Bypass

To make voting more meaningful, moderators should be able to bypass a topic if they are having trouble making a decision. Otherwise, their vote adds no value to the system.

As a result, moderators have at least three options when validating each topic: approve, reject, and bypass.

Quest completions have a fourth action available to moderators - they can report a completion if it is obviously malicious.

However, such a bypass should not be infinitely free, otherwise the idea of a system-assigned topic fails, since users can loop through all topics until they get to the one they want.

In Questfall, the cost of the first bypass is free, while each subsequent bypass costs one Silver more until the maximum cost of -5 Silver is reached. As a result, it is still more profitable to bypass a topic than to vote blindly. After a vote is cast on any voting topic except witnessing, the bypass cost is reset to zero.

Voting Topic	Max Bypass Cost	Reset On Vote
	-5 Silver	+
	-5 Silver	+
	-5 Silver	+
	-5 Silver	+
	-5 Silver	+

There is another way to bypass a topic for free. All a moderator needs to do is wait for the voting to reach a consensus. When the voting is over, the moderator will be assigned a new topic to vote on.

This is not a threat, because if consensus is reached on this particular topic, all other topics in the system are likely to be voted on as well. So users will not be able to get to any particular topic this way.

The witnessing voting topic is a special case because it has no penalty. This not only means that this type of topic can always be bypassed for free, but also implies that there should be a balance between witnessing and judging topics.

Therefore, to get a witnessing topic, a user should either vote on a judging topic first, or pay at least 25 Silver for bypassing in advance.