot votes on a node and almost no comment ! (was the idea good ? was it clear ? was it usefull ? what part should/could be enhanced? ...)


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