upvote should be a global with capital letters. but writing it like that might be a leaky abstraction of the underlaying database storage. should the web dev really have to know that some variable is represented by a tinyint later converted to a float, then "optimized" to a 32 bit int !? why make it into a failure point when there is so little gain in performance and make little sence in a high level, lose typed language such as javascript. stop writing javascript like its java!
