Related:   In the question linked to above, Affable Geek asked : Why was this changed and was it intentional. I don't know if what I'm asking here is implied on those questions, but just to be sure, I'd like to officially put in a feature request to have this ability restored. I spend most of my time on various S.E. sites reviewing instead of asking and answering.  I'm not sure what was behind the decision to remove this functionality, but as someone who spends most of my time trying to help new users, offer constructive guidance, and , the inability to leave comments seems extremely counter-productive. For new users, the most helpful thing we can do to help them improve their posts is to provide polite, helpful, constructive comments in the spirit of the .  (Which, IMO is or should be an endless summer...)  The inability do do this gains us nothing, and severely hampers our ability to help. This new restriction also seems a bit odd to me in light of all the Meta posts asking about how we can encourage (or force)people to comment when down-voting.  I realize it's a bad idea to force people to comment when down-voting, and I wouldn't suggest that, but the point is, all of these people recognize that simply voting down a question without leaving a constructive comment does absolutely nothing to help the person whose post is being down-voted.  I may be wrong, but I thought that the purpose for having the community moderate is to  Help your fellow members learn to use the site and raise the quality of Q&amp;A by:  Evaluating new posts Voting to close or reopen questions Reviewing suggested edits   It's awful hard to be helpful when you have to . I ask the StackExchange team to please consider restoring our ability to comment while reviewing.
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Today, on C.SE, I reviewed some 'Late Answers' and First Posts.  I was not even near my daily vote limit.  And yet, I was given a message that said      comments disabled on deleted / locked posts / reviews   It seems I was not the only one either:   The workaround, of course, was simply to go back and provide the guidance - but was this a design or a bug?  If it is design, why would you want to discourage the feedback? Especially with first posts, there is often a high percentage of 'didn't read the FAQ' usage, which can best be addressed by gently providing guidance. (e.g. "Unfortunately, this doesn't answer the question" or "This reads like a comment" or "This really isn't on-topic here - can I suggest you checkout our [faq]" etc...)  Timely first post guidance goes a long way towards making good users.   If it was a bug, was other functionality silently rolled out?
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If you    Formulate a question vaguely It gets closed / put on hold for this You take the comments to heart and reformulate it It no longer gets attention but you have not enough reputation to trigger a reopen.   Then is there anything you can do? Is closing the question and stating it as a new question a legitimate solution? I have the feeling it is not, but did not find any info here on meta.
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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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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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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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If I made a mistake downvoting or upvoting a post, there's no way for me to fix that unless asking the person to edit its answer.   Let's say I downvote something, then explain in a comment thinking that I'm right and the user's wrong. The user convince me that he was right in the first place and that I should not have downvoted him (everybody make mistakes or it could have been a misundertanding on words... whatever). Then I can't undo my downvote.   I get the point of forbidding removing up/down votes without edit, but in some cases it gets annoying.  Could it become so that one can undo his vote if a comment is left by someone else (to avoid dummy comments just to rollback a vote) ?  EDIT: Added a bounty to get more feedback
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EDIT : How about a forced comment   dialog...which forces the user's to   comment when they downvote otherwise   they can't....right now it just shows   a popup to suggest posting a   comment...maybe this is little too   strict...but i just find it annoying   when ppl downvote and leave no   comments....   How about having a badge "Irritable" for a user who downvotes over 20 times in a month and then have maybe further "Furious" for over 50 downvotes in a month....just a fun suggestion...since i see people downvote like crazy at times...there should also be a way to downvote a comment i think in addition...
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If you add a comment explaining why you downvoted - and I mean a long-ish comment which goes into a bit of depth to explain the issue you have with the answer - your comment gets rejected, and a dialog box pops up saying:     Don't comment on your downvote. If you think this post can be improved, please offer specific guidance.   That's just wrong, since:   Downvotes without comments are antagonistic and somewhat hurtful (for posts written in good faith). You might well be offering specific guidance in the downvote comments. It's much better for the downvoter to leave a sub-optimal comment with some feedback then to be discouraged by this message and not provide any feedback.   Instead, the comment should be accepted (except perhaps for a very brief "-1 wrong"-style comments), and the message could say something like:     When commenting on a downvote, try to explain how this post can be improved, and offer specific guidance.   The comment should remain in edit mode to encourage it to be edited, but canceling the edit would leave the comment as-is (again, except for the case of problematic/very brief comments).  Notes:   This question focuses on the specific scenario of a meaningful comment being rejected, and on the rejection message. This is distinct from how to encourage meaningful/positive criticism in general. If it's the "-1" indication that is super-bothersome to people, then either this should be removed from the comment (with the rest of it left), or it should be made very clear that is the reason the comment can't be accepted i.e. "don't explicitly mention the downvote in downvote comments" rather than "don't comment on downvotes".
