It has recently come to my attention that the Like/Dislike system is not yet perfect.

In particular, since participation in the system is not consistent, you have some over-vocal members who disproportionately influence what the "popular opinion" is on CathInfo. That goes for posts, as well as members.

Considering that CathInfo is the best Catholic forum on the Internet (and is known as such), with some of the best Catholics (at least among those who go online), that is very dangerous for the reputation of Tradition.

So the solution is obvious -- the circuit breakers need to be more sensitive to "over-participation" by the more vocal. The thresholds have thereby been dropped, so now you can only be 18% of a person's downvotes, or 20% of their upvotes, before your votes are rejected.

I also changed the error message:

Why not pray for X?

If this post by X is so bad, I'm sure others will notice it too. They will give a thumbs-down for you.

You'll only see that message if you downvote someone excessively, disproportionate to what the rest of the forum does. If someone is unpopular, you might have to downvote 150 times to get this message! But with someone extremely popular, you might only get a few before this happens.

Since the thumbs up/thumbs down buttons are apparently a source of trouble, why not remove that feature?  We can all learn to get along without them and if there is a strong opinion regarding another member's post, one can always give expression to that opinion with the reply button.

I agree. Matt, that and the anonymous subforum have proven disastrous. There's nothing wrong with removing them. They are not necessary.

Hmm...

I think the time spent 'fixing' the feature, and your explanation of the challenge assumes that anyone uses anyone's popularity or upvote/downvote totals to guage their own, or anyone else's, posts?

I don't care if someone has a thousand downvotes and 1 up, if their next post makes sense and is true, it makes sense and is true.

Period.

Every post you make here you have an opportuntiy to start over for the better or the worse(!) I might add.

That's the number of critics. A total of 4 people have given you a down-thumb, but they might have each given you more than one.

Hmm...

I think the time spent 'fixing' the feature, and your explanation of the challenge assumes that anyone uses anyone's popularity or upvote/downvote totals to guage their own, or anyone else's, posts?

I don't care if someone has a thousand downvotes and 1 up, if their next post makes sense and is true, it makes sense and is true.

Period.

Every post you make here you have an opportuntiy to start over for the better or the worse(!) I might add.

In theory, yes.

But this isn't a forum of non-Catholics, Novus Ordo Catholics, liberal Catholics, worldly Catholics, etc.

Any downvotes below 5 or 6 is just "noise" -- your own personal gallery of critics has done its thing, and everyone has fans and critics.

But I have yet to see a post with more than 10 downvotes that can be considered good. When "the people of CathInfo" speak, they have been right in 100% of the cases I've ever seen -- ever since the creation of the feature.

Now it would be hard to prove this, since I occasionally have to purge the "likes" database.

But in my experience, when a post gets more than 8 or 9 "dislikes", the post might as well be deleted because it's obviously garbage. This gets proven again and again.

Can you recall any post with more than, say, 8 or 9 downvotes that was worth anything?  

NOTE: If it has 10 downvotes but 9 upvotes, that doesn't count. That's obviously a very controversial post.

Moral of the story: The value of voting is only as good as the membership doing the voting. CathInfo is a body of serious Traditional Catholics. It's hard for a good post to get TEN downvotes from a body of serious Catholics. And like I said, it's never happened yet.

A few days ago, I glanced at my numbers and they seem to have gone down for no reason.  Both good guys and bad guys, lol.  

When the database gets about 50,000 likes/dislikes, I have to trim it down a bit so the computer CathInfo lives on doesn't have to work quite so hard...

That's how many Likes there were, too. Well over 50,000 -- and that's only a few months' worth!

That's the number of critics. A total of 4 people have given you a down-thumb, but they might have each given you more than one.

So there are 4 people make a point of down-thumbing my posts whenever they can?  That's pathetic.

There are plenty of pathetic down voters, but as Matthew said thy rarely get you more than a few down votes per post.  

I honestly see no real purpose to the thumbs up/down.  I don't use it. If I have an issue with someone's post, I'll tell them to their face.