I was upvoting for the idea, but then retracted at the suggestion that ANYTHING real takes less than 0.2 programmer-hours.
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 l...
Several people posted recently in a thread on women, mostly espousing feminist views - only to find that someone had declined to respond to their post, but instead browsed their history and downvoted every single comment or article they had ever posted.
I have two questions:
1. Why would you come to a site like this and pollute the karma system? How does it make you smarter? How does it make anyone else on the site smarter?
2. What would be a good technical workaround? In my mind, some system that detects mass-downvoting and flags a user for review would be preferable, but what should happen then? Should the system be more lenient to higher-karma posters? Who should perform the review process? What should be done with those whom the reviewer ascertains are abusing the karma system? I would prefer some kind of lesson that is more corrective than retributive - it seems to me that people who would perform this behavior are exactly the sort of people who need some of the lessons that this site provides. Any ideas?