Why not just disallow the casting of more than one downvote by the same person within a five-minute period? How many spite-voters are going to be dedicated enough to wait around for an hour just to blitz someone’s karma?
Because sometimes I read multiple comments in the space of five minutes, and it’s not unthinkable I might want to downvote more than one of them. Any rate-limiter would have to be carefully considered not to impinge on ordinary non-pathological users. This is perhaps more important than fighting spite-voters.
This is essentially the same trade-off DRM faces. I would say that spite-voting isn’t a large enough problem to need a technical solution unless somebody’s being hugely egregious, and if someone’s being hugely egregious, there are admins that can step in, right?
I would say that spite-voting isn’t a large enough problem to need a technical solution unless somebody’s being hugely egregious, and if someone’s being hugely egregious, there are admins that can step in, right?
There are admins that can step in, but I’m not sure if they have in past egregious cases. Aside from Will Newsome, I think there have been other significant instances of mass downvoting (at least PJ Eby, maybe others), and (correct me if I’m mistaken) I don’t recall anything being directly done about either in the end, except the removal of voting buttons from userpages after Will brought it up. That was an improvement, but it’s still clearly possible, and if someone were sufficiently motivated, it would be pretty easily scriptable.
Why not just disallow the casting of more than one downvote by the same person within a five-minute period? How many spite-voters are going to be dedicated enough to wait around for an hour just to blitz someone’s karma?
Because sometimes I read multiple comments in the space of five minutes, and it’s not unthinkable I might want to downvote more than one of them. Any rate-limiter would have to be carefully considered not to impinge on ordinary non-pathological users. This is perhaps more important than fighting spite-voters.
This is essentially the same trade-off DRM faces. I would say that spite-voting isn’t a large enough problem to need a technical solution unless somebody’s being hugely egregious, and if someone’s being hugely egregious, there are admins that can step in, right?
There are admins that can step in, but I’m not sure if they have in past egregious cases. Aside from Will Newsome, I think there have been other significant instances of mass downvoting (at least PJ Eby, maybe others), and (correct me if I’m mistaken) I don’t recall anything being directly done about either in the end, except the removal of voting buttons from userpages after Will brought it up. That was an improvement, but it’s still clearly possible, and if someone were sufficiently motivated, it would be pretty easily scriptable.