Oh yeah, I am having heaps of fun and a sense of purpose. Similar to what I feel when I first joined the Monastery as a Perl rookie. The website is about researchers and mentoring of junior students through a QA like forum, imparting them with soft skills, communication skills and networking: effectively making use of the collective wisdom of all members. Anonymous users should not be given a lot of freedom on what they can do around particularly with regard to voting. Voting will be a privilege given to registered members only. That way I can avoid encouraging malicious downvoting.

Regarding the 'butt of the downvotes'; I don't think I fully understand you there. If you mean by that my idea of calculating reputation loss based on the average downvotes for the past week, my assumption is that the website users won't be giving a lot of downvotes therefore the average will be quite low and in that case it will be quickly surpassed by the downvotes that one node may receive, resulting in over-penalizing the OP. So I'd probably avoid that form of cruelty altogether.