I actually arrived just as merlyn left, so I strongly doubt I was in Other Users when he took the snapshot.

I thought you were. If I was mistaken, I apologize--freely.

As for the rest, he posted a list and made it clear that most on that list were not downvoting him...

Yes...and I believe he could have been more considerate of those who were not personality voting. I believe he knee-jerked; I called him on it. I stand by that call, for I do not believe that, in this case, the means do justify the end. Three monks were rude; he listed 21. That's a 7:1 innocence ratio. Pardon me, but I thought that sort of crud went out with Salem and HUAC.

When I see him post a conclusion that I doubt, I will be first to tell him publically that I do not agree with him. But that hasn't happened yet.

Then we see things slightly differently on this one. That's a good thing. I shouldn't have to wait for you to call him on something before I express my disappointment over his behaviour. I expect to be held to certain standards; so should he.

And flipping your theorizing request around, if it is unfair for him to leap to the theory that everyone on that list is downvoting unreasonably, isn't it equally unfair to leap to the theory that he thinks that?

A fair point, one I will accept. However, I believe that if any other monk had posted the origin of this thread, it would have been placed into Consideration and promptly reaped without a second thought.

And *that* is what irks me most. merlyn rightly feels aggravated; however, he should not be allowed to be any more disrespectful or trollish than the rest of us. It's certainly his right, but I don't think he should be accorded any special treatment due to his 'nym nor his stature in the community. When he posts stuff I find to be cr@p, I will call him on it. And including 18 innocents to find three dipweeds that might not even have been logged in at that moment strikes me as cr@p.

(Apologies to chipmunk for the rhetoric, but this is how I see it. We're all asked to adhere to the same standards and those that don't or refuse to create more problems than they solve.)

--f

I don't know how the community would react were it someone other than merlyn.

I can only say how I would react.

And on this I don't have a double-standard. When I was just starting here, I ran into a few problems myself. I know what a pain it is. And every time this comes up my sympathies are with the person or people who are experiencing personality voting. There are possible technical solutions. I have never been convinced that they would be a bad idea.

Incidentally reading that thread again, it is clear that from the start my opinions have remained consistent. I don't like voting on the personality. The reasons why I don't like it have remained pretty much the same. And I don't like it whether or you you are voting for or against the person.

FWIW right now I am inclined to give merlyn more of a break than usual at the moment. Not because he is merlyn, but because I know he is going through a lot of crap at the moment and I know how stressed people overreact. Not that I think that changed how I reacted in this case, but it is a point worth mentioning.

I wish to eliminate personality voting. I've asked vroom to implement technical solutions, and he hasn't, either for lack of will or time.

So I'm doing it another way. If I post the list of people on each time I get personality downvoted, eventually the culprit can be narrowed down. It's simple logic.

Sure, I could have done all this in private, then posted an article with my conclusions, but I think if I capture the raw data, you can all conclude the same thing.

I fully expect to be downvoted when I'm wrong. But when I've given a brief, factual, correct statement as I did earlier today, to have gotten -3 in 5 minutes is a disservice to the others trying to sort fact from fiction in the Monestary. The XP system fails when personality voting is permitted. I intend to at least reveal the offenders, even if I can't do anything about it.

And to repeat what I've said frequently in the CB:

• I do not care about my personal total XP!

I will post an uncensored list from now on, for each posting that gets -XP right away when I can't see a reason. For example, I bet this post will get -XP right away, because I'm stepping on toes (and you know who you are).

I've had time to think this over, and I now believe I'm doing the right thing. vroom has the power to make it stop, and has not. So now I take it into my own hands.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

Out of curiosity, I voted ++ on the node in question (my fourth vote of the day, which is about all I really spend). It bumped the reputation to 4.

There are plenty of people who work through Worst Nodes every day or two, voting up nodes that don't deserve to be in negative territory. (And more people should do that -- there are a lot of posts that should stay at zero, in my opinion, instead of -2 or lower.) I suspect that you have very few posts at zero, and maybe a handful at -1.

It's not a failure of the voting system if, over sufficient time, the aggregate voting patterns of the monastery as a whole will tend to give you more positive votes than negative votes. Many many more.

I'd say that provoking you into a reaction is reward enough for the few consistent downvoters you describe. Hit the button, watch merlyn hit the ceiling every few weeks.

I only speak for myself, but I don't consider "personality downvoting" to be a problem. Has it happened to me? I dunno. It doesn't really matter. I'd be perfectly content if I could make the XP nodelet go away altogether, which seems to me to be a better solution than looking for maybe only one bored apple in a whole orchard.

Update: Oh, and I've posted a couple of poor-quality nodes that have received more upvotes than they deserve. Personality upvoting ain't so bad, and the system permits that too. Free will can suck.

Whether or not personality voting is a problem depends largely upon what you want the voting system to accomplish. From the time that I first came here I saw the voting system and I saw the potential for it to sort out the wheat from the chaff and long-term accumulate a record of high quality posts. That could be used as a starting point to help solve the huge problems facing these online fora, that great quality is produced but is lost in the noise.

Wouldn't it be, for instance, nice if Super Search could be filtered on or sorted by XP? But if that ever happened, then the personality votes would all be pollution, useless noise getting in the way of using the XP on a post as a measure of probable quality.

So I would prefer it if a high quality post by me has exactly the same chances in life as an equivalent post by, say, dkubb. (To non-randomly pick a high-quality poster.) Failing that, I would like people to at least know that that is how I feel...

I'm not going to express an opinion one way or the other here, because I think I can see both sides and haven't made my mind up yet, but there is one pertinent question I think I have to ask:

merlyn, let's suppose this becomes quite regular, and you generate your list on a regular basis. And let's say it does get whittled down to one or two suspects. (Big ifs, I think, especially since you assume it's the same people doing it regularly, which may or may not be the case).

What happens then? Do you publish their names on your home node? Do you set up a list of "Merlyn's Most Wanted"? (Although, that would be a giggle :)

Also, what is going to constitute proof? How many times do you have to see their names? As I see it, you never have anything more than circumstantial evidence, which could inflame opinion (as it obviously is doing) if you ever did publish a list of the culprits.