The downvoting is fairly open to the usual ‘abuse’ that goes on with all buildr stuff. The image that’s currently solo winning the itembuildr was almost voted off early on, while some others were voted up.

Easiest thing seems to be to put the removal votes much lower (and by lower, I mean -15 or such), or to just scrap getting rid of entries. Makes it easier to vote later on but by then, you’ll probably have lost lots of good entries for dull ones, just because they were downvoted to remove the competition. It won’t fix things completely (people’ll still rally up support for theirs) but it’ll help level things a bit.