In case non of the previous posts answered your question. I generaly downvote and upvote without comment or personal message. It is like anything else in life, try, see the response, try differently, see the response. Judge based on the change in response how your tries where recieved and how they could improve. This is the simple way the world runs and the way everyone learns at some level or another. In life you seldom get clear answers teaching you *exactly* how to improve. You simply have to keep trying and see the different outcomes to figure out all the elements involved. Being in the process of raising a 2 year old daughter this becomes very obivious for me. She isn't trying to be bad, she just doesn't understand, so you see her continualy try different things until the response she gets improves. Of course sometimes she decides the bad resposne is worth whatever trouble she is causing (thats when life gets hard). To some degree this is how we all learn, and the easiest way for me to picture the ++ and -- game here at PM.

In the vote case you might get downvoted for a number of reasons (bad code, incorrect code, bad tone, random chance, bad luck, rainy weather, etc). I think the most common for me is tone. If a persons tone feels negative to me then I will downvote, if it feels positive I up vote. Is this right/wrong/correct/bad? I don't know. All I can say is that is the way I go. To me good intentions are often better for a community than right answers. This is all just my humble opinion and is not meant as either fact nor governing rule.

Following that rule of thumb I downvoted many nodes in this thread just based on the tone of the person. There is no need to argue or name call, or *YELL* in a forum such as this. In the same vein I upvoted many votes in this thread that had a positive tone and add something constructive. As for who got the ++'s and the --'s I actualy couldn't tell you because I seldom look at the names when voting (and my memory is bad enough it wouldn't matter much 'whats your name agian?'). Well thats enough yabbering for me.