Re-doing an upvote of a comment should not be prevented, especially if it is all within a short timespan since that could be because of a UI problem
I have seen the following topics, but they do not address my (prevented) use case: Why are comment upvotes prevented after being undone? What's the point of not being able to re-upvote a comment?
Background info: I've just discovered that if a user upvotes a comment, then clicks the upvote comment button again and thus removes the upvote, the user is prevented from upvoting the comment again as indicated by the button no longer working and the following message popping up: "You've already undone your vote on this comment; you cannot upvote it again."
I agree with the general point (which has been expressed by others in previous topics) that adding and removing upvotes of comments should be allowed at any time. More specifically, though, re-upvoting should certainly not be prevented (i.e. it should certainly be allowed) for at least a short time after the original upvote. This is to account for UI bug that can lead to a user's upvote not being properly reflected and can lead to a user unintentionally and unknowingly de-upvoting a comment, in which a re-upvote (which from the point of view of such a user is simply an initial upvote) should absolutely be allowed.
Spelling out what happened in my case, for reference for allowing re-upvoting and/or replicating the UI bug in order to fix it:
- I clicked the upvote button for a comment, looking to upvote that comment.
- The upvote count number disappeared (with only a blank space where the number should be, on the upvote button), indicating to me that something went wrong, and definitely not indicating to me that my upvote was registered.
- I clicked the upvote button a second time, hoping that it really would upvote it this time. (I think I read something in another topic about there being warning messages about de-upvoting comments, but I don't recall getting any such warning.)
- The upvote count number reappeared, but it was the original number from before I had ever clicked the upvote button.
- I went to click the upvote button a third time, to finally hopefully actually have my upvote registered, but I got the ridiculous message "You've already undone your vote on this comment; you cannot upvote it again.", ridiculous because I not only did not choose to de-upvote the comment, but had never even seen any indication that my upvote had been registered in the first place.
- This all happened within 5 or 10 seconds. I don't see any good reason to prevent re-upvoting at all, but in particular preventing re-upvoting within 10 seconds of the initial upvoting is most likely just preventing users from working around a UI glitch.