Quote from satchel:
Seriously, the rating of threads is a great idea. It makes the search function that much easier and valuable...as in having the option to sort on rating of all threads in the Technical Analysis forum for example (over all years). The rating of all and especially older 'gem' threads should be encouraged.
Suggestion however is to not hide the rating at the bottom of the page - does not encourage readers to use it. Too hard to find, maybe the user stumbles across it.
Place the rating at the top of the page - encourages people to actually use it.
The issue is that in most other websites, a star rating is used to rate the technical merits of the information in the thread. The problem on Elite is that there are small groups who immediately assign stars to a thread based on if they like or dislike the author without any regard to the technical merit of the information contained in the thread. Most of these people have multiple ids and therefore "vote" for stars usually within minutes of a new thread being posted.
This means that stars are effectively useless on EliteTrader for evaluating the quality of information in a thread. The only possible way to improve the situation is to limit voting to one rating per IP address.
