News votes tell you when to slow down, with a countdown

Voting on news has always had a limit, so that a handful of accounts cannot decide the front page. It is now ten votes every ten minutes. What changed most is what happens when you reach it.

Before, a vote over the limit was refused, the button flipped back, and nothing said why — so a member voting through the feed watched votes un-cast themselves and kept clicking into more refusals. Now, when you have a couple of votes left, a message tells you how many and when they refill. When you run out, every vote button on the page dims and shows the time left, and a single countdown runs until you can vote again. Then it says so and gets out of the way.

The limit lives in one place, on our servers, and the page simply reads it — so if we change it, everything that votes follows automatically.