You should be able to mark any of your own ideas that currently have a zero or negative score as 'revoked' to close voting on that idea, and remove it from consideration. Being able to revoke your ideas will have at least three distinct benefits:
1) It would give users less ideas to vote on. Currently there's thousands of ideas. If we allow users to recall some of their ideas it would be a form of self-regulation, reducing the number of ideas eligible for voting, thereby helping us focus on the good ideas.
2) It would keep a user's score from plummeting indefinitely due to (possibly just one) bad ideas being submitted. Why should your score continue to tumble over the course of weeks and possibly months with people voting your bad idea down? If you concede it is a bad idea, you should be able to 'undo' your mistake.
3) Given the 'protection' afforded users in item 2 (above), users would not be afraid of submitting 'wild' or 'unconventional' ideas which might otherwise damage their overall score. Conventional brainstorming requires that ideas be received in a non-judgemental manner. - the purpose of which is to give people free range to fly any idea that they think might be worth considering. The community might benefit from some of these wilder, riskier ideas.
Maybe their should also be conditions on which ideas can be revoked. Maybe an idea can only be revoked within the first week of it's issue. Maybe only until it reaches a certain number of views or votes. Perhaps if an idea receives a certain number of up votes it cannot be revoked. Etc.
Revoked ideas can remain in the main listing, just with a special icon (similar to the lock icon for closed ideas) indicated it's revoked status. In your dashboard, any up / down votes that idea received will be removed from your score. Also, a new category 'revoked ideas' will list the total number of revoked ideas you have. Your revoked ideas will also remain listed under the 'my ideas' tab, with the aforementioned special icon.
Perhaps the process of revoking an idea will also give the user an opportunity to revise their original idea based on other user's comments.
