First, as petdance said, let's agree on what problem we want to solve, and what we want ot avoid.

I guess tilly and Masem want voting be more responsible, because he feels some monks sometimes abuse the system. Goal is to clean the monastery a little, make place to be more revarding. If so, it's worth trying.

I understand that if initiate monk will get -- for no reason (by votebot?), s/he can get frustrated, forget about monastery and we just lost one soul looking for enlightment.

I also agree with footpad that this is probably not the most important feature, and maybe it is not worth too much development effort.

Still, from many posts in a month I am here in monastery I got feeling that sometimes many of you would like to know what happened with voting process, and why, so slight need to educate (to teach a lesson?... :o) ) our voting comunity is apparent here.

So, IMHO, question is: how to accomodate "cleanup" need without too much code development and too much disturbance for monks who do not want to participate?

I think what might work is: after (monk on high enough experience level) voted, together with reputation s/he shold see also ++ and -- votes(like: 17 = 22-5). If this is not stored already, s/b not too complicated to add.

If I see -- votes where in my opinion they should not be, I can spend one more vote on chalenging the node. (another vote, or special votes like 10% of my total votes). Or directly while chalenging, you may decide to chalenge only ++ or -- votes.

If enough monks will decide voting on suspicious node should be chalenged, it's probably worth doing. We can set high treshold so it will not happen too often. Or only 3 (or so) most often chalenged nodes each day will be precessed further.

Now, How to get explanation of votes without too much development?

Maybe someone can just run report manually (ID of monks who downvoted the chalenged node) and send report via email to one (or all) of the monks who decided to chalenge node. Then they can meet via email and decide I guess /msg or email "unbehaving' monks that there are issues with the vote. I think this might be enough, just to let them know that voting is anonymous, but misbehaving is not.

I whink we can play idea that XP points, our reputation, is important for participants, and they will not be pleased to respond too often "I made honest mistake" "I clicked wrong button" etc. Even if they behave like children, they will prefer other will think about them as mature persons.

And after we found out and resolve couple ot these isues, we will know the pattern and we will have better feeling what we need and how to automate it. And in this first phase, without automation, only truly dedicated will do it. After a week or two doing it manually (resolving 20-30 nodes) we will know if it makes sense and how to do it - how to automate it, if feasible.

Maybe "misbehaving" monk can get "black points", which will be in his/her account for some time until expire.

So if we can figure out how to make our stay here Monastery better, safer and more pleasant experience without too much need of development from vroom, let's do it.

And if Ovid will need to overcame some temptation in the process, so be it - he can be tempted, he is saint, isn't he? :o)

I agree with your arguments, even if you do not agree with each other. And I am glad I can participate in such a comunity where is more than single correct opinion and more than one single answer. Now, go ahead and downvote me, if you feel so, I know I am not consistent. This is not black-or-white, here we do not have single correct syntax: we are dealing with life, with humans, not with computers.

And, by the way TIMTOWTDI...

And soon, we will have no nodes to chalenge - and everybody is happy... :o)

Update: I probably will not chalenge votes myself - I do hope on my level it will not be allowed. However, maybe strugling with temptations might improve my karma... :o)

pmas

To make errors is human. But to make million errors per second, you need a computer.