I wonder if there can be a race condition, when a comment is started before its parent is downvoted to −3, but submitted after, resulting in an unexpected karma burn.
I guess a workaround would be to open the parent in another window and check its vote before hitting “comment”… And if it is already at −2, maybe think a bit first :)
I hope that this half-assed mis-implementation gets fixed eventually. Incidentally, my earlier suggestion to only apply karma burn when the offending comment’s author has negative monthly karma would largely take care of the race condition as well, if the warning message pops up based on the monthly karma. Something along the lines of “do you really think it’s a good idea to reply to someone with negative karma?”
Yeah, that sounds like a much better solution than what we’ve got. Your workaround should also work—and would be made a bit more safe by applying the reversible vote trick, though that’s a borderline exploit—but I wouldn’t be surprised to find other issues; the different parts of the karma system here don’t always synchronize perfectly.
I wonder if there can be a race condition, when a comment is started before its parent is downvoted to −3, but submitted after, resulting in an unexpected karma burn.
Yes. That happened to me yesterday; not only does it produce karma loss, but the warning message doesn’t pop up.
I guess a workaround would be to open the parent in another window and check its vote before hitting “comment”… And if it is already at −2, maybe think a bit first :)
I hope that this half-assed mis-implementation gets fixed eventually. Incidentally, my earlier suggestion to only apply karma burn when the offending comment’s author has negative monthly karma would largely take care of the race condition as well, if the warning message pops up based on the monthly karma. Something along the lines of “do you really think it’s a good idea to reply to someone with negative karma?”
Yeah, that sounds like a much better solution than what we’ve got. Your workaround should also work—and would be made a bit more safe by applying the reversible vote trick, though that’s a borderline exploit—but I wouldn’t be surprised to find other issues; the different parts of the karma system here don’t always synchronize perfectly.
A related note: You can sometimes get around the karma burn by upvoting a comment that’s at −3, commenting, and then reversing your upvote after.