It appears that the most common route taken is to pick an author and just systematically vote for (or against) every one of their nodes. So I think it appropriate and useful to reduce the number of votes one can cast if one is only casting them toward a single author. The tough part for me is how to (mildly) discourage casting most of your votes for a single author while not unduely causing frustration when one reasonably runs into several nodes by one author that all deserve an up-vote.

I see a certain 'danger' (probably a word with too many negative connotations for the exitable, but...) in such an implementation, and perhaps you have already considered them...

One of my "voting behaviours" is to sometimes seek out (via Super Search some area of interest, say, charting and graphing, and work my way back through those threads with promising authors/titles. As I do so, I very often find old nodes/entire threads still worthy of an upvote. And so I find myself sometimes casting many votes on a given topic.

Now, the 'danger' I perceive here is that, possibly, because of my choice of topic, it may appear (to an algorithm, anyway) that I am casting a disproportionate number of votes for a given author... Say, our very wise zentara may receive a "showering" of upvotes simply because he seems to hold the corner on the market for Tk and Gtk2 knowledge.

So, my question is, might node age and also node topic (perhaps using keywording) influence the determination of whether or not a disproportionate number of votes is going to one author?