I assume someone got personality voted again?

Your idea is interesting and might work, but I'm not sure yet. Let's look at a few different things:

• How will this affect XP's granted by voting?

  I've heard there's a votelog somewhere. Is there also a log of XP's granted by voting? Would the voter lose any XP's granted for unconfirmed or inappropriate votes? Would the votee regain XP's lost by unconfirmed downvotes or lose XP's for unconfirmed upvotes?

  If not, then you really haven't done much to mute the personality voters. You've simply limited their annoyance factor by increasing the burden of work of everyone who votes.

  However, if these XP's are balanced out/in, I wonder if that doesn't make the XP system really unpredictable. You might be a Saint one day and an initiate the next. Okay, that's a bit extreme, but I think you get the idea.

• It seems like this would create a huge burden of work for someone, whether vroom or whoever. Aren't there better ways to invest our development resources? There have been a lot of good suggestions made over the past several months. Thankfully, some have been implemented. Unfortunately, others haven't. I'm not sure what the ToDo list looks like, but I imagine it's pretty huge.

• Like power deregulation in California, it might back-fire severely. Ovid mentioned that he's not sure he really wants to be able to challenge votes because he's not sure he really wants to know. Another editor recently expressed similar misgivings privately to the team.

  We may find that we really don't want to learn who voted us down and why. Granted, there are times when it can help, such as when you and I discussed a node of mine that you downvoted, but I wonder if there would be other times where it might increase friction between certain monks. (And, as you know, friction generates heat.)

• I don't think it'll really stop the votebot/personality voter problem. After all, it seems like it would be pretty easy to register a new handle and work it to earn votes. You might chase those folks away for a time, but they'll only resurface under a different handle or find another way to abuse the system.

  In other words, I don't think it'll catch the rat(s) I think you're trying to chase down, the one's defacing doors (as merlyn once put it).

I agree that there is a problem with one or more people, but I'm not convinced that this is the best way to solve it. Perhaps a better idea would be to simply limit the number of downvotes available in a given time frame to 1/10th (or 1/20th) the total number of votes granted during that time period. I'm not completely satisfied by that, but it does prevent those that voted from having to explain their votes. Also, it seems like it:

1. Is a simpler implementation
2. Limits the effects a troll can have
3. Still allows you to properly downvote nodes that truly deserve it
4. Doesn't add any burden to the people who are participating nicely.
5. Preserves voter anonymity.

Again, I'm not convinced that's a better solution. However, if we must have a compromise, perhaps this one will be more palatable.

--f