I think that something like that might help, but I think ET or JB would really need to take a close look at forumbuildr statistics first. Are there really enough people voting who aren’t submitting any forum ideas at all, so that enough entries will be eliminated in order to make voting manageable? I think it would be extremely discouraging if people had to page through a huge mbum of entries that never decreases, or if their own entries just never got voted on because of the increased quantity of entries. And due to how the forum ideas with more votes are weighted to appear earlier in the voting list, a larger batch of entries means that the entry that gets an early lead will run away with a win even more quickly.

I also don’t necessarily think it’s group voting that is causing this. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some of that going on, but you have to understand that the people who are downvoting are also simultaneously being downvoted themselves, and this happens as individual-level behavior that’s done out of individual self-interest. So some weeks, it’s a big race to 0 or -5, and nobody gets many positive votes at all until the morning. Then, you’re lucky if everything you submitted isn’t gone. There might be another week where the Sunday voting is relatively generous, and you actually do miss out if you held off on submitting. But I think it’s much more common for the earliest-submitted entries to get pummeled by everybody. And this of course happens on a much larger scale when there’s some flamebate thread or community voting campaign that whips people up into a frenzy of dissatisfaction and downvoting, and then everybody who’s submitted entries has to pay for it.