Ok, so far I don't remember starting a thread about the rating system, but I had enough so I will start one. I know that generally starting such a thread will result in a dramatical decrease of your rating, so feel free to post the submarine comic and the associated rating graph. At this point I really don't care about it, as I am considering leaving the forum again, for an indefinite period of time (for multiple reasons I won't get into). So here is my problem with it: Most of the people that have a high rating are infrequent Lounge posters. This is because no matter how helpful you are in other forums, or to the community in general, if you post in the lounge some idiot will disagree with you and rate you down. Even if your posts are not rude, but just simply disagree with someone, you are going to be rated down. Plain and simple. For example, before starting this thread, my rating was 1589. 20 or sominutes later, it decreased to 1575. Now, while 1575 is a relatively high rating, my rating could have been in the 1700-1800 range had I not post here so often and say what I think. Now, I don't know if this is how the rating system was intended (the "friendy" term is ambigous) but it simply doesn't reflect how helpful one is, unless that person refrains from making any contradictory comment. There were quite a few good proposals, that were moderately easy to implement, such as: 1. Disable the rating in the Lounge. 2. Make it so that the rating system will have an associated POST_ID, so you can tell for which posts you were rated up or down. 3. Make it mandatory to post a comment when you rate someone, and explain the reason for the rating. 4. Separate the "helpful" from "friendly" and use two ratings. 5. Allow only the mods/admins to rate people. I do believe that the rating system is a very good idea, and it generally works as intended, but there are some exceptions, such as the Lounge posts. Thats all I had to say on the subject, now feel free to rate me down.