Tavern on the Meta

We now have a "top voters" tab on the user page and.. indeed, there is not much voting in this community :( http://webapps.stackexchange.com/users?tab=topvoters&filter=month

of course, the month just started, but still

George Marian

7:13 AM

heh

Tim Stone

@RebeccaChernoff Good call posting the link to balpha's comment reply link script and SE Modifications as an answer, heheh.

Yi Jiang

0

Q: Smarty,how can it survive with 416 parsing conflicts??

processing state 374 actions: Action REDUCE for LDELSLASH - rule template Action REDUCE for SMARTYBLOCKCHILD - rule template Action REDUCE for LDELFOREACH - rule template 416 parsing conflicts. I'm just surprised that the templating language that I'm using every day has so many conflicts...

Uh, hard to judge if it's a valid question or not without any knowledge of Smarty

Does anyone here know/use Smarty?

Rebecca Chernoff

@TimStone wanted to point people at StackApps.

Tim Stone

\o/

Rebecca Chernoff

@YiJiang I like to eat Smarties. Does that count?

Tim Stone

7:17 AM

StackApps needs loving, yes. :P

Yi Jiang

@RebeccaChernoff No. /facepalm

Rebecca Chernoff

@YiJiang Well blah at you then! ):

Tim Stone

Just so mootinator isn't confused, I assume you mean the small sugary things that come in a roll right? ;)

Yi Jiang

@RebeccaChernoff And a very good backward smiley to you too

Rebecca Chernoff

Oh, a php thingadongdong? I need to know no more!

@TimStone I do (:

Tim Stone

7:20 AM

(In Canadia, Smarties are bigger M&M's :o)

Yi Jiang

Smarties come in a roll?

Rebecca Chernoff

yes, but does anyone really care about Canada? (:

hides

Tim Stone

Oh snap.

George Marian

@TimStone This one's an amusing read as well:

Qld police warn against Windows service scam - Crooks try IQ test on banana benders

Benjol

@YiJiang, what do you think of proposing your bubbles for April 1st?

Dan Grossman

7:23 AM

0

Q: how to delete in Mysql

i want to delete a element in mysql. the problem is that my connection not succesfully open and they give me error unable to connect even same connectionstring work elsewhere in current project. well when my code open the connection they work fine. but a small function try to delete a row in Mys...

mysql error exception connection

Rebecca Chernoff

bubbles?

George Marian

@RebeccaChernoff Dang it, now I'm can't quite remember Homer's joke about Canada. Something about America Jr.

Yi Jiang

@Benjol What bubbles?

Dan Grossman

I think he managed to restate his question his question 5 times.

Benjol

@YiJiang jsfiddle.net/mhpgx/5

Dan Grossman

7:24 AM

@Benjol I didn't see any bubbles in that page you linked

Benjol

@Dan, in firefox?

Dan Grossman

Chrome, of course

Rebecca Chernoff

All I see is it telling me to use a modern browser.

Dan Grossman

Firefox is so 2007

Yi Jiang

I updated it use the webkit version in /8 I think

Benjol

7:24 AM

@RebeccaChernoff, yeah, well that threw me the first time too. Apparently Firefox is more modern than chrome for this particular usage :)

Rebecca Chernoff

LET'S ALL USE IE6, K GUYS?

Benjol

jsfiddle.net/mhpgx/8

try that, I <3

Yi Jiang

jsfiddle.net/mhpgx/10

Dan Grossman

The bubbles are neat, what's it have to do with april fools?

Yi Jiang

That should be the latest one. Gosh, I shouldn't be using jsfiddle's versioning system with my brain here

Benjol

7:27 AM

@YiJiang, how'd you give it a name/title?

Yi Jiang

@Benjol Under the 'info' tab

Benjol

@YiJiang aha, learns something

Dan Grossman

"jsfiddle expert" belongs on @YiJiang's resume

Benjol

jsfiddle is the dealer to jsquery's crack :)

Tim Post

Does anyone remember encountering an imgur clone done in Django, that had an API fully compatible with imagur? A self hosted impementation

I could have sworn I saw one, but get no love from searching

Dan Grossman

7:37 AM

Afraid not

Benjol

for @badp, when you turn up: I rewrote the script description, hopefully there'll be less misunderstanding

Tim Post

I wish my phone's key guard worked when the phone was in my pocket.

Just sent a "sldkjfsidu" text message to everyone in my phone book (again).

