The topic itself has been  and it seems that  has been broached .  I'm not sure what is the current prevailing opinion, though.  Let's rehash a possible scenario.  I downvoted an answer that seems to be wrong and posted my own one.  Later, after my downvote was already locked, I realized that I read that question wrong and it didn't deserve a downvote.  At such time I can either leave unjust downvote there or do an unneeded edit just to allow myself to undo my downvote.  My initial actions could be construed as  and, from what I understand, the lock is specifically preventing such behavior by not allowing downvoters to reclaim their lost reputation points.  The bottom line here is that a person (for whatever reason) regrets his/her downvote and wants to do something about it.  So, what about a suggestion to allow late downvote removals without crediting back the rep.  This logic is similar to bounty handling.     Is it worth a consideration or are we better off with a trivial edit just to circumvent the lock?
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Background and History Presently, trying to change your vote on a question or answer more than a few minutes after casting it results in this message appearing:  You last voted on this answer xx minutes ago. Your vote is now locked in unless this answer is edited. (click on this box to dismiss)  This has been a source of some contention and many posts on meta. You can see these by looking at the . The justification that I have seen posted for the current behaviour is as follows:   by initially downvoting rival answers to a question you have answered and then removing the downvote once your answer is accepted.   However, a problem remains:  The workaround is ugly and undesirable. If you don't yet have enough rep to edit someone's post yourself, then you need to leave a comment asking them to edit it for you, which is useless clutter to any future reader. On the other hand, if you edit the post yourself, then you'll show up as the last editor in the post's edit history, giving the potentially false impression that the post has changed in some significant way since it was originally posted, especially if the edit comes long after the date of the original post. There is an entirely legitimate use case for undoing your past votes: correcting mistakes, which even the most careful voter may sometimes make.  Example: earlier today I was frustrated after I stupidly downvoted  to a question, believing it to be wrong due to a basic mistake in my own understanding of some SQL syntax. I commented explaining my mistaken reasoning, and my error was quickly pointed out by other commenters. I was simply and objectively wrong, and my downvote was, consequently, without merit. However, by then my vote was locked. It took several further comments (which remain on the page) and several further minutes to inform my innocent victim that he needed to make a token edit to his post in order to let me retract my erroneous downvote. Surely this is not the system working as it should? With this in mind, I wondered if there exists a way to change the vote locking behaviour that:  Is simple, Allows users to undo votes they regret, and Does not in any way make gaming the system easier.  Such a solution would allow those who want to be able to undo votes to get what they want without any downside. I believe such a solution exists. Proposed Solution Allow undoing of votes, but:  Have it cost 1 rep, Don't simply remove all record of the original vote having been cast; instead, have the owner of the affected post see two rep changes in their profile: one for the original vote, and one for the retraction. In other words, record both the original vote and the retraction as separate rep-affecting events. When a downvote is rescinded, don't refund the user a downvote.  Why this would work:  Since removing downvotes would offer a further penalty instead of a refund, it would be impossible to recoup the costs of voting down competitors' answers in bad faith. Any tactical voting (by downvoting rival answers and then retracting the downvote) would leave the same 'paper trail' as it does now, since the record of the original downvote is being kept. Users who are victim of such downvoting would still be able to notice it, and the  would still have access to the data it needs to function. An honourable user who chooses - mistakenly but with good intentions - to pay a point of rep to downvote an answer, would be able to pay the same price to retract that vote. If they were willing to pay the point to downvote, they will presumably also be willing to pay the price of undoing their mistake. Hasty or frivolous votes would be penalised when the user chooses to undo them, so fact-checking and thinking carefully before casting your vote would still be encouraged.
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I downvoted  and now really can't say why, so I wanted to remove my downvote. However, I get the message:  You last voted on this question yesterday Your vote is now locked in unless this question is edited  Why is this? I don't think I voted on it multiple times, and even when I did, I can change my mind, can't I?
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When I talk about Meta here, I mean any meta but this one. I understand the . However, I don't think this reason applies to meta sites and have some reasons why I think votes on meta sites shouldn't get locked: Opinions change: I thought a feature-request was just stupid and I downvoted it. Later on, after reading the answers, I saw the ideas behind it (which weren't included in the question), and wanted to upvote it - but I couldn't. Of course, the question was written badly, but ... Votes on meta work in a different way, as they indicate (dis)agreement instead of usefulness. So in my example, the question wasn't really useful as-is, but I did agree, after hearing the ideas behind it. You don't get reputation on Meta, so there is no reason to 1. So, What would you say of disabling the lock-vote feature on meta sites? And no, There is no problem with users who go bumping posts by up- and downvoting all the time (as suggested in the comments) since votes  - thanks Hugo and cpast.  Some very clear examples of when you want this  Moderator pro tempore elections - what if a nominated user does something stupid and you want to remove your upvote? Nope, too late.  Feature-requests can get more useful after a new feature implemented (e.g. when there's a request for changing the footer that you downvoted, and then the team changes the footer in such a way that you want to upvote it instead)     1: as Shog9♦ , there still is a reason to tactically downvote: when you've answered a question yourself as well, then downvote the other answers to get your answer shown higher. I don't think this is a real problem with this feature-request, but a problem we have now too and will probably always have.
