This rating and star system does have a purpose. On the site that I helped create, which is a college student community website, content thats not exactly PG-13 rated gets posted on a more than regular basis. I'd say that porn is posted on average, about once every 5 to 10 minutes on our site. Now, this is fine and dandy and all for a site full of college student computing from their PC's at home. However, once you get people logging into machines from public labs and from work machines, we started getting in legal hot-water.

Many times you'd click a thread saying "party at my place tonight" or, "can someone help me with calculus?" and you'd be greeted to some sort of X-rated material. Don't ask me why, thats just how students are sometimes. They think its funny.

So we instituted a rating system. All it takes is for 1 "editor" (a relatively small group of close friends that started and maintained the site) to stumble across that material and boom, it gets an "X" rating. Also, the normal users are able to rate each thread as to its usefulness. For example, the director of virtual advising from the university made herself an account and started to advise anyone that needed academic advice right there in the thread. It immediate got a very high rating, so people can tell that there is usefull information. Likewise, there is a character on the website, his name is travis, but his handle is "jackleg" who posts usually mindless drivel... admittedly, some of its funny, but more likely than not, its just crap. I'd say a good 95% of his threads are rated low by the community, however, his public opinion is very high thanks to our website. He ran for student president on purely ideological level since student government ostracized him and didn't allow him to run. Thanks to his popularity, among a student body of near 30,000 he garnered the most votes total, even though he was ineligable to run. Point being, the quality of people's character or intelligence isn't judged by the quality of their posts on a message board, nor what other people think about them.

Ratings can be useful, if used appropriately and responsibly. The people on the new forum, I believe can handle it. The old forum, I'm not so sure. There seems to be a lot of pent up bad blood between people over there, and the rating system would just degenerate into another tool to attempt to undermine opposing viewpoints.