: Given that the OP was hardly controversial, in no way rude or offensive, and phrased as a very open question,

I agree with this. But not the rest of the line. When I read the original post, I read it as "I'm worried I'm getting more downvotes, and want to know if this is true, without getting more downvotes." In short, I see it as a request for information. But clearly, there are two ways of reading it.

Therefore possible solutions would be: 1) just give everyone more detailed information (possibly in such a way that you wouldn't have to see it if you didn't want to) such as "You have gained 2 experience points. You have 200000000 points to go to reach level vroom. (+3,-1)" or having nodes show the + and - votes as well as the total. The arguments against this have generally been that this information will cause obsession about points, but tye's willingness to answer the question suggests that perhaps the attitude has changed.

2) /msg gods Could you please tell me if I've been losing more xp lately?

With either of these solutions, the original poster gets what she or he wants (an answer without exposing her/himself to the world at large), and tye isn't guessing about whether it was an answer or a conversation that the person wanted, so everyone else is happy too.

Update Summary of my post could be that I agree with point 1 below and am not at all concerned about point 3.

In reply to Re5: Increased number of downvotes at the Monastery? (no) by kudra
in thread Increased number of downvotes at the Monastery? by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.