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There's now a feature-request based on this discussion; see:   I'm about fed up with the First Posts review queue. Oh, it was : give folks a chance to welcome new users to the site, without  with Low Quality review. The problem is, the review system was designed around the idea of guiding folks to accomplish specific goals. And there's no clear goal for First Posts. Without a goal, folks tended to just , until we &quot;fixed&quot; that by adding a &quot;do nothing&quot; button and strict audits. Great fix! , and those that do find that trying to automatically audit an open-ended system is . It's the same problem we had with , with the addition of . So yeah, this review queue is terrible and useless But before throwing the baby out with the bathwater, I figured I'd best check with y'all to see if any baby even lurks in these murky depths.  What value do you see in having a First Posts review? What outputs do you see as valuable from such a queue?  I'm thinking we could probably make this work if we narrowed the focus considerably; less &quot;help new users in some mostly-unspecified way&quot; more &quot;help filter the wheat from the chaff&quot;:  Separate queues for questions and answers, with answers being sanity-checked for spam and questions requiring one vote - up or down. Essentially answer voting would be left to those with a specific interest in a given question (as it should be) while question voting would be used as .  Allow flagging, commenting, comment voting, etc... But don't count those as a review action (unless we decide that the goal of reviewing these is to dramatically increase the number of comments or something, in which case we should probably drop that &amp; try jSobriety).  Send more things into the queue faster, remove them more quickly if they're &quot;reviewed&quot; organically. Less waiting for a new post to get attention, but less duplicate reviewing when something is getting attention without the need for review.   ...Thoughts?
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Disclaimer: I understand that down-voting (social discord) is an important part of community building. Communal negative messages help to deter behavior destructive to the group. Down voting places warning sign in the road for new travelers (don't tread here) and to temper overexcitement.  Rant: We techies are a hazing culture. We invest countless hours mastering languages, algorithms and nuances. We accomplish great things. We rub it in people's faces to feel superior. We feel good becoming an "expert". We feel good when we master lambdas or create a great search algorithm.  Admit it, even the humblest among us feels warm and fuzzy when someone marvels at our work. It's validation. And it's not a bad thing.  But the joy of accomplishment has a darker sibling: PRIDE  It's part of what drives us so hard. It's part of every negative decision we make. And it's often at someone's expense!  Looking through posts on Stack&nbsp;Overflow, I see many answers with negative ranking. Many questions get negative rankings too. Many of these questions are repeats of ones asked in the past. The user could have done a more thorough job googling and probably deserves a mild slap.  But some questions are interesting and well thought out. New users usually aren't familiar with the thorough and serious natures of experts who frequent the forums. Some useful and interesting thoughts could be refined with a little help. Instead they're insulted and leave.  This spree of "reckless down-voting" may be hurting our "community"  In searching for my own name, I went through 10 pages of users with similar names and found most had rankings of 1. This means they never did so much as except an answer (automatic +2). Many of them just wanted their answers and no interest in community.  But I wonder about the many users who got "Geek-hazed". I wonder how many "Noob"s were scared away by unnecessary down-voting?  As of this writing I have a "rep" of 75. Barely noticeable compared to the super-users with rep above 32,000. But so much higher than most users ever get. My low score reflects some serious attempts to ask and answer worthwhile questions. But it's only a month of "real participation".  According to this article (from 2009)  what I witnessed in non-participation is nothing new.  Good reasons for downvoting  1) Person didn't even try to figure out answer by coding or serious googling.  Example: How do I validate user input on the client level?  2) Vague question; No code, No error msg  Example: Every time I run my application I get an error  Constructive alternatives to downvoting  1) A clearly new user didn't give code samples but described his error and error messages  Action: Suggest the user elaborate and include relevant code samples.  2) An answer is correct but vague. No examples, not enough detail. Maybe even sloppy English.  Action: Suggest the user elaborate and include relevant code samples.  Question: Do you think gratuitous down-voting hurts participation in our "community"?
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Bravo for allowing comment editing, but what's the explanation for enforcing a five-minute window?  I think this might be over-engineering. If I have a spelling mistake or an inaccuracy I'd like to fix, I don't think the fact that five minutes has elapsed should prevent me from fixing it.  Further, if you are worried people will edit their comments in a way that makes the comment thread nonsensical, they can already do this by deleting their comment. So, limiting the ability to edit isn't really helping much in that regard.  Update  If people don't like this idea, I'm definitely open to hearing your reasons. For now, it seems like an unnecessary limitation of a quite awesome feature.  Update 2  Regarding John's scenario...     Me: Obama is cool!   You: You are right, man!      My edit: Obama is an idiot!   You: You are right, man!   ...this problem can still occur with deletions...     user1: Obama is cool!   user2: No, McCain is cool!   you: You are right, man!        user1: Obama is cool!   ---- deleted -----   you: You are right, man!     So, yes, editing could be abused as you suggest, but discontinuities can occur already because of deletions (and as someone else mentioned, because upvoted comments get prioritized upward).  As for Jeff's argument about rate limiting, I agree that is important, but I don't understand why you can't just use a CAPTCHA to prevent too many edits in a short period of time.
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I just failed these   in First Post, I read the question and thought it seemed reasonable but the user was deleted so to be on the safe side I clicked add comment and I failed the audit.  I'm not sure why adding a comment would be considered a negative action, is the correct option to click No Action Needed or edit?  What was I supposed to do in this situation?  Adding a comment should not be a review audit fail.
