I filed a feedback report on ask.LO several months ago, but haven't heard anything, so posting here. The ask.libreoffice site doesn't let me vote up good answers because I don't have 5 rep points yet. This is odd and counter-productive, because it prevents new users from validating working answers. Upvoting shouldn't require reputation. Look at how StackOverflow does this. Note that I did try to get reputation. For example, I posted an answer (https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/71044/lo-52-beta-wont-install-on-linux-x64/), but apparently that requires upvotes to give me any rep, and opvotes can only be cast by established members.
These things are handled by the Infrastructure team, not UX. Please go to redmine.documentfoundation.org, project Infrastructure, and file your request there.
Brought the issue onto the table at the engineering steering commitee today. It was decided to keep the voting as it is. The reason is basically to avoid spammer to push their own postings. If your question gets an upvote you gain 10 points, so the barrier is quite low. And finally the actual question about 5.2 beta is outdated meanwhile.
@Heiko: let me see if understand that reasoning correctly. You said "The reason [for denying upvoting until the user gets reputation] is basically to avoid spammer to push their own postings." This doesn't make sense to me. Here's why: 1. I was already able to post an answer without any reputation. A spammer can just post a spam answer. The lack of upvoting won't help clean that spam answer. Other mechanisms, such as flagging should be in place. Please look at StackOverflow. 2. How much of a problem has spam been, actually? What exactly can spammers do if they can upvote existing answers, which as shown above, shouldn't be spam? 3. The point of a Q&A site is to *avoid* questions, by creating a repository of questions that users can find via web searching. This means that most users will *not* need to ask new questions, so they won't get the 10 points. Most users will find an answer on ASK.LO, and will want to upvote the answers that worked for them. But now they can't. 4. The 1% rule[1] indicates that the vast majority of users are visitors, not creators of content (questions or answers). We should make it possible for this vast 99% majority to be able to vote, without having to ask some dummy question, then hope for an upvote, just in order to get the right to vote. This would actually incite spam. Please reconsider this gamification mechanic. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
Are we going to keep misusing Bugzilla for this, when we have the mailing lists and the Redmine instance as better communication channels for the Infra team?