Jeff Atwood

Geoff Dalgas hates the new "Top Voters" tab on the users page. He is equating it to this

4

A: Badge Request: Voter

I don't like the idea. It sounds like something which would either encourage people to use up all their votes every day, whether or not they actually had an opinion on posts, or which all long-standing users with normal patterns would get eventually anyway.

Sam and I think it's necessary to raise awareness of voting vis-a-vis

Stack Overflow Blog: Vote Early, Vote Often

Posted by Jeff Atwood on October 19th, 2010

Have you ever wondered why the vote buttons and score are so prominent on every Stack Exchange question?

Putting voting front and center is very much intentional; it is how …

It’s only through voting that a class of editors, closers, and moderators can emerge to help run and govern the site. Voting is how site leadership forms. That’s why the reputation leagues show a breakdown of reputation spectrums.

Does your site have a healthy middle class of users with vote up and down, and edit tag privileges? Does it have a healthy governing class of users with edit, close, and moderation privileges? All of this requires sufficient reputation, which in turn requires users to exercise their right to vote. …

Tim Post

Samsung Corby is a nice basic phone, but if you slide the keypad even just a little, bye bye key lock

I've used up all of my votes quite a few times. Rather than complaining about interesting / tough questions getting buried, I look for them and up vote them.

balpha

That's going to be the title of my autobiography

6

Tim Post

7:43 AM

Tag feeds are just too much noise to deal with, so I sort by latest and go through the first dozen pages when tie permits

Yi Jiang

►

Tim Stone

@YiJiang @DanGrossman beat you on that one by a few hours :P

Yi Jiang

@TimStone I'd expect it, sighs

Tim Stone

Heheh

Yi Jiang

Hey, some of the OS's predates me :P

Dan Grossman

7:50 AM

nakedpassword.com. It's jQuery!

2

George Marian

Oh, man, MS DOS 5. That brings back memories.

Dan Grossman

The Windows 95 installer and boot screen really brought on a wave of nostalgia for me.

I was really excited when that came out

Jeff Atwood

@DanGrossman did you go to the movie theater demo of it?

Geoff Dalgas

As a sign of support VOTE - how many people here would want the number of votes they cast to be in competition with somebody else? Remember: If you remain silent this will be counted against you

George Marian

@DanGrossman So was I. Not so excited about shelling out $90 for the POS, though.

Dan Grossman

7:55 AM

I was only 10. I did go to the AOL chat room where the VP of Windows was there on launch night.

George Marian

Youngins...

Dan Grossman

I started making money online almost immediately, and used all of it to buy computer stuff. Was like $80 for 8MB of RAM!

Jeff Atwood

@GeoffDalgas I think it's going to take a while for regular users to even realize that page is there

Benjol

Not voting enough

Geoff Dalgas

this one: stackoverflow.com/users?tab=topvoters&filter=all

Tim Stone

7:58 AM

@GeoffDalgas I don't really mind either way. I did start making an effort to vote more because waffles came in here with a violin and played a sad song of the frequent voters of ol'...but.

Jeff Atwood

haha! I am on page 6 :P

SUCK IT EVERYONE ON PAGE 7 AND LOWER

Benjol

@Jeff slap wrist

Jeff Atwood

there's a limited amount you could do to game this list because 1) who cares and 2) you can only cast 30 votes per day. You'd have to be pretty patient.

Dan Grossman

When I'm feeling altruistic, I want to answer or clean up questions. I want to leave good stuff for future Google searchers. Voting doesn't matter.

Benjol

Should I vote stuff up to get it off the review pages? :)

Jeff Atwood

8:00 AM

patience is not commonly associated with "people who like to game things" in my personal experience

Benjol

@JeffAtwood Did you see Mr Nice yesterday? :)

Geoff Dalgas

"Voting doesn't matter." - that's kinda my point

other than the GOOD stuff will matter

Jeff Atwood

@GeoffDalgas you don't have a point here, you're just ranting

Geoff Dalgas

the bad will as well

Barry

You are all nice

Tim Stone

8:01 AM

Isn't the problem that voting doesn't matter to people?

Jeff Atwood

seriously, go re-read my blog entry on this

Stack Overflow Blog: Vote Early, Vote Often

Posted by Jeff Atwood on October 19th, 2010

Have you ever wondered why the vote buttons and score are so prominent on every Stack Exchange question?

Putting voting front and center is very much intentional; it is how …

It’s only through voting that a class of editors, closers, and moderators can emerge to help run and govern the site. Voting is how site leadership forms. That’s why the reputation leagues show a breakdown of reputation spectrums.

