Downvoting

[agiacosa]

I'm reading alot about the downvoting debate. What's the point of downvoting?

As an admin, I want the users to be able to:

1. Say they don't think this story should be or should go to the main page because it isn't interesting; or

2. The story is SPAM, wrong, crude, off-topic, redundant or auto-promotion.

If we want to have a site where editing is controlled by the users, this feature must be in the code.

There is a problem with "bots" now apparently that automatically vote something down or classify it as one of the above. What can be done about that because it prevents the purpose of the feature?

Meneame deals with this problem by:

1. Having in the config:

// The maximun amount of annonymous votes vs user votes in 1 hour
// 3 means 3 times annonymous votes as user votes in that period
$anon_to_user_votes = 3;


2. Controlling vote frequency:

$votes_freq = $db->get_var("select count(*) from votes where vote_type='links' and vote_user_id=$current_user->user_id and vote_date > subtime(now(), '0:0:30') and vote_ip = '".$globals['user_ip']."'");

if ($current_user->user_id > 0) $freq = 3;
else $freq = 2;

if ($votes_freq > $freq) {
if ($current_user->user_id > 0 && $current_user->user_karma > 4 && $link->status != 'published') {
// Crazy votes attack, decrease karma
// she does not deserve it :-)
require_once(mnminclude.'user.php');
$user = new User;
$user->id = $current_user->user_id;
$user->read();
$user->karma = $user->karma - 0.2;
$user->store();
warn(_('¡tranquilo cowboy!, tu karma ha bajado: ') . $user->karma);
} else {
warn(_('¡tranquilo cowboy!'));
}
}

"Tranquilo cowboy" means easy cowboy.

[The Humanaught]

Has there been any incorporation of downvoting into Pligg? Digg's got it... Pligg should too, in my opinion.

[daveyc]

per your description of meneame's approach, it sounds like throttling might resolve the issue...like no registered user can vote for the identical item more than once within 24 hours (or maybe ever) and for more than any 5 items within 2 hours (or something like that - perhaps admin easily sets those intervals relative to site traffic)