While I quite like the idea of getting /msgs to explain votes, what is to stop people from simply responding "because you suck" or something similar, thereby avoiding both the vote removal and loss of privileges? If some higher authority will have to arbitrate the process to stop such abuse, then it will be unweildy and doomed to fail.

I'd be quite delighted to see a working system, but I'm sorry to say that this probably isn't it.

I've been thinking about the voting system lately, as I suspect have many other monks, and I'm somewhat surprised that even with the quite formidable collection of brains present, no significant progress has really been made towards solving the problems of the voting system. I'm not certain what this observation reveals (though I have some theories) but there it is. Though it has been suggested before, it bears repeating: we should all try to worry a lot less about how voting works and get on with simply reading and writing nodes to the best of our abilities. We're all at least pretending to be mature here (I almost said "we're all adults", but I'm glad to say that isn't true at all, especially since there is little correlation between age and maturity) and if we could put co-operation and our obvious joy of learning ahead of petty squabbles, I suspect that there would be no voting problem at all.

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I'd like to be able to assign to an luser