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In seeing some of the potential solutions and problems related to this  I noticed something. Why are closed questions allowed to obtain more reputation for a user?   So my recommendation(even though it's a pain to implement probably) is this(note, this includes all close votes except for migrations)   When a question gets closed, only the question gets retroactively marked as community wiki. By retroactive, I mean all upvotes on the question before closing are undone.  Also note, downvotes are kept. This means a closed question with downvotes will always have a net negative reputation.  When a question is reopened, it gets retroactively assigned to the user instead of the community user. This just undoes point #1.   Details:  Point one solves these problems:   User asks a popular, but "bikeshed" subjective question. Even if the question is closed an hour later, they may accumulate 15 upvotes. With this system, those 15 upvotes won't matter. Downvotes are kept to the user while being closed. This deals with low-quality questions that people should get a negative reputation affect for. However, after being closed downvotes should be assigned to the community user to prevent the downward spiral affect, especially since pitty upvotes won't be able to save them. People can still upvote as a method of suggesting that a question should be reopened. The upvote just won't count for the author of the question until reopened.   I see no actual point in closed questions being capable of acquiring reputation, except for maybe duplicates(but only barely).  So, here is my feature-request. :)  Also, to solve the  you could apply the same thing toward the answers of closed questions. This isn't a big problem with any close reasons other than Not A Real Question, where many low quality answers fall but with users who try to answer them anyway with the small amount of information given. I think those users should not be discredited for their attempts.
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Currently we capture fanatic, voting ring or rage-type activities, by measuring the number of up-votes or down-votes between the same two users in a certain (relatively short) time period. When this is detected by the system, the votes are reversed, and I've never bothered to investigate what else happens after that - though I'm sure some form of wrist-slapping ensues.  While it is intended to be well-guarded for obvious reasons, the algorithm used is not exactly a secret, and I am sure there are plenty of examples where people are dangling (maybe intentionally, or maybe by dumb luck) just on the safe side of getting caught.  Personally I believe there are active, intentional, long-term vendettas in operation right now where users either:   blindly up-vote every answer from a user; or, down-vote a particular user once or twice a day, regardless of topic or quality.   Now, maybe the first one is valid - if I'm operating in the same tag-sphere as some smart person, it may just be that I'm constantly enthralled with their answers, and I'm not even noticing who they're written by. (Though, even Skeet isn't perfect, and I haven't up-voted every answer I've seen him post.)  But still, can we do a better job of catching - or at least noticing - this activity over the long term in addition to the short term?  The behavior is the same, and shouldn't be tolerated, regardless of the time frame - vengeful rage serial voting, blind staker crush serial voting, and painstakingly patient serial voting are all undesirable behaviors IMHO.  I'm not saying it has to do anything automatically, as I'm well aware of the possibility of false positives. And I'm not even sure what to propose as a time frame or a vote threshold.      But if a large percentage of my up-votes or down-votes are against a particular user, and especially if on a majority of those posts I am the only one voting in that direction, I think it should at least be raised as some kind of flag to moderators.   This would work much like how other suspicious activity is highlighted (but also not dealt with automatically). If a pattern becomes obvious and persists, then they can intervene in some way (or not, but at least they were provided with the information - just like they can reject and ignore manual flags). Today, all I can do is e-mail team@stackoverflow.com, and unless I know exactly which person(s) are involved, there is not much they can do about it.  And you're thinking, "Meh, let some hater down-vote you once or twice a day. Unless all you're posting is utter crap, it should be statistically insignificant." You're right. But reputation is not the point, and is not the motivation behind my request. What I'd like to see curtailed is the tendency for folks to down-vote a question or answer because of who posted it, not because of what it said or didn't say. When a down-vote is personal it can leave a person second-guessing the quality of their post. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, except when it happens repeatedly.  Sorry for the essay but I wanted to try to anticipate and cover all the objections and hole-poking.
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My rep went over 2,000 today which meant I could edit other people's posts. Great! Then I added a bounty to a previous question, which brought me back down to 1,984...and I can no longer edit other posts. Should this changed? Or is this ideal?
