Somebody was silly and approved this. Clearly that should not be done until the author provides the answer to their own question. It is unfortunate that the answer was not provided almost immediately. I've unapproved it. Please don't approve it again until after the answer appears. Thanks.

Dear tye...I was tempted to try and see, however, had it worked, I would have felt rather foolish if I had to say sorry for approving my own node. I decided to just ask instead of playing with it. However, with your prompting I did try, and it appears that there is no backdoor. All is well with the world. Moving on to the next thing (actually going back to a previous thing).

Have a cookie and a very nice day!
Lady Aleena

I suspect Lady_Aleena was looking at her meditation Writing regexes, think ahead just a bit. at the bottom of the Meditations page when the behaviour was noticed. The Meditations page does not show unapproved nodes from other sections so approving the OP does not make any difference to Lady_Aleena's ability to TITS. As the meditation has now been approved (by someone else) Lady_Aleena can't perform the test with collusion from one of the Janitors or Gods (who would need to unapprove the node for her).

True laziness is hard work

Oh, I didn't realize that the PMD section page didn't work pretty much the same as the Meds section page. Oh wait... it does. And given that the question was actually stated quite generically, I also find it unreasonable to not expect this realization of the question's author. But it seems I should provide a much more explicit explanation.

Yes, I had indeed already (silently) conceded that one might not come to the conclusion to "try it and see" quickly enough to actually accomplish the self-test for the first case noticed. I was disappointed that one would be so desperately curious about the answer as to start a new thread on the subject and then resolutely refuse to just get the answer since posting would immediately present the opportunity again. I was also disappointed that somebody else cut that second chance short (especially since the whole purpose of this new thread was to find an answer to the question so keeping the thread "in limbo" seems well worth the opportunity). Since it was indeed missed, I have already arranged for a third chance.

Then there is also the possibility of searching... which I leave as an exercise to others, as I'm told exercise is beneficial. I suspect an enlightening search can be found but won't even venture a guess as to how difficult that might be.

But in conclusion, I find your statement containing "Lady_Aleena can't perform the test" to be simply incorrect.

- tye        

I have actually approved my own node – but only by accident.   Personally, I think that everyone already generally understands that the idea is to let someone else give the nod to your work, and so it ought to be enough that such things are done voluntarily by those who have already been entrusted with such a privilege an honor.   (If you know what to do with other people’s postings, surely it goes without saying that you also know what to do with your own.)   I don’t particularly see any need to change the software to “enforce” such a policy, because, y’know, we are a community, of responsible grown-ups.   (Well, most of the time . . . ;-) . . .)

What I do not see is a “thumbs-down button.”   And the only reason why I bring this up is that sometimes an objectionable post crops up and how do you get rid of it?   How do you, so to speak, “vote it off the island” or otherwise “cause it to go bye-bye?”   There are also posts that need to be remanded to their authors for further editing, e.g. the addition of <readmore> tags.   However, in retrospect, even this might be wandering too far into the complexities of “a content-management system,” which this is not.   Is there a compelling benefit to be gained?   I’m not so sure.

There is something already in place for helping out nodes which need it. What is consideration?

Have a cookie and a very nice day!
Lady Aleena

I believe (but I'm not sure about all this) that if you have multiple accounts, you can approve your post from another account, and you can vote to a consideration twice.

Note the following. Voting has very few actual rules (so basically you're free to vote however you please), is anonymous, and your votes are practically never changed by the gods. For this reason, voting powers of multiple accounts need to be limited by the Site Rules Governing User Accounts. Moderation is quite different: it does have rules, users are asked to use their moderation powers wisely. To enforce this, if you moderate, your nick is visibly attached to the moderation (except for section moves), janitors may change your moderation (such as unapprove a node) if they feel it approperiate, and I presume gods would take away your power to moderate if you misused this power.

Having two accounts that have both accumulated enough XP to reach the level of "ability to approve / consider" is tantamount to violating site policy. People have actually lost access to site privileges that they took years to achieve in part due to actions just headed in the direction of ending up with such a scenario. More people have been forced off that path long before getting there.

Having multiple accounts is discouraged in general. Having multiple accounts without informing the gods is a violation of site policy and has lead to loss of site privileges. There are a lot of known cases of multiple accounts that are grudgingly tolerated (to varying degrees). There have been a few cases of multiple accounts that are completely acceptable (im2, for example), most of which have passed out of use already.

Many of the gods have one separate account that is in gods and that they only use when doing maintenance work that requires the higher privileges (for reasons similar to why most people don't spend all day logged in as 'root' but instead use only 'sudo' when the need arises).

For example, tye&nbsp; is my account. I only use it for maintenance / administrative work. It would have to double its accumulated XP and rise 3 levels in order to reach the point where approval / consideration is granted. It stopped accumulating non-trivial amounts of XP a very long time ago. The only reason it gained as much XP as it had is because it existed for a long time during which the best practices on multiple accounts were much less clear (at least to me). If I had been promoted to gods more recently, my maintenance account would probably never end up accumulating significant XP.

Now, since tye&nbsp; is a member of gods, it actually can approve nodes and consider nodes and vote on considerations. I almost never use it for any of those activities. Using it along with tye to cast multiple votes on the same consideration would most often simply be an abuse of my godsly authority, sometimes less so than others.

There have been a few times when I have actually voted twice on the same consideration as part of an unusual administrative task. Almost always that was done only because it was more convenient than achieving the same results through different means. For example, there have been particularly obnoxious node(s) needing to be reaped more quickly than usual where tye's vote turned out to be the 4th vote and it was trivial to have tye&nbsp cast a vote to trigger the reaping while it is more work to use gods-only tools to reap a node w/o invoking consideration voting.

So, it is indeed technically possible for one person to vote on a consideration twice or to approve their own node. But, in practice, that really only applies to gods (who can do such things without even bothering with a second account anyway) and to people posting a node anonymously and then approving it non-anonymously.

If a situation came up in which it became appropriate for one person to have two accounts, both with high XP, then (similar to voting on nodes) changes would likely soon be made to the site in order to actually disallow that (except for the case of gods where any code trying to disallow something would never be more than an inconvenience so we must rely on social tools to make the gods behave instead). Those limitations have not been implemented because there should be no way for them to matter.

I believe (but I'm not sure about all this) that if you have multiple accounts, you can approve your post from another account, and you can vote to a consideration twice.

So I find that paragraph at least close to misleading. I certainly find the observation of no practical value. :)

- tye        

Having two accounts that have both accumulated enough XP to reach the level of "ability to approve / consider" is tantamount to violating site policy.

Having multiple accounts is discouraged in general.

If this is so, could you perhaps edit Site Rules Governing User Accounts to make this clear? If I can have my say, I'd prefer if multiple accounts accumulating XP would be allowed, only perhaps you weren't allowed to use more than of them to moderate.