I just joined the programmers stack exchange site in order to upvote an answer that I thought was particularly worthy but when I clicked on the button I was told that I needed 15 reputation.  This is not a problem, I now understand how reputation works.  However would it not be better to hide the upvote and downvote buttons on all questions and answers until you can use them? There are many other features of Stack Overflow that are hidden until they become revealed by reputation increases such as deleted questions, reviewing tools, etc.   The upvote a comment button and all the other elements above are hidden until useable so why not the main voting buttons? As it stands the interface seems to be inconsistent and frustrating for new and low rep users.
2634
Currently, the system makes you think you can upvote/downvote your own question/answer but then you get notified that you can't. Why have the up/down vote buttons there then?   In general, if some operation is not allowed, then don't put UI for that up or make it disabled so it is apparently disabled - no post operation error panels please?  ps: hope this is not a dupe, but if so, just comment it and I will remove  (+a joke: a user notification panel message: I deleted this file. Is this a problem? Yes/No.)
124085
The comment link should be always visible. For users without enough rep to comment, clicking on it should give a nice popup, just like those on the vote buttons, informing them that they need more reputation to comment.
55187
An  over on Ask Ubuntu. There is currently one nomination with 4 comments (one of which is mine). However, I can't upvote any of the last three - clicking the upvote arrow doesn't do anything.  Popping open the Chrome Inspector reveals nothing - no errors, no network requests, nothing.  I am using Chrome 16.0.912.77 m.
29300
When a user has the  privilege, they can click on the post score to see the individual counts for upvotes and downvotes.  When a user doesn't have this privilege this functionality isn't present, except after loading newly added answers without refreshing the page. After clicking the "new answers to this question" link the click functionality to view vote counts is added to all posts, though actually clicking on it results in a dialog stating that an error occurred (I'd assume due to not having the required reputation).  May be related to the fix for this previous bug report:
1120
As a new user, I find it impossible to contribute to the community or to even begin contributing. I know why the reputation system is in place and I respect it, but at the same time it is too hard on new users.  It started with me wanting to upvote a question...     "Vote Up requires 15 reputation"   Just to appreciate a good question that helped me I need 15 rep? OK..., so I find out how I can get reputation points. More or less, I need to ask a question for +5 and add an answer for +10. I don't have any questions at the moment and I don't want to spam a random question, but I did happen to have a slightly different answer to the earlier question that I wanted to upvote. So I try to answer...     This question is protected to prevent "thanks!", "me too!", or spam answers by new users. To answer it, you must have earned at least 10 reputation on this site.   Now... I know this doesn't apply to every question, but at the same time, this means I'm forced to answer yet another question, and I don't want to go around looking for random questions and spam irrelevant answers...  Now I'm stuck. So I try to talk to some other users in the chat rooms about how to go about getting reputation points and how they first started. I entered into a "casual chat room".     You must have 20 reputation on Meta Stack Overflow to talk here.   Yes... I can understand why this is enforced, because we don't want new users to spam chat rooms, but all I wanted to do was ask for help. So I can't even talk to anyone about my newbie problems. So okay, I'll just settle for upvoting comments in the question that helped me. I don't see an upvote hover-over button so I can't even do that.    So now I'm stuck at 1 reputation point, unable to cross that 15 rep barrier, and even after posting this question I'll only have 6 rep points and still unable to do anything, and I'll be forced to look for questions to answer. Yes, I should be contributing to the community, but I shouldn't need to begin answering or making questions to upvote questions and answers. This only spurs more spam/irrelevant answers if anything.   Very, very, very new-user unfriendly.
