a la Slashdot and Everything2? Maybe that would be a terrible idea but sometimes I would love to vent my frustration at an immature post in a constructive (ideally) way.

On the other hand... this site works well enough the way it is and if I can't deal with the occasional flame bait I probably need to pull the NIC card out of my machine.

The only upside that I could possibly see to this is the development of some kind of rating criterion for quality of information which would also make syndicated content more valuable to people off site who don't have a chance to interact with people and learn about their quirks and/or relative compentence. It would also make search results more useable without reading through thread after thread of LOL and me too replies.

I dunno. It's really late. Maybe this is a tangent that isn't worth exploring. It would probably stress the machine quite a bit as well so it might be a topic for discussion a ways down the road.

we already have a thread rating - which no one ever bothers to use. i think we have one thread in general that's rated at five stars - which is ironic because it's the epitome of the me-too flamebait threads...

I think the rate a thread feature could be nice, but like isajera said it almost never gets used. I thought about a member rating/karma system before, but I decided against it. I try to make sure this site is as newbie friendly as possible. I think the rating system is a barrier to entry of sorts and like on ./ it would probably be abused.

--jeremy