Does your site have a healthy middle class of users with vote up and down, and edit tag privileges? Does it have a healthy governing class of users with edit, close, and moderation privileges? All of this requires sufficient reputation, which in turn requires users to exercise their right to vote. …

I voted like crazy on Server Fault early on to help its economy

Dan Grossman

On SO, there's enough reputation going around from answering questions, just because it's so big

Jeff Atwood

of course I only voted up stuff that was good, because doing otherwise would be insane

Tim Post

Some of the most useful stuff I've found on SO had little to no vote love. Granted, it was in some seldom used tags

Jeff Atwood

serverfault.com/users?tab=topvoters&filter=all

wtf, I have 1947 votes on server fault

Jeff Atwood ♦, El Cerrito, CA

3.9k 1 27 50

windows windows-server-2008 networking dns sql-server sql-server-2008 hardware

Sankar Ganesh

8:04 AM

@TimPost: hi,

Tim Post

It's just nice to know that when you are forced into something as psychotic as automake, there is help ....

@SankarGanesh Hello again :)

Jeff Atwood

and yet, I don't show up in the top voters list for Server Fault. BUGS.

Tim Post

Ah yes, when Jeff fails to show up on top, it must be a bug

Dan Grossman

@JeffAtwood I have just lost all faith in the integrity of the system. I now assume all reputation is randomly generated.

Jeff Atwood

this is crap, I am emailing waffles right now

I DEMAND MY RIGHTFUL PLACE ON THE SERVER FAULT TOP VOTERS LIST

Tim Post

8:05 AM

Wow, he must be mad, he's using e-mail.

Geoff Dalgas

sigh you will have your place in the MEH hall of fame

Jeff Atwood

@GeoffDalgas you have your opinion, but I respectfully disagree. It is important to incentivize voting, e.g.

12

Q: What does voting mean and why is it important?

Now that we have graduated out of beta status, the rep requirement levels have bumped up to that of a normal site. This is expected, and a good thing. However, our users' rep levels are not high enough to self-police the community without moderator action. The root of this is caused by a low l...

discussion faq-proposed voting

Tim Post

I thought the meh hall of fame was your local motor vehicle administration office?

Jeff Atwood

> owever, our users' rep levels are not high enough to self-police the community without moderator action. The root of this is caused by a low level of voting from the community.

Geoff Dalgas

yes, however meta.stackoverflow.com/users/5640/geochet was also a top voter

Jeff Atwood

8:08 AM

if you don't think that is important, well, you are wrong

I welcome Rich B's votes, actually -- it's his posts and style of communication that were more problematic

Dan Grossman

Important to you, not to me. I want to create stuff to help other programmers when they search Google, not build your community. :)

Jeff Atwood

BEHOLD THE ONLY META ITEM I SELF-DECLINED

-23

Q: Should we have a policy about "too much downvoting"?

We've never had an explicit policy around downvoting -- users are free to, if they like, cast all their votes as downvotes. Whether this behavior is desirable or not is another matter. Now, we do discourage downvoting by making downvotes cost -1 rep to the casting voter. But, there's nothing in...

discussion status-declined voting down-votes

lately I have really warmed up to lots of downvoting

Pekka

@JeffAtwood me too

Jeff Atwood

perhaps the /review page has broken my mind

Pekka

I went from 5% downvotes to currently 17% in the past few months

Jeff Atwood

8:11 AM

@DanGrossman but voting is how the good stuff goes to the top for your peers

Dan Grossman

@JeffAtwood Google takes into account votes in its search ranking algorithm?

Benjol

@Dan :)

Jeff Atwood

@dan historically, it has listed votes at times, depending on whether its parser can understand our current HTML

Tim Stone

I was actually surprised, there's some decent first content by some new users on /review. I just had to flag everything else to clear the way to see it. ;)

Benjol

"You should vote because we need more votes for moderators" seems a bit... dunno, disjointed?

Jeff Atwood

8:13 AM

where did anyone say that?

Benjol

That's an indirect effect becoming a first cause

Jeff Atwood

If stuff is good, vote for it because it is awesome

Benjol

> However, our users' rep levels are not high enough to self-police the community without moderator action

Jeff Atwood

if stuff sucks, vote it down to get it out of our faces

Pekka

There was a series of questions that broke my mind, along the lines of
- "How can I do (incredibly complex operation involving the fields of AI and OCR and at least weeks of work) in PHP?"
- "you can't, this is a very complex issue. Here's an overview of the current state of affairs in this field: (insert loads of research here)"
- "but I need in PHP"
- "You can't, this is the kind of thing Google has a departmentful of engineers for"
- "but I need in PHP"

2

Jeff Atwood

8:13 AM

well @Benjol you will have to take that up with @RebeccaChernoff

my only point is, without voting, your economy is broken, and your ability to tell "good stuff" from "crap stuff" is also broken

Dan Grossman

@Pekka I want to read that Q :)

Jeff Atwood

@Pekka paging Col. Shrapnel

Tim Stone

@Pekka I think I know one of the specific questions you're referring to, heh.

