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Yesterday I asked about editing in order to fix an accidental vote. That got me thinking and reading about vote locking. It appears that Shog9 has the definitive answer as to why the vote-lock exists, and these are all very reasonable concerns (as you might expect from a diamond mod). Still, it appears there are plenty of users who feel this "feature" is more of a hindrance than a help.

This got me thinking--there's gotta' be a way to address the concerns without getting in the way of users trying to do legitimate actions.

First, here are some ideas that have already been suggested, but aren't up to snuff:

What I'm NOT seeing is a suggestion to have the system limit the number of vote retractions you can have in a given time period. Right now you have a maximum of 40 votes/day, but we could have a MUCH lower number of vote retractions allowed; for example, 3/week.

If we wanted to get fancy, we could say that you start with 0 retractions allowed (use vote-locking as it is now) and earn more as part of your rep-based privileges (at 100 you get 1/week, at 500 you get 3/week, etc.). There are lots of other ways to spin this as well.

Based on Shog's answer that I referenced earlier, this would address most (if not all) of the present concerns that have been explicitly listed.

That is my primary idea and the one I would like to focus on. As a bonus, I had a couple of other ideas that may not work by themselves, but may spawn a new idea from another user:

  • (To address Shog's 3rd bullet point--toggling votes) Set a limit on the number of times 1 user can vote/retract on any given question/answer. After you hit that number, do any of the following:
    • Don't allow any more vote retractions from that user on that question/answer
    • Start auto-inserting comments like "User PhatWrat retracted a downvote".
    • Have an automated process temporarily ban the user, alert the mods, adjust reputation, or whatever.
  • (To address most concerns, but esp. gaming) The automated process mentioned above could be for vote retractions from a given user in general (not tied to a specific question/answer). It could be especially sensitive to retractions on "competing" answers.
  • (To address the concern about knowing that there's a permanent record) Whenever a vote is retracted, simply pop up a message saying something to the effect "Your vote retraction has been logged."

I suspect these ideas have been considered in the past (esp. the automated processes), but I haven't found anything on here to say why they wouldn't work.

What is the opinion of the community (and more particularly, the mods) on a "vote retraction limit" to be used in place of, or in conjunction with, the current lock-in? Any feedback on the other ideas listed?

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    Hrrrm. Your reasoning aims to optimize vote/retract patterns on posts. Not only is vote/retract a potential issue (e.g. in FGITW situations), I would be curious to see the actual numbers regarding this behavior. I would estimate the pattern at less than 1% (then again, I'm obviously pulling that number out of my rear end).
    – Frédéric Hamidi
    Commented Jun 17, 2015 at 23:45
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    I don't see vote locking as a sufficient issue to warrant that much work, frankly. If you find yourself in the position of having incorrect votes locked in frequently, it's time to slow yourself down and pay more attention to what you're doing so you're not voting incorrectly as much. I had the issue very few times when I first started frequenting SO, and haven't had it happen for several years now.
    – Ken White
    Commented Jun 17, 2015 at 23:54
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    @Ken White: A valid comment, for sure. In the couple of years I've been doing SO, it's happened to me once--thus the proposal for a very low limit (my example was 3/week, but 1/month would make me just as happy). My reason for bringing it up here is because as a read through the other posts, it looks to me like there are several other people who have been hit by this feature at one time or another. It is a problem fresh on my mind that has (what I thought was) a simple solution. Maybe it's more effort than I thought... I don't know...
    – David
    Commented Jun 18, 2015 at 0:02
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    Gonna chew on this for a while; my gut feeling is that Ken is right - the problem just doesn't warrant additional complexity. But I wanna say, this is how you propose changes in an area that's already been talked to death: by demonstrating that you've actually read some of the previous discussions. Kudos.
    – Shog9
    Commented Jun 18, 2015 at 0:02
  • @Shog9 I've managed to wrongly downvote two or three times without being exactly aware of how (something like remove upvote after edit introduces error, attempt to restore upvote after fix). I probably just clicked the wrong thing, but anyway, didn't notice till after vote was locked-in. Embarassing and the first time I managed it I also got two of my answers downvoted later (it was a really dumb question, which I was critical of in comments, so perhaps the recipient "guessed" it was me, even though it wasn't, by intent at least). Eventually found the edit method, but damage was done already.
    – Bill Woodger
    Commented Jun 18, 2015 at 7:35
  • Does the limit only apply to vote retraction without edit, or does it apply to general case?
    – nhahtdh
    Commented Jun 19, 2015 at 3:52
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    @nhahtdh my thought was only for posts without edit.
    – David
    Commented Jun 19, 2015 at 6:44
  • This issue has happened to me, with me having to make an edit to retract a vote because I clicked the wrong button when my computer was lagging.
    – milo.farrell
    Commented Oct 13, 2021 at 16:08

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