Originally Posted by Mary2e
All birthday threads didn't have a single star rating, it was just those select few people. Those people also had most of their threads rated with a single star no matter where they posted - even in forums in which no other threads were rated at all.
So maybe two people don't like each other? Do you like every single poster on FT? If not, don't you feel that you should be allowed to express your dislike? To warn other (newbie) FTers that a person's posts are not worth investing time reading?
Just like the reputation fiasco, a few people that get off on chasing others around & causing trouble ruined it for the rest of us.
One one-star vote shouldn't cause the thread to go to one-star. There's no point having a rating system unless you can set the threshold to something meaningful, like 25 ratings.
Furthermore, ratings should be on individual posts, not on the thread as a whole. When the greater community has decided, through ratings, that somebody is an idiot, then the software can automatically filter out the trash. This is how Fatwallet does it, although I'm not sure what their minimum size is before the rating is applied to the filtering.