Recent history shows that although the voting system encourages participation and increases the signal to noise ratio, it can lead to some unfortunate situations. There are at least three ways the voting system can be abused:

• Personality voting -- voting not on the nodes content but on the likability of the author
  
• Show-me-your-rep voting -- voting on a node to see what its rep is... even if the content doesn't particularly deserve a '++' or '--'
  
• Votebots -- scripts that automatically cast votes using one of the above criteria, which oddly enough give XP to the votebot.

I think there are some relatively simple tweaks to the XP system that could alievate these problems.

• Real Null Vote Option -- the ability to cast a '0' vote. This would give people the option of seeing a nodes rep w/o affecting its score. I know this has been discussed before, but it has yet to be implemented. (no, the Null Vote option on the user options page isn't the same thing)

• Potential loss of XP on downvotes -- Casting a '--' vote could cause a loss in the voters XP. Chances of this happening would go up with the current rep of the node. Downvoting a node whos current rep was 100 would almost always cost the voter an XP, whereas downvoting a -4 node would not. This could also be based on the upvote/downvote percentage below.

• Publicly available upvote/downvote percentage -- Making the upvote/downvote percentage a publicly available number for each monk. (i.e. 96% of the votes blakem casts are upvotes) This would discourage people from abusing their downvote privileges

I believe that these three modifications could help avoid the situations highlighted in the past few weeks. The null vote would reduce the show-me-your-rep voting, and the other two suggestions would remove the incentives for personality voting votebots.

We've already lost several high-level monks over this, and their contributions will be missed. I'd like to try to avoid this in the future if possible.

-Blake

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