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My question is similar to   I believe this would be useful in the scenario if I upvote a question or answer... and the OP changes it where you no longer think it deserves the up vote you have bestowed upon it.  For example, I upvoted an answer, because I thought it was a great answer... then the OP changes it to add a bunch of stuff that I no longer think makes it a great answer. How am I notified of this change?  I know you can rollback use roll back, but how do you know it was edited without getting a notification!?  I haven't seen any meta asking this question, but if one exists please link it and I will remove this question!    EDIT:   @JoshC brings up a valid point... where not everyone has time to go through all the notifications... but why can their be an option under account preferences to turn this feature on or off?
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I'm not a fan of the downvoting feature in general; frankly, I think it should be removed from all of the stackexchange sites.  Negative feedback leads to negative results. I recognize that the intent is not to provide a means of giving negative feedback, but that's what downvoting does. "The community's way of telling peers that their content can be improved" isn't an accurate description of downvoting: people who downvote other people with no explanation as to why (the usual practice) generally consider them not their peers, but their inferiors.   I fear that the downvoting feature panders to the worst aspects of human nature, to an extent that far outweighs any possible benefit that it can provide. I recognize that the intent of downvoting is to make a form of constructive criticism available, but that it fails to do. It simply says "this is bad" without any explanation. If someone really wants to offer constructive criticism, he can do so in the comments, or by closing questions with an explanation of how to bring them up to par. If he does that, it is that that has the value, not a downvote that might or might not go along with it.  I submit that the increasingly negative "elitist" reputation of many of the stackexchange sites (stackoverflow, the "bread and butter" site, in particular) is due more to unexplained downvotes than anything else: downvoting is (much) more often than not a way of telling new people that they aren't welcome in the club. This isn't conducive to growth.  It seems to me that the recently introduced admonishment to "be nice" to new members acknowledges the problem without really doing anything about it. It would be given more teeth if the downvoting feature were removed entirely — people have to give a lot more thought to a comment than a downvote decision. Furthermore, the (apparently many) "serial downvoters" who contribute little if anything else to the site would take themselves elsewhere.   Thoughts? What are the positive contributions (are there any?) that downvoting makes to the stackexchange sites?
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There is a lot of irritation and whining from newbies when their suggestions get downvoted because they don't understand that votes have a different meaning here.   This is unnecessary, and I'm absolutely sure is one of the contributing factors why some people turn away from Meta after first contact, and never return.  To fix this, when a user asks their first question here, it should be pointed out in big bold letters that voting follows different rules here than on the mother site.  Something like     Note that voting on Meta.stackoverflow.com works differently from the other Stack Exchange sites. Voting is used as an expression of agreement or disagreement on contributions here, rather than to point out a lack of quality or helpfulness. Do not be too concerned if you receive downvotes - it is possible that members of the community are simply  disagreeing with what your contribution is suggesting.
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It seems to me that down-voting is the one process in Stack Overflow that is not really subject to review. While many would argue that the current methods for managing down-votes are adequate, I do not feel that they competently ensure a checks-and-balances approach to the use of down-votes. The following arguments summarize why I think the current down-vote policy is not as effective as what reviewing could provide:   There is no real check against down-voting a question regardless of the whether the down-vote was deserved. Any user can down-vote a post without explanation and without assessment.  The -1 penalty for down-voting an answer may provide incentive to not recklessly down-vote, but having a reviewer apply a penalty for a unjust down-vote would seem far more appropriate. Additionally, this would allow answers that are obviously inappropriate to be down-voted without penalty to the reviewer.    While I believe the format of Stack Overflow should not be flippantly changed without due thought, I believe this issue is one of the few areas in which the topic of alternative solutions should at least be addressed. I know reviewing down-votes may be a hefty task (as they happen so frequently) but we certainly have the user base to accomplish such a task. What'cha think?
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Meanwhile, in August 2009  as reason for comment flagging, and the comment flags show in the 10k tools. And  is on its way. Hence: I don't care for this request myself anymore. An explicit [status-declined] would be fine.    What about being able to set comments to auto-expire? Or, alternatively, set a comment to be removable by the author of the question or answer one comments on?  This way the communities would allow for some personal or funny comments (even like "Thanks") without those comments littering the sites forever. Or, when the original author is allowed to clean up, then comments that have been taken care of by editing the question or answer, could be removed.  Why?  As, , there's no way to send a personal message to other members, I find myself abusing the comments like some "poor man's private messaging system". I try to refrain from things like "Thank you", but sometimes I do want to point out something to someone. After a while (hours, days) I then  to remove them (hoping that no-one actually replied to them with another comment, like "Thanks, fixed it").  Like :    (I don't find this feature request very important (at all), I am quite impressed by what's been given us already, and I doubt there's a way to implement it without making things too confusing. Maybe I'm just trying too hard to keep things tidy and clean. Still, I wanted to share it, just in case someone comes up with something very clever...)