Originally Posted by ElmhurstNick
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?
You just hit the nail on the head. Thread ratings is not for whether or not you like a poster. It's to rate the information in the thread. These people were being single starred just for posting, and it was by more than one person. How do I know? In order for the star to even show up it had to be more than 1 or 2 people rating it. I tested by giving 5 stars to a few of the threads. Again, I feel it was a small group of people running around and searching for the threads of a few people they didn't like.
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.
No way... from some of the behaviors I've seen around here there is no doubt in my mind that people have multiple ids they have in their back pockets. There is no guarantee that the extra ids won't be used for this purpose. To ask the HOM to police this is asking too much, plus, there are some people with enough skills to hide their IP addresses or even redirect them to avoid being found out.
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.
The greater community wasn't deciding - it was a group of about 5 or 6 people going after about 4 or 5 people they just didn't like.
This is how Fatwallet does it, although I'm not sure what their minimum size is before the rating is applied to the filtering.
And tivocommunity doesn't allow political or religious topics
. This is FT and has it's own quirks and RP has made it very clear he doesn't care what happens on other BBs.