Proposal: Voting Bonanza

Question

We just ended the The Great 5 Year Anniversary Bounty Bonanza - CLOSED - mts won and it was a great success.

However one thing I personally found discouraging is the low number of votes attracted by the bonanza. In general it has been found that we are not voting enough before.

Voting is good. Voting is important. It expresses your opinion on something, if you found it useful or interesting or not. It gives feedback to the poster and encourages people to post. High voting activity makes questions go hot and attracts users from other sites to our site.
Voting is also cheap. It costs you no rep if upvoting and only minimal rep when downvoting. It can be reversed once a post has been edited. And you can vote on up to 40 questions and answers per day.

And IMHO we are not doing it enough. That is why I suggest a Voting Bonanza.

The idea is easy:

• All participants register up to the day prior. Everyone registered on Travel and with enough rep to vote can participate.
• For the duration of the Voting Bonanza, every participant commits to voting (up or down, it doesn't matter) on the maximum allowed 40 questions and answers per day.
• Who does not reach the maximum number of votes on any given day is out.
• The last participant is the winner or, if there are more than one participants standing at the end (I suggest one month), there are multiple winners.

The idea is to vote on everything. You could look to new posts. Or go through a tag and vote on old posts. Voting on the posts of one person only is discouraged.

As for time, since July has begun already and August is a typical travel month even or especially for us, I would look to do this Bonanza in September or October.

Edit: In response to concerns raised in comments and chat:

• It is easily possible to verify the number of votes cast via the Activities Tab of each participants user profile on Travel SE. There on the bottom right you will find a summary of voting activity looking like this
  and in this example the user has cast 26 votes on 1 July and 1 vote on 2 July. These counts are cached but I assume the counts are cached in the same way for the day-count and the month-count, so one can always verify for the whole month excluding today. E.g. on the 31st of a month, votes_month - votes_day should be 30 days * 40 votes/day = 1200 votes.

• Yes people can vote for anything. They can already do so now without any bonanza. I would err on the side of trusting users (especially those active enough on here to get wind of this Bonanza) to cast useful votes (and who of us is to judge).

• One positive side effect might well be that as we are looking for posts to vote on, we will find many older questions were vote correction is needed or might come across posts that need a new answer given that circumstances have changed or we know more now. Or we find old posts that can be closed as dupes.

Answer 1

This kind-of reminds me of the Vote early, vote often hat of last year’s Winterbash. That one required 250 votes across seven days, meaning an average of just under 36 votes a day.

Which leads me directly to my criticism and improvement suggestion: To actually get rid of 40 votes in a day requires voting on questions early enough. That can be hard and easy to forget. I only just realised that yesterday (writing this just after 00:00 UTC) I only managed to vote 37 times because of voting for too many answers. Thus, instead of strictly requiring 40 votes a day, I would propose lowering the number to 35 a day. That’s still a good number of votes but just a tad easier than realising ‘damn, I can only reach 39 today.’ Remember that the number of daily votes is fixed before you can actually see the ‘only five votes remaning’ notice.

Answer 2

The proposal for a Voting Bonanza has been met with much interest, some concern about uncontrolled voting, vote limits and the daily participation, and mostly support.
I propose a precise mode how to conduct the Voting Bonanza, trying to also take into account the concerns mentioned. Please vote (up or down) on this proposal to signal your agreement or disapproval. To suggest small changes to this proposal, make a comment. To suggest a different approach please post another answer and mark it as a proposal. Finally if you see more need for discussion, post an answer that is identifiable as for discussion (like the one of @Jan).

Proposal

• The competition goes over four weekly rounds. Weeks are counted by the update of the SE data explorer, i.e.

The data is updated early every Sunday morning around 3:00 UTC. The last update was Jul 3 at 6:30.

• Participants have to register before the Bonanza starts on a meta post to be established.
• To stay in the competition, each participant has to cast at least 240 votes in each week (corresponding to six days of maximal voting, but can be split in any way across the competition week).
• The number of votes is counted by this query, where the number of votes is determined before and after each week and the number of votes per week is determined as the difference. Votes intends upvotes and downvotes on questions and answers but not votes on comments, close-votes or similar. (Participant IDs will be hardcoded into the query, those present now are sample IDs.)
• If after four weeks there is more than one participant standing, the winner will be chosen as the one with the highest number of votes during the Voting bonanza.