Alright, I’m a buildr newb, but I have a suggestion. Since this is the stickied “fix buildr” thread, hopefully I’m not going off-topic.

I’ve thought of a fix that I believe allows us to keep the benefit of downvoting (reduce the amount of crap voters have to wade through) and eliminate the major downside (reduce options for voters, sometimes to nothing). It can be implemented in Item and Forumbuildr without wrecking either. And hopefully, it’s simple to implement.

Below “More Random Submissions”, add an option to “See Random Downvoted Submissions”. Boom.

Now, when there’s only 21 submissions, and 20 are downvoted, voters have an option beyond “Vote out this last bad submission.” No one has to wade through downvoted submissions in any buildr, but anyone can. Ideas that were already voted below the cutoff continue to accrue downvotes if they were really bad, but they can be resurrected back to (at least) -4 status if they were just obsessively downvoted for no good reason. Theoretically, truly bad ideas will stay out of sight of those who don’t want to see them, while ideas with potential at least get a chance.

On Forumbuildr, this’ll probably have very little effect. It’s unlikely users are going to want to wade through pages and pages of rejected ideas.

On Itembuildr, where there’s a lot fewer submissions to look through, people are more likely to want to see them all, which might allow some worthwhile images etc to make it to the finals.

TL;DR: Just add a bumon to allow users to vote on downvoted submissions.

That’s my suggestion. Take, use, alter, call me an idiot… whatever works. Early downvoting will still hurt an idea more than I’d prefer, since fewer people are likely to see it, but at least it won’t kill the submission forever.