Down votes should be closely monitored by administrators/moderators

Question

In Help Center we can find: When to upvote and downvote posts?

When should I vote down?

Don't hesitate to vote posts down if you feel that they are not useful to the community, when they are unclear or when they are completely incorrect. For serious problems with the post, consider flagging it as per the instructions in What are flags and when should they be used?

It is a good idea to leave a comment together with the downvote so that the author or other users know how to improve this post.

I see a lot of down votes on our website in last days. I can even risk and say people more down vote than up vote! For exemple, the top  member on TibiaQa (he is active on TibiaQa since Aug 21, 2018) gave out 362 up votes and 12 down votes. Another member active since Jul 29 (3 months) gave out 39 up votes and 29 down votes.

People lose energy for searching longer informations. For example question asked 4 days ago: 

https://www.tibiaqa.com/7860/how-to-get-all-the-ingredients-needed-for-the-dishes-the-hot-cuisine-event

It is possible to answer that question, but it will take at least 25 minutes to write a good answer and if someone down votes it without any reason, it will be a waste of time.

A few examples of questions/answers that were negatively assessed:

Answered by Beix:

https://www.tibiaqa.com/7777/is-there-way-to-view-list-of-all-fully-unlocked-monsters-from-my-bestiary#a7787

Asked/ answered by Tynusiiaa

https://www.tibiaqa.com/7937/is-possible-to-get-more-than-one-silver-raid-token-from-raids

Asked by Loreffy

https://www.tibiaqa.com/7820/how-to-upgrade-falcon-shield-into-a-falcon-escutcheon

Asked/ answered by FPoPP

https://www.tibiaqa.com/7660/is-there-any-possibility-to-get-experience-while-offline

In my opinion, all votes should be more closely monitored by administrators/moderators to prevent abuse. For example: If I want to downvote an answer, I would have to write a reason why - seen only by administrators/moderators, and if the reason is plausible and gets approved, only then my vote would be cast.

I hope that everyone who thinks that TibiaQa's down vote system should be improved leaves an answer/comment on this post.

Comments

Thanks for starting this topic, Loreffy. I think Tynusiiaa managed to summarise the problem well - the most common misuse of downvotes is on own answers - which are legal and much encouraged. It should be our priority to communicate this to the community.

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agree. Would be good to put face on the author of the 'chrime' but I know at the same time it would be counterproductive

Answer 1

True. I don't understand why people behave this way. Answers to questions and answers to your own questions are legal, the points system for this is changing and instead of cool technical support, you should only excuse yourself. I agree with you.

Comments

I completely agree with this. Most of the downvotes that I see, seem to be driven by the lack of understanding that answering own questions is not only allowed but VERY MUCH wanted. Finding a way to communicate this to the users should be our priority.
https://meta.tibiaqa.com/484/why-do-we-allow-answering-own-questions

Answer 2

I just acess my page now and for my surprise take a look at this:

9 downvotes in sequence, surely someone is doing it in  a premeditated way and with bad intent. I made a quicly review at this post and there is no reason for that. There are some ppl that just want to harm other members.

There is a way to identify the acc? If possible to reverse the downvotes too.

Comments

What can I say? At least the "problem" was identified and solved. Raven you might use QAMeta, it's a easier way to answer this kind of doubt and would avoid all this mess ^^

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Beix now I'm laughing too rsrs

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yeah I don't use QAMeta that much XD but it was funny :P I didn't know it was possible to give that many downvotes but maybe I should've asked here =/

(well only this case was my fault all the other random downvotes comes from other users)

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Im sorry to see this, I got 2 downvotes in 10 minutes on a perfectly good question and I don't see why? I think explanations should be required for why they downvote

Answer 3

The voting system in general should be watched. Some questions / answers without quality get high amounts of votes while others with high quality don't get any votes at all.

Also for downvoting:

Don't hesitate to vote posts down if you feel that they are not useful to the community

This is very vague. I vote up / down a question based on quality. Being a valid question doesn't mean that the question has quality and is good for the community. I tend to downvote very easy to answer questions as having the front page filled with questions that can be answered with one simple in-game or wiki search will only drive away new users. Also for answering up I try to give prestige to answers that are more than a copy paste from wikis and have extra knowledge from it.

Furthermore this system is very heavy on new users. If someone make wrong question the tendency is to downvote it and lock the question without giving the opportunity for the user to fix it. 

Answer 4

It could also be a lack of understanding from the user base regarding question utility. I feel as if some people may be downvoting due to their personal view of some questions being posted as unuseful.

Answer 5

I wanted to submit this as an answer and suggest if there's a way that in order to downvote it's required to have an explanation or some sort of reasoning as to why someone down voted. If I recieve a down vote and I don't get an explanation I'm a little confused but definitely want to improve

Comments

I agree with you, sometimes it can feel personal somehow, an explanation would be cool

Answer 6

I was against making downvotes public, but since I'm getting more and more downvotes even for best answers without any reason I started to think, that it would be a good idea. In my opinion giving a reason of downvotes should be obligatory.

Answer 7

Perhaps a stickied post at the top of the Question threads retelling the rules.

I am pretty new here and am loving the site... but I had no idea posting answers to your own questions was not only allowed, but encouraged.  Seen a few people do it but am not really into downvoting, just thought if it was a problem the admins were the one  to deal with it.

Good to know I can feel free to upvote these posts now

Answer 8

I really think I can answer this, the community itself is not very good (a bit toxic) but I think the main motivation is that a regular Tibia player is a guy who has been in this for many years (he knows 90 % of the game and its mechanics), so when new players decide to consult something, older players feel offended or consider the question absurd. They believe that the questions are at the level of their knowledge which is not correct.