Many times when I read threads, I keep on upvoting for the reason being that if someone has put an effort to write a big answer, s/he/it should get some rewards for it.
I recently saw someone getting suspended for voting irregularities.
So, I was wondering if I use the total amount of votes allowed per day, daily, will I be suspended?
There's three common types of irregular patterns that we discourage (and actively detect):
The first case should seem obviously wrong to anyone that understands that cheating isn't a good thing for people to do. We allow multiple accounts, but they should never vote for each other.
The second becomes a problem if low quality posts receive more positive votes than they should, especially if it causes them to out score much better information. We have an implied contract with everyone that finds our site - the best information should be at or near the top. Breaking that is, well, bad.
It's okay if you vote for your friends occasionally, but:
The third is a problem because that sort of perceived hostility can be very detrimental to the community, especially if you cause someone to lose a privilege that they recently unlocked. It goes back to voting based on the quality and technical merit of the post, not the person that wrote it. This often manifests when someone sees one low quality post, then goes through the profile of the user that wrote it and down votes additional posts in short succession. We strongly discourage this, but generally only issue a warning if it's apparent that you were focused on quality alone.
If you see that a user is consistently contributing low quality posts, it's time to flag for a moderator's attention, don't take it upon yourself to down vote everything and restore justice to the universe.
Other than that, we try to stay out of your business when it comes to voting, because we feel that you should feel free to vote as you choose without being held accountable for it later - provided that you're doing it honestly.
You have nothing to worry about, you are using your votes absolutely the way they should be used. You get to decide for yourself when to vote and on what to vote, and using effort as a measure of post quality to help you decide to vote is great!
Voting irregularities are voting patterns aimed at defrauding the site, by trying to gain votes for yourself or someone else in a dishonest manner. Some examples would be:
Creating a separate account just to vote yourself up (sock puppeting).
Working with friends to vote one another up regardless of post quality (a voting ring).
Continuously serial voted someone (vote for one person's post regardless of quality, up and down).
There are automated processes in place to revert the occasional serial vote, but repeatedly voting on someone, especially if there are other connections (IP address, other patterns that connect you with the other account) then that could also be seen as a voting irregularity.
But if you open a user's profile and upvotes his/her posts (especially in a short period of time) then this is serial voting which is not allowed.
Or if you create another account and start upvoting posts of your first account then this is a voting irregularity.
wait - what? shouldn't I upvote these 2 amazing answers?!but ofc I should; :P