###Do not lightly downvote salvageable content or dupes, please!

Ever since we started this discussion here we can observe a significant increase in down voting. This is done far more often on questions than on answer, presumably because downvoting questions does not cost you any of your own reputation.

Some of the down votes are well thought and justified, but it is my feeling that this is far not always the case. We can see quite a few questions where downvotes were cast even before the OP had any chance to respond to comments or improve their questions.

Let me quote from the [guidelines for downvoting][1] in the Stackexchange network:

>- Use your downvotes whenever you encounter an **egregiously** sloppy, **no**-effort-expended post, or an answer that is clearly and perhaps dangerously incorrect.  
- The up-vote privilege comes first because that's what you should focus on: pushing great content to the top. **Down-voting should be reserved for extreme cases.** It's not meant as a substitute for communication and editing.

As we may develop our own voting guide for Ask Ubuntu it is my believe that we should not go too far off the Stackexchange Network practise. 

If we simply used the tooltip ("This question don't show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful.") as a guide we may prematurely vote down a question that will not fall into the categories *"egregiously sloppy"*, *"no-effort"*, or *"extreme case"*. This will needlessly lead to confusion and irritation especially from new users. This may eventually lead to users not coming back, or not daring to ask again.

This is not what we want. We want to be a place open for new users. We therefore should help them to become better. This is to my strong believe better be done by

1. **Edit**
2. **Ask for clarification**
3. vote to **close** if the question meets a close reason which can not be resolved from an edit.

Use your downvotes only on questions that are really not worth any effort. This will then show others that this question is not worth to be read. But keep in mind: this will also affect probably good answers on that question.

In case you still felt like having to downvote a question for lack of details, or otherwise inappropriate content: **Please do come back to see if the question was edited** to be able to revert your downvote. This sadly does not happen too often.


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As per request here some examples of the last 30 days:

- https://askubuntu.com/questions/338052/how-to-make-google-chrome-work-after-a-host-name-change  
 **-3:** Beginner who couldn't figure out what to do with an error message. They even came back and answered our questions from comments. Now at -3 it will be unlikely someone cares to read and help.

- https://askubuntu.com/questions/338543/install-libopencv-dev-32bit-on-12-04-64bit  
 **-3:** The OP needed help on broken packages with Multi Arch. We may not be able to resolve this but the question *per se* is neither sloppy nor effortless nor extreme.

- https://askubuntu.com/questions/338674/video-display-problems  
 **-3:** An absolute Ubuntu novice is faced with severe video issues. They even posted a screenshot. The question needs more details alright, but it had downvotes without asking for clarification when I made my comment 5 hours after it was posted.

- https://askubuntu.com/questions/338675/what-are-some-good-low-spec-and-free-games  
 **+1/-4:** This is an opinion based question - no debate - but it is clearly written and all information needed was given. Why not close it as dupe of the games question? This would not have led to these many auto-downvotes.

- https://askubuntu.com/questions/332969/who-do-i-have-to-pay-for-support-on-ufw  
 **-5:** They asked for an API documentation but they chose a poor question title. What if we had edited the title to *"Where do I find a documentation for UFW?"*. The question has an upvoted and accepted answer. By this it is now a **downvote trap** because the OP can not even delete it (even if they better edited the title IMO).

- https://askubuntu.com/questions/334939/can-i-try-out-ubuntu-without-deleting-windows  
 **+1/-8:** This is only a dupe of almost the same question which has 32 upvotes.

- https://askubuntu.com/questions/335456/system-report-and-phishing-help  
 **-11:** This is a poor question, no doubt. It was closed as NARQ which is fine. But why did that many downvotes follow then? Why don't we have a single "delete" vote up to now? This will not help anybody. In fact rewriting the question to something on how to perform penetration tests in Ubuntu would not be that bad, would it? Nobody will care to do that at this question's rate now.

  [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/vote-down