The upvote tooltip says:
This question shows research effort; it is useful and clear.
The downvote tooltip says:
This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful.
Sometimes, a question can show research effort, be useful, be clear, but just not in the good place. Voting to close the question and downvoting seems like a double penalty.
Should an off-topic question always be downvoted ?
That's the whole point of having two distinct review systems. Use your up and down votes to comment on the question's quality and your close votes to comment on its topicality. While there's certainly no shortage of questions that should be both downvoted and close voted, there's also no reason to downvote a well defined and thoroughly researched question that just happened to be posted on the wrong site.
Use your up and down votes to comment on the question's quality and your close votes to comment on its topicality I hope every one read this part at least :)
Commented
Oct 2, 2013 at 5:28
Sometimes, yes.
In the new 'off topic' list, several of the options are inextricably linked to quality problems. For example, when a question is 'pls send the codez', we close it as off topic, 'question must show minimal understanding ...' These deserve both close votes and downvotes.
No. Only if it's unclear, not useful, or does not show research effort.
For instance: I'm active on Role-playing Games Stack Exchange, which is about tabletop RPGs (think Dungeons & Dragons) and LARPs. It is not about video game RPGs. The name is confusing, though, so every month or two we get a question about Fallout or Skyrim or something else. We close these as off topic. There's no need to downvote them, though, and nobody does - unless they're really terribly written.
Voting for closing the question + downvoting seems a double penalty.
Voting to close the question isn't a penalty. It's just closing the question to keep the site clean. You are only penalised in that you don't get questions from that particular SE site, which you shouldn't have been looking for from there to begin with.
There is no requirement to upvote anything. There is no requirement to downvote anything. There is no requirement to vote at all.
Vote as you see fit.
Aside from serial vote detection, no one will know how you vote, or don't vote, unless you say so.
On Drupal Answers, there are often questions that appear to meet your:
Sometimes, a question can show research effort, be useful, be clear, but just not in the good place.
And they are in wrong place because OP didn't bother to check if it isn't generic HTML issue, CSS fix or something that happens with his Apache server no matter if it's Drupal or his own custom script.
Don't know about general approach, but automatic -1 (is it still working) and sometimes manual downvotes seems justified. For manual, it shouldn't be a rule either way.
While I tend to agree with the other answers here which say that you should not downvote, I want to indicate one exception: off topic (usually programming) questions here on Meta Stack Exchange.
Since MSE does not have its own dedicated moderators, and since the traffic here is pretty low, we (the active high rep users, I believe I can speak as one) tend to moderate the site ourselves and keep it clean as much as we can, without involving SE employees who have the diamonds.
Technically, 20k rep user can delete a closed question right away only when it has score of -3 or less. Hence, downvoting is required as part of the cleanup. That is the reason I downvote off topic questions here, even if they're "good" on their own, if asked in the proper place.
If I see a "good" off topic question here on MSE with score low enough for deletion I usually won't downvote further. But if I see a "bad" question, which I'd downvote anyway even if posted in correct site, I'd downvote here as well regardless of its current score.
