1) Why would you stop? If you rarely downvote otherwise, then you can downvote several spam in a row and have no risk of losing any XP. Then you can downvote another set of spam in a row and likely lose less than 1 XP for each 3 you downvote. So do you have a pathological devotion to never losing a single XP that you'd rather see spam stay longer just to avoid losing 1 or 2 XP?

The rules get adjusted because there are actions that the rules reward that are not beneficial. These are pretty simple rules so they will never be perfect. So, of course, there are beneficial actions that are not rewarded by the new rules. You are (still) expected to use your judgement. This is part of why the motivations and discouragements are fairly minor.

2) Up-voting a few nodes by the same author is not punished. At some future point, up-voting more than a few nodes by the same author might reduce the number of votes you get just the next day, not much to worry about. Use your judgement.

.... Then you can downvote another set of spam in a row and likely lose less than 1 XP for each 3 you downvote.

I quite agree with your changes (++ by the way)) and view downvoting spam, rather than considering it, to be misguided. It may even be sufficiently misguided that it should cost the voter XP.

Nonetheless, the risk of losing XP for what the writer says he views as a community service (even if that notion is, in fact, misguided) may be a disincentive not only to that specific community service, but to any other which might be better-founded, unless we plainly state that "downvoting spam is deprecated. Consider it, instead."

Update (ca 21:35 GMT): Gentle reader: my observations were colored by a misconception, corrected in tye's Re^6: History now influences voting (reaps), below. It may be below the level of replies you usually read, but if anything I remarked above resonates, please see tye's clarification.

Well, for a spam to be reaped, it needs to have a reputation < 0, so somebody needs to downvote it. I usually downvote a node before voting "reap". -5 for an accidental duplicate costs just enough XP (likely 1 or 2) to make one slightly more careful next time. :)

- tye        

I quite agree with your changes (++ by the way)) and view downvoting spam, rather than considering it, to be misguided.

Surely it doesn't take being level 9 and above to consider spam - and below that, all a well-intentioned PMer can do is downvote.

Edit: Thanks to planetscape for the pointer at typoing "downvote"! Oops.

---

dwu

1) Why would you stop? If you rarely downvote otherwise, then you can downvote several spam in a row and have no risk of losing any XP.

That's fine. It wasn't clear to me late at night that the average was taken over a long enough period that a few days of downvoting spam wouldn't mean I was doing - or seen to be doing - the wrong thing.

So do you have a pathological devotion to never losing a single XP that you'd rather see spam stay longer just to avoid losing 1 or 2 XP?

No, but I DO have a pathological devotion to doing the right thing! :-) If I AM doing the right thing by downvoting spam, I'll keep doing it. But given that you want to discourage problematic voting, I wanted to clarify whether my voting was problematic, given that I'm not at a level where I can 'consider' nodes.

2) Up-voting a few nodes by the same author is not punished.

Got it. Again, I'm concerned about avoiding being a problem rather than anything else.

Regards,

John Davies