A1987dM comments on [META] Retributive downvoting: Why?

[A1987dM]

Seriously, how long would it take? Unless the number of upvotes and the number of downvotes are not stored separately in the first place (which I don’t think it’s the case—aren’t the “Best”, “Popular” and “Controversial” sorting criteria based on them?), I wouldn’t expect that to take more than 0.1 programmer-hours.

[mwengler]

I was upvoting for the idea, but then retracted at the suggestion that ANYTHING real takes less than 0.2 programmer-hours.

[faul_sname]

Several real modifications to the code base I work on have taken less than 0.05 programmer-hours. About half of which was booting up and connecting to the server.

In this case, it would be a matter of changing something along the lines of this:

<span class="votes " id="score_<? echo $comment["ID"] ; ?>">
<? echo $comment["up"] -  $comment["down"]  ?> point<? echo $comment["up"] -  $comment["down"]  != 1 ? 's' : ''; ?>
</span>

and tacking something along the lines of this to the end:

(
<span class="votes " id="score_up_<? echo $comment["ID"] ; ?>">
<? echo $comment["up"]  ?>
</span>
|
<span class="votes " id="score_down_<? echo $comment["ID"] ; ?>">
<? echo $comment["down"]  ?>
</span>
)

I don’t know the exact implementation details server-side on this, as I don’t have access to the LW source code, but it really would be a minor tweak (unless upvotes and downvotes are counted together, in which case it would be nontrivial).

[ChristianKl]

You are talking about code on which you work. That means that you already invested a lot of time into knowing the code base. If SI search someone to implement this they probably need to spend some time to understand the code base before they can make changes.

I don’t know the exact implementation details server-side on this, as I don’t have access to the LW source code

The source code is open source.