Exchange Reputation & Voting

Exchange Reputation & Voting

Exchange Reputation & Voting v1 adds lightweight community feedback to published questions and answers.

Voting model

Authenticated Exchange members can cast:

• +1 upvote;
• -1 downvote;
• 0 to remove their existing vote.

Each account can hold at most one current vote for a specific question or answer.

Changing a vote replaces the previous value.

Self-voting

The API rejects votes on content authored by the current user.

This rule is enforced server-side.

Public score

The displayed score is:

sum(all current votes for the content)

Votes are attached to the immutable Exchange user identifier and the target content identifier.

Reputation

A member’s v1 reputation is derived rather than stored as a separate mutable balance.

The score is the sum of current votes received on that member’s questions and answers.

The profile view separates:

• total score;
• question score;
• answer score;
• received vote count;
• published question count;
• published answer count.

Reputation is informational. It does not grant administrator or moderation permissions.

Persistence

Votes are stored in exchange_votes.

A unique database constraint enforces one current vote per:

voter + target type + target id

Removing a vote deletes that current vote row.

Scope and limitations

This v1 does not implement:

• vote-history/audit events;
• public leaderboards;
• reputation thresholds;
• badges;
• vote-based permissions;
• anti-brigading controls;
• dedicated per-action rate limiting;
• automated fraud scoring.

The existing Exchange write gate still applies to vote writes.

Voting is intentionally separate from moderation authorization.