Admins should be able to view comment and post voting

[vaniver]

If a user has admin on, they should see the list of upvoters and downvoters for a comment, link, or article (probably in the tooltip that currently shows percentage positive?).

[malob]

Does the list include usernames? Do we want to have this information so readily available?

[vaniver]

@malob yes, it includes usernames.

Right now, if we want to do investigation of either sockpuppets (how did this get so many upvotes) or retributive downvoting (did someone who just lost 100 karma lose it because of one person / sockpuppet ring?), it requires coming up with a SQL query and interacting with Trike support. It's a painful process for everyone involved.

This expedites that process, and makes it so investigations can be done in depth as soon as suspicion appears.

Expediting the process does have the potential for abuse; we don't want an admin getting mad that one of their comments got downvoted, finding all of the people who downvoted it, and punishing them. Are there safeguards that we can put into place to minimize the possibility of abuse?

One idea would be checking to make sure that the user isn't the author of the item.

[malob]

Being able to investigate abuse like that does seem very valuable. I do wonder if it's worth exploring other options though. What about adding some functionality to the site that runs stats on the voting behavior and raises an alert when it catches something of note. (That was just a random idea, no idea if it's feasible.)

I can imagine that LW users may feel uncomfortable with admins having the ability to see all voting activity with such ease.

[xrpd]

Perhaps test at vote time if a particular user's voting pattern is 'unusual' - test to be determined - if so, flag, and then allow admins to see usernames with the unusual_voting flag? This might also help with UI design - by limiting the number of usernames displayed. Any test opens you to gaming though.

[brendanlong]

One relatively simple test is if one user downvotes another a certain number of times in a short period. For our use-case, we'd need some sort of logic for when the downvoting is on the same page (downvoting the same person several times in the same thread is probably not unusual, but downvoting the same person across the site is).