No, that vote wasn't lost. It was at -1 as you thought. As to why it was at -1, <shrug> I dunno. Luckily I don't take XP seriously. ;-)

Note: the "no significant downvotes" will show up any time that the reputation is 0 or higher and the downvotes are less than 6 (well, this is actually tied to $NORM, but right now that's close enough).

Thanks for the confirmation Tanktalus. Being relatively new to PM, with few votes, I do try to think about where to use them. As to the importance of XP, it seems a nice, low overhead way of encouraging courtesy and constructive comments, both of which are exceptionally high at PM. Some of that's the Perl community norms in general, but the XP system has a role in it as well. Beyond that, I agree it's good not to take it too seriously, as there will be considerable noise in any such system of human opinion.

My post was just looking for confirmation that the technical aspects were working, and you gave me that clearly and concisely, thanks again, and thanks to others as well for their comments.

There's no accounting for the way some people vote.
The same thing has happened to me on more than one occasion.

Heh, when I logged in just now I got a "you lost 1 vote" message - not over unusual, but amusing in the context of this thread. After reading the thread I had a look at my recent nodes and noticed that at least the most recent 5 nodes have received at least 1 down vote each since last I logged on so I'd guess either someone has it in for me (paranoid reaction) or someone playing the XP game has realised that downvoting the other players is a good way to get a better relative increase in their own score.

What they probably haven't figured out is that writing good nodes has much more impact on XP and your ranking in the XP game than spending all your votes every day. In the end, while the XP game is fun and I am sure is a large part of why this site is so successfull, quality replies and the helpfull colegial spirit here rise above silly manipulations of the voting system by a few malcontents. Even the very best posts attract down votes.

Heh. I'll go one better: with a few notable exceptions, writing ANY kind of node has more positive impact on your XP and ranking in the XP 'game' than spending votes. As a 'player' who has enjoyed the game, I've been occasionally astounded by the (often excessively-so) positive reputation of answers that are irrelevant and even wrong, not to mention the crossposting spammers who cut and paste intelligent-sounding posts (bug reports, poetry, etc.) from other sites and authors, presumably hoping to attract some positive reputation and thus XP. Sometimes I think monks just ++ a node that looks interesting, without stopping to really evaluate it. The vote fairy is too generous ... I know I rarely spend all 20 of my votes.

But, hey, node reputation is just an imaginary number given by strangers, so I will do well not to brood about it. :)


No good deed goes unpunished. -- (attributed to) Oscar Wilde

I've been occasionally astounded by the (often excessively-so) positive reputation of answers that are irrelevant and even wrong

And by the surprinsingly low reputation of very high quality of nodes like this by BrowserUk, only because it's deeply buried in a Re^5.

--
David Serrano

Downvotes happen. I forget who it was in the CB that said, "It's my considered opinion that some people here are wankers."

Aside from the occasional hung-over or cranky monk, there are other reasons why a node might be downvoted. I find that when I click on a vote, the radio buttons remain active and will respond to my navigation keys. If I use Page Down or an arrow key, the vote may change. It could be something as simple as this - that someone clicked on an upvote, then used a key that changed the vote (and didn't notice the change).

Remember that reputation votes are simply a measure of how popular a node is. Ideally this would be based on the node's accuracy, whether it contains interesting content, is on-topic, well-written, and so on. Overall, it will have some connection to these qualities. But everyone has a different take on things, and what one person finds useful, another might find annoying or trivial. The system isn't perfect; it's just the best we've been able to come up with here.