Why the inconsistency - rating system?

I don't know, maybe something with server, issues. But, can we bring the debate about the voting system to this thread as well?

"Maybe we should remove the voting because it is inconsistent."
"No, keep the voting because it's easy to see the useless posts."
"Remove it because it only causes trouble with 'you downvoted me' 'he up voted you...'"
"KEEP ALL THE VOTES!!!"

 

Please note, my posts was simply for entertainment purposes. I don't want that discussion anywhere else but it's own thread, nor did I have any intention of starting that discussion somewhere else.

 

I'd vote for a 4 week moving histogram of up and down votes per day, displayed as a sparkline.

 

He could have been serious. If MR ever got enough visits and votes then perhaps, but otherwise it's not feasible.

That said, you're right about the breakdown-- if they are going to show votes, they might as well show the total breakdown. A 0 could be -20/+20, which would be a controversial comment.

 

It would show when the activity (up and down votess) happened. If there's a total of 100 votes on a post, I'd like to know if they all came at once, shortly after it was posted, or whether there's an ongoing stream of readers actually reading it and voting on it. It's just more detailed data, and because it's a sparkline, it occupies a small amount of space.

It wouldn't have to be time-limited at 4 wks. It could taper off non-linearly, so the first 1/4 of the graph can represent all recorded votes older than 3 wks, with the first point everything older than 9 wks (3+6), the next 6 represent weekly votes, and 3/4 of the graph is just plain linear (3 wks).

Not that I expect this to happen. Nor do I expect the separate up and down counts to happen either.