Benjol

Maybe I just don't have a clear enough idea of what is good/bad/crap. I vote up interesting, I flag off the wall, I close dupes or offtopic, when would I bother to downvote?

Pekka

@DanGrossman I erased any memory of it from my mind :)

@JeffAtwood hahahahahaha!

Jeff Atwood

8:15 AM

@Benjol visit the /review page a bit

Tim Post

Col. Shrapnel has been quite pleasant lately :)

Benjol

@JeffAtwood I did, got my Deputy badge yesterday :) But as I say, I mostly flag, edit or close, what are the cases where I shouldn't do either of those, but should downvote instead?

Dan Grossman

stackoverflow.com/tags/php/topusers

Jeff Atwood

@Benjol when you hate the content so much you want it to die

Tim Stone

@TimPost I got a kick out of his Meta rant yesterday, heh.

Jeff Atwood

8:16 AM

I suppose it depends on your personality, but generally you should downvote when you want to actively disincent that kind of content

Tim Post

<sigh> Another one?

Jeff Atwood

e.g. "this behavior is not acceptable in our house"

Benjol

Ok, when you want to close it but none of the close reasons apply, and you want to flag it but none of the flag reasons apply :)

aka, nuke button :)

Jeff Atwood

also remember that downvotes feed back into "sorry, we are no longer accepting questions from this account."

Geoff Dalgas

anon

94.5k 13 148 405

c++ c stl pointers windows gcc templates

Jeff Atwood

8:17 AM

remember this blog post?

Geoff Dalgas

top downvoter

Jeff Atwood

Stack Overflow Blog: The Pee-Wee Herman Rule

Posted by Jeff Atwood on November 29th, 2010

I recently had a long discussion on gaming meta regarding “Help me remember this game” questions. I’ll spare you all the gory details; my general conclusion was this:

If we get an excellent user who asks a good, thoughtful [game] identification question and sticks around in our community to participate, then it’s worth allowing it in those rare cases as a high quality “getting to know you” fun question.

This reminded me of a conversation I once had on Server Fault Chat about mod rewrite questions. This is a true gray area in our network. It’s tricky, because any given URL rewriting question could legitimately be on topic for multiple sites, each with a different core audience: …

downvoting people's content is encouraging them to seek the exit

Tim Stone

@TimPost Yeah, he was complaining about how people post a lot of crap because they don't find the already-existing questions, and how those questions get mediocre answers. Then it somehow turned into a conspiracy about how SO isn't fixing the problem because question pages generate more ad revenue than the FAQ pages.

Jeff Atwood

@GeoffDalgas that's Neil Butterworth

Tim Post

@TimStone In the PHP tag, it's hard to argue with half of that.

Benjol

8:20 AM

OK, @Jeff, here's a suggestion, combine this April 1st idea with downvoting. Give us a 'nuke' or 'burninator' button which combines the downvote with some satisfying animation (and disappears the question/answer for us, just leaving a pile of smouldering ashes). Make it fun. Whac-a-noob :)

Jeff Atwood

I'm a lot freer with downvotes on meta and (of course) child metas though since the meaning of downvotes there, to me, is "I strongly disagree with this"

@Benjol post it in Ben's meta thingie that is pinned

Benjol

@JeffAtwood (done :)

Tim Stone

@TimPost Well, and that's the thing. Any time he has a point, he goes off to lose it in a sea of random jackassery, heh.

Dan Grossman

Blankman

8.9k 2 47 108

ruby-on-rails c# asp.net java python jquery javascript

Someone should award him a Help Vampire badge

Jeff Atwood

I tend to downvote on non-meta sites when: 1) the post is of extremely low quality 2) the post is actively wrong or harmful in some way. And with #1, those kinds of users tend to be the wrong Pee-Wee Hermans.

Dan Grossman

8:22 AM

I thought you just nuked the questions

Jeff Atwood

eg not the cool red shoe Tequila table dancing kind

Tim Stone

@DanGrossman Heh, it kind of seems like the tag listing shouldn't be in that onebox. "These are the tags that I know absolutely nothing about."

