Hello fellow monks.

I've been doing some thinking about the moderation system lately. I'm not intending to turn this into a full-fledged discussion over the merits and problems of the XP and voting system. God help me if it does turn into that.

What's been troubling me lately is how I apply my votes. At this point I have 25 votes per day. That's a lot! I rarely read the site long enough to spend all my votes everyday. I'm too busy trying to get some piece of code to work.

I usually find that I apply different rules to upvoting and downvoting nodes depending on where they are. Well-written or thoughtful top-level nodes always get a ++ from me; good or clever code responses also get a ++ from me.

But why do I downvote something? I have a short list for myself: It attacks someone or something; it's a completely incorrect answer; the post is spelled very badly; the post is one giant long line with no breaks, or similar gramatic snafus; it's a rip-off.

Some of those make me pause. The voting guidelines are a great start, but they don't address things like horrible spelling and grammar. Should I downvote those people for not taking the time to clean up their questions; or should I have more sympathy for our non-english speaking friends? What about nodes that appear to be honest questions, but the poster just wasn't very smart in how he posted them, ala this node? Then there are the questions which aren't really perl questions,

Hi I'm trying to make this cgi script work on my apache server, but I just keep getting a blank page in the browser, can someone please help me with this, k thx bye

and it turns out after much discussion to be a problem with how Apache is configured, not the script. Downvote? Ignore? Upvote the people who answered and downvote the top node? It's a weird, vague line, and I'd like to know how other monks handle the power of the downvote.

Cheers,
ibanix

$ echo '$0 & $0 &' > foo; chmod a+x foo; foo;

In reply to Why do I downvote something? by ibanix

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