29643
Possible Duplicates:             Voting on questions played a big role in the site when we didn't have the option to comment on, close, migrate, flag, or edit questions which did not fit the site or required modification to be useful and usable.  As it is, question votes are not much more than a popularity contest, and a lot of bandwidth is taken up on Meta regarding question votes.  Notably:        In most cases a downvote is being given where a good edit should be used instead, or a comment indicating that the question user needs to provide more information.  People are also downvoting in the case of duplicates (or suspected duplicates) when they don't want to do the work of finding the duplicate.  There is no need to downvote to 'alert' other users that a question isn't worth spending time on - if it's bad enough that it can't be fixed, and so bad that you want to be sure others avoid it then it's not worth keeping open.  These are all situations where the person downvoting should be taking a different action.  , and several questions have thrown ideas at how to increase question upvoting artificially, and a  was even implemented to encourage this behavior.  Given all this, I am now convinced that voting on questions is an unnecessary distraction.  Voting no longer provides any useful information about a question, and there are more than adequate means of fixing or removing questions that need work.  Voting makes more sense for sites like Meta where questions aren't really questions, but suggestions and discussions.  For purely Q/A sites such as SO, SF, SU, the voting is superfluous.  The only two possible positive things voting now provides are:   A way for users at lower rep levels to have a voice when they are unable to perform many of the other functions that are needed to fix a question (I contend this is useless, but perhaps they need some sort of outlet) A 'hook' to get new users into the reputation game (which fails frequently because questions aren't getting upvotes, especially questions from new users)   If that is truly the case, then we should consider removing question voting altogether, or removing the effect of question votes on reputation.   Am I wrong? What obvious and explicitly important role does question voting play in our community?
23727
How do users on the new Stack Exchange sites get started? Each user starts with 1 rep, and can't upvote until they have 15 rep.  It struck me that this creates a bit of a deadlock. If a new user asks a question and a new user answers, neither can upvote the other.  Are we relying solely on existing SE users to join these exchange sites (with their bonus 100 rep) so that they can get started?
99095
I've been lurking Stack Overflow whenever I had a problem for at least the last 2+ years. More times than not, I find my solution (or cobble one together) before I get frustrated enough to have the innernets help me with my specific custom problem.  Many times, the only commentary I would be able to add would be "thanks!" which really only wastes bits and bandwidth.  I understand implementing measures to keep the bots and SEO kids out, but sometimes it's a PITA to start participating in a community.  If you couldn't extract my question from the above rant (or title), this might be a little more clear:  Why do I require 15 reps to just up-vote something?  I feel like it's kinda silly.  Additionally, I noticed the quote off to the left:     We prefer questions that can be answered, not just discussed.   yet I have looked around here and haven't been able to find any justifiable explanation.
70504
When we started Stack Overflow, we wanted to make sure that downvotes were more of a visual and psychological motivator than a punitive action. That's why    upvotes are +10 downvotes are -2, and cost the casting voter -1   However, recently, I've seen Marc Gravell and Jon Skeet both say similar things:     IMO, downvotes don't quite carry enough... -5 downvotes and +1 upvote (for sympathy) yields zero points overall; or it could even yield +10 points for a new user! I'd prefer to see, say, -4 points? -5 points?   I am starting to come around to this way of thinking. There are some users who ask a lot of questions that get downvoted heavily, but over time these users end up with a fairly sizable amount of reputation.  This doesn't feel right.  We are considering changing downvotes to -5, with the same -1 cost to the casting voter.  There really aren't that many downvotes in the system, so the net effect of this change would be to reduce rep growth for users who tend to get downvoted as much as they get upvoted. (Yes, I realize this is no panacea: over time, we'll still get rep inflation for marginal users based on sheer quantity; this is only one of several changes we are considering to help mitigate this.)  The other downside to this change, besides the obvious minor loss of rep for most users, is that it would force a global reputation recalc for every user. I think we're due for one of those anyway.
17056
How many users have created more than one profile on SO to vote themselves on their other original profile? There are some benefits when you have more reputation and sometimes you don't want a single -1 vote on your question or answer. In this case you may have an extra account to convert that -1 vote into 0 vote and  upvote for each of your questions and answers to gain reputation. I think it is not a good thing to do as a good developer.  Is there any way to recognize this situation? I think there should be some stats in each user's profile about how many votes are posted by each user on him/her or something like that.  So how many users have more than one profile? How to handle this situation? I have not created one yet but............ I don't think so :)
56050
Over time I realized a very annoying property of the Stack Overflow reputation system: Easy answers to popular question are rewarded with a lot more reputation points than actually great answers. In case anybody actually needs examples for this, here are two examples from :   gained me 420 rep, I invested 2 minutes writing it, and it only was a wild guess.   took me about an hour for the research and the math and gained me 40 rep.  Now I know that you are bound to get more rep for answers that are useful to more people, and I'd say that's fine. But the current situation is quite extreme: 30% of my reputation is from 5 of my 330 answers, and they are definitely far from being my best ones.  A final example that is not from my profile, but more extreme: Do you really think  is worth 40000 reputation?  My proposition to improve that situation would be to make the reputation gain from a single answer non-linear, maybe even have it capped at a certain point. I'm not sure on how that non-linear function should look exactly, and would leave good proposals for that to users with more experience than me.
