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Here is what happened:

  1. Asked this question at work yesterday afternoon
  2. Watched it for a bit.
  3. Went home and up-voted the answer by Jared (and made some other votes I think)
  4. Came to work this morning, and still had the tab open, so I tried to refresh the page, but accidentally down-voted Jared's answer, (so it changed my up-vote to a down-vote).
  5. Tried to change the vote back to an up-vote, but couldn't! It says the answer would need to be edited (because of time I guess).

I know there are timing rules on when votes could be changed... but this sounds like a bug right?

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    Well since you were trying to up-vote my answer it sounds like a bug to me :D
    – Jared
    Oct 9, 2009 at 13:12

1 Answer 1

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They changed the system (to prevent potential vote abuse) so that you can only take away your votes if the post has been revised.

If you have enough reputation to edit the post yourself, you can revise the post and then it will release you from the vote lock.

This doesn't do much to prevent vote abuse, IMO, and more than anything it just leads to users frustrated and revising things that don't need revising just so they can get their vote back.

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    I agree it doesn't do too much, except for the following: it provides transparency. Anyone can see those edits, and if they are no-op edits, you can take a pretty good guess at why they were made.
    – Matthew Scharley
    Oct 9, 2009 at 13:13
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    @Matthew Scharley: You can make a guess about why they were made, but you can't always put a motive behind it. If I go and vote someone down. Then they make a comment that makes me realize I voted the wrong way, I would have to go in and edit their post for no reason just to take my vote away (or to switch it to an up). If you came around and saw that I made a useless edit, you could then sit there and make an accusation that I edited so I could do some rigging with the sort order of the answers, when in reality I was actually correcting a mistake on my part.
    – TheTXI
    Oct 9, 2009 at 13:15
  • But I was able to change my vote... why can't I change it back right away?
    – John B Staff
    Oct 9, 2009 at 13:16
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    @SkippyFire: because the post has not been revised since you last voted. This was done a few months ago as an attempt to prevent people from "gaming the system" by quickly downvoting someone to push them down the list of answers and then revoking their downvote once they themselves had gained enough of a lead.
    – TheTXI
    Oct 9, 2009 at 13:18
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    @TheTXI: Don't get me wrong, I find it annoying too more often than not. But I do still feel it necessary to point that one little detail out whenever someone says there's no benefit to it. Also, it does stop anyone <3k rep from abusing the system at all, and one would think that anyone >3k rep wouldn't feel the need to anymore. One can hope anyway.
    – Matthew Scharley
    Oct 9, 2009 at 13:24
  • hard to abuse what is visible and apparent to all -- undoing votes is 100% invisible. making edits is 100% VISIBLE.
    – Jeff Atwood
    Oct 9, 2009 at 23:22

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