Jeff Atwood

it's really rare for a typical user to produce an extremely low quality post. Either that's ALL you create, or you never do.

Dan Grossman

2 mins ago, by Dan Grossman

Blankman

8.9k 2 47 108

ruby-on-rails c# asp.net java python jquery javascript

+43 questions, and 4 pages of negative vote questions

Benjol

By the way, @waffles, I think you could add non-capitalized 'i's to the metric for determining post quality, there is a strong correlation...

Jeff Atwood

8:24 AM

@Benjol oh that's a great idea

Pekka

@DanGrossman yeah, but he doesn't strike me as one of the totally infernal users. He has many questions that actually make some sense

Tim Post

Folks, the first day of the fourth month is looming .. and it's hard to top unicornify:

30

Q: Careers 2.0 Featured Listing: Web company needs successor for retiring unicorns

You know what day is coming up, right? Just to get you up to speed: Stack Overflow's first April Fool's day came with glitter, cornify buttons, lots of pink, and Comic Sans. Last year, all user avatars turned into unicorn images, provided by a web service created by some weirdo with too much fr...

discussion april-fools

Benjol

You want candidates for the burninate button? : stackoverflow.com/questions/5164094/…

Dan Grossman

Yes, he's an example of someone that creates both good and horrible posts

Jeff Atwood

post it

51

Q: Heuristics for detecting a bad answer?

A lot of bad answers are slipping through the cracks on Stack Overflow. You can see some examples at Thanks a lot for this post ... and other first time user curiosities I've been paging through hundreds of these first answers by new users and I've identified a few heuristics that, when applie...

discussion new-users answer-quality

Benjol

8:26 AM

@JeffAtwood ok

Dan Grossman

@Benjol I wonder if you mapped that correlation on the same graph as self-identifying as being Indian...

Benjol

@DanGrossman eh... I was trying to skip that step and go directly from non-capitalized i's to question quality...

Geoff Dalgas

It seems like the small percentage of people here don't care at all about measuring the # of votes they cast in a given time period against another person.. I will retire back to my lair with a resounding YAWN

Jeff Atwood

@Benjol with enough downvotes that user will hit the "sorry, we are no longer accepting questions.."

Benjol

Correlation between both and nationality is left as an exercise for the reader :)

Jeff Atwood

8:28 AM

he's already quite close

I might just.. nudge him over..

Tim Post

Is it a full moon in Iceland?

Pekka

@Benjol I can see false positives for this, though, e.g. when talking about a variable i

Dan Grossman

Putting such a thing in code would appear too racist anyway.

Benjol

@Pekka good point. How about posts with NO capital letters at all? :)

Pekka

@Benjol they could just be upholding the great traditions of the Red Army Faction :)

Jeff Atwood

8:30 AM

@Benjol we already test for that

Pekka

All their communiqués were in lowercase

Benjol

@Pekka or e.e.cummings :)

Geoff Dalgas

stackoverflow.com/…

Benjol

@JeffAtwood ok, rats...

Jeff Atwood

@pekka there is a length filter on the test so unless the code is tiny it wouldn't be a factor

Geoff Dalgas

8:30 AM

these people should make their mama proud

Pekka

@JeffAtwood But what if he talks about i? Like "when I set i to 0, c changes while i remains unchanged"

Dan Grossman

Does that page really mean there are no SO users at all that have voted between 1 and 10 times?

Pekka

Granted though, it's extremely rare to happen.

Jeff Atwood

no, we cap at 10

@Pekka we can strip pre and code blocks

Dan Grossman

Shoulda guessed that.

Benjol

8:32 AM

@Pekka I'd go with a few false positives, we're talking about review, not some automated downvoting

Pekka

@Benjol true. Upvoted

Dan Grossman

@Pekka I'm still trying to find that question you talked about, with the OCR and such. You've participated in a few about the topic.

2

Q: Image Classification - Detecting Floor Plans

I am working on a real estate website and i would like to write a program that can figure out(classify) if an image is a floor plan or a company logo. Since i am writing in php i will prefer a php solution but any c++ or opencv solution will be fine as well. Floor Plan Sample: Logo Sample:

php image-processing opencv pattern-matching classification

20

A: What is the best way to programatically detect porn images?

This was written in 2000, not sure if the state of the art in porn detection has advanced at all, but I doubt it. http://www.dansdata.com/pornsweeper.htm PORNsweeper seems to have some ability to distinguish pictures of people from pictures of things that aren't people, as long as the pictur...

