Thumbs-up and thumbs-down don't really serve much of a purpose at the moment. Sure, they may flag an individual post as being popular or unpopular, but I think that they could be used to a much greater extent.
Here are some of my ideas:
Idea 1: Filter out posts below a certain thumbs threshold.Like slashdot.org, posts that fall below a user configurable threshold are not shown to the user. The user would chose how many thumbs down a post would need to be given before they don't want to see it. The default for an unregistered user could be set to say 5 thumbs down, which would prevent casual passers-by from being mis-informed by bad posts.
Idea 2: Have a persistent "credibility" rating for each user based on thumbs historyA credibility (or is that popularity) score for each user could be calculated from the ratio between total thumbs for all their posts vs. their total number of posts.
EG: DL has made 200 posts with a total of 30 thumbs-up and 10 thumbs-down. This gives a net thumbs score of 30-10 = 20. Divide this by total posts = 20/200 = 10%.
From this, DL would be given a credibility score of 10%.
Brucie/Bigboard/etc with 2 posts and -10 thumbs would have a credibility of -500%
This credibility score could be listed underneath each user's avatar where the stars used to be. This would give some incentive for users to make posts that attract thumbs-up, thereby providing more quality content for the seabreeze forums.
Idea 3: Filter posts from users with a credibility score below a certain threshold.Following on from the previous idea, each user could then set a preference to hide posts by any other user with a crebibility of less than a certain threshold.
This would serve to block posts from users that have a demonstrated history of bad posts. As with the first idea, the default for an unregistered user could be set to say -100% credibility, which would block posts from serial bad posters from the general public.
Thoughts?
[edit: I changed the title due to the puppet of Kim-Il-Sung making facetious comments
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