12891
We should recover close votes cast on questions which are deleted by the owner before actually being closed.   For example, a user posts a question, and I think to myself that it looks familiar. A search turns up one (or several) pretty clear duplicates, so I vote to close and provide the link to the older question(s). A short time later, the OP comes by and realizes that their question is, indeed, a duplicate and decides to delete it.  What I don't like about this is that I've essentially "wasted" a close vote. Now I'll admit, I've never actually used all my allotted close votes in a day yet, but it's a little disappointing to know that I've effectively squandered a vote pointlessly when it could have been used for something more productive instead (i.e. a question that really ought to be closed for whatever reason).  I suppose there's also some hypothetical room for abuse of this current mechanic (trying to force people to waste votes), but with moderators on the boards I think that's a non-issue.
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If you are the OP, could you not request for a downvote to be reviewed by some moderators so that you are not the one who gets wrongfully blocked from asking questions, but him/her for downvoting unreasonably?  That you could appeal against anything you feel is unjust to you - like in real life - would be great. If you do it right, you won't have to fear getting blocked from asking questions any more. Creating new accounts just to be able to keep asking questions is getting tiresome.
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I think you should be notified if anything of yours is deleted or even flagged, preferably with some explanation (even if it's a simple categorisation like #rude, #irrelevant, #incorrect) and who did it.  Recently, a couple of comments of mine vanished without warning or evidence afterwards. I'm fine with deletion, but I think it should be used sparingly and be based on democratic decisions. What's the harm of letting a comment simply sit with no up-votes or responses rather than outright removal? Or allow downvoting and then negatively voted comments are hidden by default?  I get the impression that anything I post could be deleted. Very few people want to be unpopular or do the wrong thing. It takes time to understand what something is about and how best to use it (this site). Whether or not what I posted deserved to be deleted is irrelevant because I got no feedback. No-one can learn without feedback. The number of frivolous comments with many upvotes I've seen shows how inconsistently the rules are applied. A community that gives too much power to highly rated users won't grow but turn stagnant.  Sorry if this was rude, inappropriate or pathetic. I'm aware that similar discussions have occurred. In any case, I'll continue to use the site and move on...
6150
I'm happy to see the "first posts" facet arriving on the Beta Review system.  I like that it encourages reviewers to make a decisive move on a question or answer, but frankly, I think there should be a No vote, but okay option in addition to the I'm done and Not sure ones.  I think that there are some posts that are perfectly acceptable, but that show no demonstrable lack of effort or lack of clarity that might warrant a downvote.  I am a firm advocate for voting good quality posts up, I just think that forcing an option of voting or making the reviewer throw their work back into the pool untouched (assuming no edits or flags, etc. are needed) may be detrimental in the long term.
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When new users edit a post, the review is posted to a review queue and other reputable users can review the edit and choose to approve or reject it. However, I feel that a lot of people do it pretty quickly.    to . He was fixing broken links in the answer, and as soon as I saw it I knew it would have been a good edit. However, only one reviewer found so, and three others rejected it. I ended up manually doing the edit, and poor Onato didn't get any credit for it (in fact, he got an undeserved 'rejected' for it).  The point I want to bring is that, first and foremost, the person who wrote the answer probably knows best if an edit is acceptable or not. Could there be a time frame where the author of the answer (or question) can overturn a review decision?    EDIT: one more  was rejected by overeager reviewers as well. I absolutely disagree with the notion that the community knows better. The community repeatedly proves that it only wants Internet points.    EDIT: I told a commenter to fix something himself in one of my posts, but . I went back and applied the changes myself. It's not credited to him and his stats got a rejected edit now (which really should be an approved edit). The reason ("This edit is incorrect or an attempt to reply to or comment on the existing post") is blatantly wrong and shows once more that the community has much less insight into edit quality than the people who wrote the answers in the first place. It's true that the UI didn't make it easy for them, but those guys clearly didn't read the comment thread; I did, because as the author, I was notified.    EDIT: This time around, a user fixed a blatant (though small) mistake in one of my accepted answers. One hour later, another, unrelated 10k user , even though it had been approved by the community. I went back to undo his undo.  This goes on again to show that an active user is the best judge for the quality of an edit, and that since I can have the last word on edits on my own posts, I should be allowed to retroactively overturn a community edit vote and accordingly credit the person who proposed the change.    EDIT I wrote a  years ago. Some guy found it and tried to fix it but the community thought that it wasn't worth it. I think that the changes are great and once more I'll integrate them by myself into my post. Unfortunately for this user, he won't be credited for it. I still don't understand why I can't have a binding vote on edits on my posts.
