I've been searching the boards, but there may just be so many discussions that I can't find one that would tell me why people may download without voting? Seems if they like it enough to take it that they can at least help the image go from a zero index?

It seems this would be the case, but we all know that honestly most people will take and not give anything back and not think twice, sad but true. =(

You will get a nice reminder if you do not vote enough hehe

Thank you for giving. ;-)

A zero index seems to appear the first day an image gets enough votes for a c-index. The following day the "real" c-index appears. But you've got me looking at the figures on the image rankings page now (maybe I should cross-post this to Sam's "Things to do on a rainy day" topic ;-)) and the proportion of votes really is quite low. The top page of images only average 17% of votes per download, and various pages of newish images further down average from 21% to 34%. (Older images can have an incredibly low percentage of votes: presumably the rules were different then....) So I guess it's like mckinleysh says, people are happy to take the images but not to take the trouble to vote. But maybe it's better to let people do that rather than forcing them to vote every time they download a picture: people who vote because they want to are more likely to give it genuine consideration than someone who can't get what s/he wants without clicking on a button.....

Sorry - bit of an essay there.... ;-)

Remember though that a "download" does not mean that they have actually saved the image to their hard drive, it just means they have looked at the image full screen. But I do agree that in general people should be voting as often as they can.

I agree, you would think that people would want to lift an image from zero. However the world is full of takers, it’s always been that way and always will be. I suppose you could call it an ugly fact of life.

Perhaps you should take pride in belonging to the elite group of givers.