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I vote a lot on Unix & Linux. I often run into the measly limit of 40 votes per day.

In order to ration my votes and not overly favor questions posted early morning, I frequently check how many votes I have left. This was easy with the old top bar design. Now, I need to visit my profile and scroll down to the bottom, or switch to another tab where I have my profile open and reload the page.

I know that most users aren't affected as much, because hitting the vote limit isn't very common over the whole user base. But for me on this site, this is a major regression. Unsurprisingly other heavy voters have the same problem.

A few months later… my voting habits have changed a lot, and this is the cause. I now rarely ever run into the 40 vote limit, as long as I check the site roughly every 24 hours. That's because I have lowered my voting threshold a lot. You now need to post a pretty good question or answer to get an upvote from me. I've also started to vote or not-vote based on the existing score — if your post already has a handful of votes, I now tend to abstain. I think this is a bad consequence of this UI change — and I've yet to see a compensating benefit.

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    I second this Q. I usually just keep voting until I'm at 5, then I know how many I have left. – slm♦ Dec 5 '13 at 1:14
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    What do you propose? The hover panel isn't coming back, but if there's somewhere else this information makes sense it could be re-added. – Shog9 Dec 5 '13 at 2:28
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    @Shog9 I don't know, all I'm asking is that it takes at most one click and doesn't navigate away from the page. Could be a hover panel, could be a panel requiring a click, could be the hover text somewhere. The hover text now on the reputation is the reputation, which is rather useless. Of course if you only put the vote count that will solve my problem but not the problems of other users who are missing something. I don't understand why you insist on removing functionality that didn't get in anybody's way. It's really up to the party removing a feature to provide a replacement. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Dec 5 '13 at 9:09
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    Again Gilles is dead on with this. Having access to this type of info is critical to frequenters of the site. Having to navigate away from the current page every time I want to check info such as vote count wastes my time. The new bar is IMO a step backwards. Esp. for power users to sites. – slm♦ Dec 5 '13 at 16:16
  • I agree as well, bring it back please – Steven Penny May 15 '14 at 22:17
  • I'm wondering if this shouldn't be migrated to MSE. Thoughts? – Caleb Jun 10 '14 at 12:13
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    @Caleb I deliberately posted here and not on MSE because this affects me specifically as a U&L user and not on other sites. While I'm aware that this is a cross-site issue, this is me as a U&L user complaining about a change that affects me directly, as opposed to me as a generic SE user complaining that something has changed. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Jun 10 '14 at 13:28
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I think Caleb's answer is on the right track, but it has a fatal flaw: I want an easy way to know how many votes I have left before voting, not after.

It does give me an idea: include the current vote count in the tooltip. For example, instead of ”This answer is useful“, show “This answer is useful (39 votes left)”.

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I second this request. Months and months later I still miss it and inability to ration votes well is a poor way to contribute to high signal to noise ratios on the sites I frequent.

I propose adding the information back in the form of a popup when voting, beginning with the first vote of the day.

You have 39 votes left.

Currently this warning does not show up until you are down to 5, by which time it is too late to effectively ratio what is left. By showing this data on EVERY vote instead of just as a last minute warning the message would also serve and an encouragement to infrequent voters that they have more voice to contribute. The message could even be varied depending on context. For example the first couple votes could say something like:

Thanks for voting. You have 39 votes left today; use them all to help sort the most useful content to the top!

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  • Hmmm, I don't like that much. It's too “in your face”, and not at the right time. I want to know the number before voting, not after. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Jun 10 '14 at 13:24

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