Suspend their accounts for a week, maybe? Upvote begging, unless done cleverly, is uncreative and clutters up the top page.

Can't punish people for things not against the rules. Upvote begging is obnoxious to me as well, but it's hard to add rules forbidding it when such a high percentage of users show their support by upvoting it. Maybe we'll increase the power of downvotes in these cases though, which would help a little.

I think you're exaggerating the seriousness a little of what he said about me. I've seen much worse.

Regardless, I'm not personally concerned whether someone berates me or not. I'm generally only concerned if it's other Imgflip users being targeted or bothered. Let one of us know if you see serious instances of this.

You are correct, he is a recently banned user, previously Timber1972. He would always criticize me for having an apathetic, neutral, and unbiased political standpoint.

I've also been forced to delete several of my images thanks to his trolling.

how about this: just ignore them? if you ignore the memes and just accept there existance, itll all be grand, i just ignore begging memes, just let ppl do what they want with the generator and don't hate on them, just downvote the meme and be done with it. this is both easier on you and imgflip

I have been trying to send them to the begging for up v otes stream. A few have gone, but really they shouldn't be allowed to post in the fun stream. My opinion, and maybe a lot of people share in that. In fact that begging stream was made by someone who had this very goal in mind. He said he was hoping to get the beggars out of the main stream.

The problem is a couple things. 1) They're kids and they just don't care and they don't believe in "hard work" and earning anything, including points on a website. They just want to do it the easy way.

And 2) there seems to be a high number of these upvote beggars who are new to this site and don't understand the etiquette here.

I have only been on imgflip since august, probably less time then 90% of upvote beggars
And i know not to beg, i learned that from one of my fist memes, but there is definitely no toleration of upvote beggars to me!

You are definitely right on both accounts.

There really isn't a way to stop them though, no matter how off putting it is. But as you state in your post, it would be nice to at least see some amount of work go into the begging part.