Reputation reference

Post votes and reputation#

Members can upvote (+1), downvote (-1), change their vote, or undo it. Each member has at most one vote per post and cannot vote on their own posts. Repeating the same explicit vote is idempotent. Votes do not grant permissions, ranks or other privileges. Votes are allowed in locked discussions; locks still prevent ordinary replies.

Voting requires a verified, nonbanned account, current forum visibility and the post.vote permission. This permission is configurable by forum/group and defaults to members, moderators and administrators on installation and upgrade. Guest readers and other nonvoters see counts without interactive voting controls. Voter identities are not publicly listed.

Post counts and scores ignore banned voters. Author reputation sums votes only on undeleted posts in undeleted discussions in forums the current viewer can access. The profile and author display may therefore show different totals to different viewers. Banning a voter removes their influence from all displayed totals without deleting the ledger; unbanning restores it. Soft-deleting a post/discussion removes its influence, while restoring it restores the votes. Hard deletion cascades vote rows.

Administration → Community settings → Post votes and reputation enables or disables the feature. It defaults to enabled. Disabling hides counts, scores and controls, rejects vote/reset mutations, and retains existing votes. Re-enabling restores them.

Abuse controls apply to the signed-in member, never a submitted actor ID. The named request throttle permits 60 voting/reset requests per minute. New or changed nonzero votes permit 20 per minute and 200 per 24-hour window per member, plus 20 per 24-hour window against each target author (each window starts with its first counted cast). Repeating the same value and undoing a vote do not consume casting allowances; the general request throttle still applies. Operators may adjust these limits in config/reputation.php. Current authorization and actor status are rechecked under row locks. Casting and resets serialize with discussion moderation; unique post/member keys prevent duplicate concurrent votes.

Use the existing post report controls to flag vote abuse. Moderators who can view and moderate the current forum can reset all votes on a post after giving a meaningful reason and confirming permanent removal. Reset audit records contain the post ID and reason, with no voter identities or unrestricted scores. Administrators can also deny voting permissions or ban abusive voters. There is no automated fraud detection or reputation leaderboard in this phase.