Determine how identity should be used with votes

Thank you, @greggles. I've emailed you the set of dialogue that occurred between me and the admin.

What @kiamlaluno said is how I feel as well. I've worked on websites with very heavy moderation and the users are informed very early on on what reasons they will be personally contacted for (for awards, for warnings, reason for getting banned). The interface provided to them for social activities also dictates its purpose (and coupled with the appropriate text make a user think on what their action will be). In this scenario, I think it is unclear to regular user on what voting means and it was also unclear under what circumstances I should expect to be contacted by a site maintainer.

From my perspective as a non-editor / non-admin / non maintainer and because of the way the voting options are presented to the user, it simply looks like a 'I like this' or 'I don't like this'. Even the language used is 'vote up' and 'vote down', not implying to end user that it is for spam moderation purposes - http://groups.drupal.org/node/147089 specifically states to create an issue when spam is involved. When I have really disagreed with a comment, I have used downvoting (and in most cases explained in a followup comment my disagreement) in the past. And it is only recently that I found out it is used for other purposes.

Personally, I'm ok with voting privacy going either way. A policy on when users can be contacted and why would go a long way. Though generally, I have seen voting actions to be relatively anonymous (for obvious reasons; no one likes being called out on being the sore thumb). I have observed sites that strictly use 'vote up' or 'like' to sometimes display the list of people that liked it but that is the extent of it.

Regarding actions to perform, it would be great if the user can have an expectation of what a particular action means. A 'flag' action (like from flag) is much clearer in explaining to a user that something is being marked as being spammy or otherwise than 'vote down' (heck, even just add that language to the vote down so we rethink if the vote should be made or not).

UPDATE: I've had over 2 months to think through this issue and I'm actually taking back what I had said about being ok with voting privacy going either way. I have continued feeling uneasy about the whole situation and, in essence, it felt like I had been harassed. Just because a user has the ability to see or do something does not make it right (see my earlier point about feeling harassed - there are laws against it in a number of workplaces now; there weren't before but that still didn't make it right). And @greggles: thank you. I really appreciate what you have done to try and bring a resolution to this.