2824
I think more reputation points should be required to add a new answer than to upvote an existing answer.  I don't continually watch for new questions, so usually when I find a question it has already been answered.  It seems bit inappropriate to answer an already-answered question in order to contribute to the conversation, but until you earn reputation, you can't upvote or comment; you can only add new answers, which prevents me from contributing at the moment as much as I would like to.  This seems backwards to me. If someone incorrectly upvotes a bad answer, the damage is minimal, as other users can down vote it and upvote the correct answers. On the other hand, an incorrect answer wastes the time of everyone who reads it.  So, IMHO, it should require more reputation points to add an answer than to upvote or comment on an existing answer.  I wouldn't say say that users should be prevented from answering unanswered questions until they have x reputation points, as that might prevent users who have answers from providing them, but perhaps it should be required if the question is already answered, to discourage users from reiterating previously given answers.  What do you think?
20682
Problem: A lot of the time I downvote something that clearly shows lack of research or effort on OP's part, and when they edit to improve it, I usually find out pretty late, because there are no notifications to help with that.  Proposition: add a Get notified when this post is edited button/checkbox under a post which you have downvoted (per post, not just all posts ever), so that if there is a significant improvement, you could remove your downvote or even change it to an upvote to show you recognize the improvement.  I believe this would improve public thinking about votes, and make people (who choose to participate like this on the SE sites more often) vote more freely and more often, and everybody else would not think of a &lt;0 post score as a death sentence for their contribution.  I'm not asking to enable this on SO (for a number of obvious reasons), and that's why I propose an opt-in subscription. This would be most useful on lower activity sites like the SE, in my opinion, but who knows.    I want to know if someone has improved their post after a downvote to reinforce the positive behavior and I get -4 on my good intentions? What kind of culture are you trying to cultivate? Please, explain why you disagree without silently downvoting. If you think there's a better way, yes, I want to know your thoughts.
77912
My reputation in StackOverflow is among the top 1% of users. I'm not as active as I used to be, but I still come back to the site from time to time. Unfortunately, I find that when I do return, I get a message "Welcome back, you can upvote!" To be frank, this reminds me of the paperclip on Word 98. I am well aware that I can upvote (or edit comments, or delete posts, or downvote, or undelete posts, or flag, or... pretty much everything)  If reputation could we either get rid of the message entirely or at least get rid of the "you can vote" part of the message?  While I'm at it, I would also appreciate it if a high rep level meant that I could skip the "You've down voted someone! Please add a suggestion to try to make it better." Once again, I am more than aware how the system works, I do not need JavaScript annoying me about it.
107174
I often see new users posting questions and getting answers. But instead of getting an upvote or accept for the answer, they just add a comment that the answer helped them.  I understand that you need 15 points minimum for upvote.  I often see people then commenting "when you are happy, please accept / upvote".  My impression is that the new users don't really know about the upvote/accept business.  So my idea is if the system could send them some automatic and more explicit message when they have earned > 15 (or another threshold) points in the sense of "Now you have x points, and posed some questions. Please review the questions and vote / accept answers given"
65042
Just curious how this works:  My Stack Overflow reputation on my Stack Overflow CV shows an amount X, which is less than my actual Stack Overflow reputation Y. It's been this way for a few days. In addition, some of my 'favorite answers' on my CV have a lower # of votes than they do in reality.  How long does it take for this (I assume cached) value to be updated?
66201
I know once you get a certain amount of reputation, you can see the total up and down votes for questions. Well, my proposal is to always be able to see this on your own questions and answers. You can see it by going to your user page anyway, so why not make it possible to do by simply clicking on the number of votes (like you can when you have the rep)?