Pekka

@Dan yeah. I don't remember anymore what the exact question was about where the actual "But I need PHP" quote came from the OP... It might have been OCR, or some other terribly complex form of pattern detection or something

Benjol

@Pekka weren't there a few recently about matlab and image recognition?

@GeoffDalgas Of course, the fact that I can only find myself in any of those lists by bisection doesn't exactly help...

Dan Grossman

0

Q: How to create polarized 3D image using Matlab?

I want to create polarized 3D image using Matlab or C#?. Is any way to create 3D image from any 2D image using Matlab or C#?

c# matlab image-processing image-manipulation

George Marian

8:40 AM

Dang it. I shouldn't have read the back log. Now, I have Tequila stuck in my head.

Tim Stone

Hah

Geoff Dalgas

so it's worthy as a leaderboard @Benjol - not much else unless you enjoy paging

Dan Grossman

3

A: How to create polarized 3D image using Matlab?

Build your own Polarized Stereoscopic Projection System Principles of Polarization Optics Polarized Light Since the late 19th century we know, that light can be described in terms of electromagnetic waves. The theory behind it are the well understood Maxwell Equations. Since this is not an art...

that answer needs upvotes

Geoff Dalgas

on smaller sites it's a little more useful

Benjol

@GeoffDalgas yes, but the problem is that if you have a ranking, automatically you want to know where you are in it...

@JeffAtwood, how about unlocking the upper limit of the flag weight, and dangling a t-shirt at me :)

Geoff Dalgas

8:47 AM

the fact that you can rank in a leader board based on nothing other than clicking a vote button is the fundamental issue I have - it takes very little skill to place in the top N - just click a lot

Jeff Atwood

where does it say "leaderboard" though? It's just top voters

Geoff Dalgas

TOP = leader

Jeff Atwood

it's also pretty heavily suppressed, it is the third tab on the users page

it ain't the home page

we can remove the word top so it just says "voters"

Benjol

@Jeff & @GeoffDalgas, you both missed 'Mr Nice' yesterday, he posted n-identical (and irrelevant) comments in the space of a few minutes, just to get the Commentator badge. So there are some people who do stupid things to game the system...

Jeff Atwood

most community members 'do the right thing', we've seen this proven time and time again

I expect the voting tab to be handled no differently

Benjol

8:50 AM

And in any case, wouldn't your 'magic' system detect someone voting repeatedly in a very short space of time?

Jeff Atwood

not necessarily, it depends on the pattern of votes

Benjol

Having said all that, I think there must be more creative ways to incentivize voting, I just can't think of any right now :)

Dan Grossman

Shares of SOIS for when it goes public, equal to the number of votes cast. :)

Jeff Atwood

we already have four badges for voting: suffrage, sportspmanship, civic duty, electorage -- plus the newbie bronze ones

George Marian

@DanGrossman Nice.

Benjol

8:53 AM

@JeffAtwood, yes but that just incentivizes voting, not 'good' voting. I'm thinking of something like: downvoting makes the post 'disappear' (for me)

Jeff Atwood

also @GeoffDalgas remember that upvoting reduces your rank relative to someone else in other ways, e.g. they move ahead in reputation. Therefore it is QUITE illuminating to see that some of our top users give away as much rep as they have through upvotes

on Super USer there is one notable user who would NEVER vote for other users

eg that user chose not to vote because every vote for an "opponent" reduced his relative rep ranking

it's a complex system

Tim Post

@JeffAtwood What about a "Conduct" badge? "Received zero valid spam or offensive flags for an entire year" ?

Or less than (a very low number)

Jeff Atwood

more interesting than most badge ideas I've heard, but.. I'm kinda meh on it

Benjol

@TimPost I'm guessing most people would get that straight away. (I mean, after a year)

Tim Post

I'm also kinda meh on it, which is why I did not propose it officially

Dan Grossman

8:56 AM

Do spammers read the badge list then conduct themselves according to maximizing their badge count?

tombull89

@TimPost and how would you know until you'd recieved the badge (or not)?

Tim Post

@tombull89 That's part of the 'meh' part

I'd like to find some way to reward people for trying hard not to take advantage of comments as a sort of "community wiki" answer that does not cost them reputation.

Despite the merit of the intent of the poster, most antagonistic comments gather flags.

tombull89

@TimPost unless you have an extra field in your profile saying how may posts (and which ones) have been flagged...but of course you'd get posts edited and demanded that the spam flag removed.

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