Meta: Down Voting and Analytics

There has been a decent amount of chatter over the increase in frequency of down votes. As a reminder of when to down vote, "if someone flames or wages a personal attack, then down vote. Do not down vote for disagreeing with someone's opinion. In general, vote up way more often than you vote down."

I spent my lunch reviewing the logs and there is almost no abuse of the system. In all, only 330 people have ever down voted a user. For a rapidly growing site with over 2,400 users, that's not bad at all. I quantified my statement of, "vote up way more often than you vote down", at 20%. Only 44 people down voted >= 20% of the time. 14 of those 44 folks had single < 10 total votes. I sent an email out to some of the folks >= 20% and >= 10 votes, and a few others who had curious habits. (Voting for things that were innocent.) There are also some "power voters", who have down voted over hundreds of things, but have up voted in the thousands. I thought that was rather interesting.

After the Duke loss, a few folks who had sparse commenting history hopped on the site to rant, then mildly flame replies that countered their opinion. I'm going to need to figure out how to deter that in the future. However, for what the Internet is, and compared to other Hokie websites, I'm pretty proud of how everyone conducted themselves after the loss. I'm not going to say from who, but a father of one of our current starters emailed me to let me know how much he thought of the site and discussions on it after the game. Thank you to everyone who posts, comments, and makes this a fun place to hang out and discuss Hokie football.