Vote question down

What is voting down?

Voting down, also known as "casting downvotes", is how the community indicates which questions are least likely to be useful on the site.

When should I vote down?

Use your downvotes whenever you encounter a question unlikely to be useful to other readers. A useless question might be unclear, egregiously sloppy or lazy, ask for answers that are common knowledge or simply strike you as trivial and uninteresting.

You're limited to 30 votes (up and down) per day, across all proposals on Area 51, so use them wisely!

How do I vote down?

Click the large down arrow to the left of each question.

You can undo your vote by clicking the same vote button. To change a vote from down to up, click the up arrow without undoing the downvote, and vice versa.

When should I vote down, and when should I vote to close?

There's a fair bit of overlap here, and that's intentional: a question you consider useless may well be completely inappropriate for the site. You may often find yourself both downvoting and voting to close the same question. However, there are some key differences:

• While you're free to cast a downvote as a matter of personal preference, closing is limited to the predefined choices.
• You may well find a question potentially useful, but still recognize that it is inappropriate for the site (and thus vote to close).
• A good question may be proposed multiple times. There's no reason to downvote duplicates, but you should close them to avoid drawing upvotes away from the original.