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This question on Server Fault was just bumped to the front page like any other question that has no upvoted answers and is a bit old. The thing is, it's been locked. Shouldn't these be treated as "closed" questions and not be poked to the front page? The  says that locked and closed questions aren't bumped.  As of today, the question has been bumped every month, and received its last bump 2 days ago.  The whole point of bumping these posts is to get new contributions, but a locked post can't have any content added or revised.      Edited: as of today, 2017-03-30, the same question is yet again bumped:
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I spent some time trying to help the OP on  this morning.  He evidently didn't like my answer,  and gave me a downvote.  How do I know?  Well, when I deleted my answer, his rep immediately went back up by 1.    Now, I don't much care about the particulars of this question/answer (or my rep), but it seems to me that this is a potentially significant hole in maintaining the anonymity of voting.  Obviously, this hole has only been possible recently -- ever since rep changes have become reflected instantly.  Also,  is very similar, but doesn't take into account the ramifications of the insta-changes to rep that led to this scenario.  Should this be considered a bug?
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Note: If you're looking for a simple explanation as to why comments aren't required on downvotes, see .   I used to get "upset" (though that is too strong a term) when I got downvoted without comment. If my answer isn't good enough then I'd like to know why. Not only does it improve the answer for the OP but it improves my knowledge too.  Where the down-vote has been explained I've found it useful &amp; it has improved my answer, or forced me to delete the answer if it was totally wrong.  So is there any way we can encourage people to leave a comment? Perhaps they don't lose rep if they explain their down-vote?  I must admit though that I haven't always explained my down-vote either so you could call me a hypocrite. I've also grown a thicker skin over the months of using SO (it seems to have come with the higher rep score ;-)), so I'm less bothered about this now.
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It is incredibly rare that I downvote on this or any other community site. I would rather just ignore the item. However, occasionally some very bad advice is given that is worthy of a downvote. Why should this adversely affect the reputation of the person who downvotes?
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Before you disagree with me with a downvote, or just want to be funny, please hear me out. From the :  The upvote privilege comes first because that's what you should focus on: pushing great content to the top. Downvoting should be reserved for extreme cases. It's not meant as a substitute for communication and editing.  I have honestly never seen a downvote reserved for an extreme case. The process is usually 1) downvote post if it's bad and don't comment. (Not much of a process, is it?) As you stay on the site longer and longer, you develop a carelessness towards downvotes (as I have), but for new users, it's really discouraging.  question inspired me to [ask balpha to] make , which is a list of users with 1 rep who have the  badge. That's the closest I could get to new users who deleted their own posts after downvotes came in. Don't get me wrong, I know the argument about being nice to new users very well, but I still believe it to be an issue. And since , users are much more inclined to go the lazy route and downvote bad questions. No alternative measures (see below) are taken, for the most part. Personally, I leave a comment and don't downvote until the asker shows no interest in fixing their post. The only other measure taken to discourage downvotes (on answers) is the -1 rep punishment to the downvoter, which is absolutely meaningless and inconsequential anyways. How are we supposed to educate new users when we don't teach them what to do, don't direct them to the FAQ, and discourage them with downvotes right off the bat?  Instead of voting down: If the post is spammy or offensive — flag it. If the question is duplicate or off-topic — flag it for moderator attention. If something is wrong, please leave a comment or edit the post to correct it.  We claim to discourage downvoting, yet I see answers like  that encourage us to downvote first and ask questions later when a question is simply unclear or effortless. It's just an awful chain reaction. A new user comes to the site asking a question, but that doesn't work out too well, so they get downvotes, delete the question in shame, and don't get the help they deserve as a fellow writer of code and programmer. Strip away the quality of the site for a moment: the core functionality of this site, and the only reason I and a lot of other users are (still) on it, is to receive and give help to/from others. I enjoy making sure fellow programmers get the answer they need, because this site has helped me get mine when I needed them. Quality can still be maintained if content is fixed rather than downvoted more often. So can we stop discouraging new users from continuing to use this site and actually start to discourage downvoting? I think we need to encourage effort towards teaching and helping new users understand the system and why their post is bad rather than slapping them in the face with downvotes that they don't know how to interpret anyways. I'm leaving ways we can do this up to others. My first thought was to increase the punishment for downvoting answers and to no longer make question downvotes free, but those wouldn't be well-received, judging by the history of similar suggestions. .
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Once a question has -8 votes, that's it - it disappears.  Perhaps we might discourage users from downvoting more at that point(i.e once it hits -8), because any more downvotes are functionally meaningless, while an upvote may help salvage something.  But once it's at, say, -10 or -15, any downvote behavior is merely a wasted click. Unless that user truly wants to downvote it, which leads to the idea of:  How about making a bold generic downvote symbol once a question hits -8  What about if we said, OK since it's -8, let's delineate that by marking it so and keeping it fixed at -8 even if it gets ten more downvotes( which still reflect on the reputation, even though for newbies and drive-by's they get stuck at "1" rep anyway ).  Related:   Thanks