John Cardinal wrote: don't show the score until a certain number of votes have been made, i.e. not until the 11th vote or something Oooh, I like that, but I think the number should be higher, like say... 20 votes. John Cardinal wrote: The second is that any votes that are extremely off the current average should have a *Suggestion* pop up that they make a comment of why they voted that way. I think showing votes accumulated like this would alleviate Chris' voting wars fears (illustrating the way it would look for one of my articles - grin): Vote -------------- Votes By ----------------- Value Platinum Gold Silver Bronze 5 1 4 2 3 4 5 2 7 0 3 0 0 5 0 2 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 4,038,764,324 Further, Chris cited the a probability that if forced to leave a comment, many folks would just post "asdf" or other equally invalid comments. My response was that a rudimentary text parser could be created that would parse the comment, and automatically reject votes that are associated with comments that failed the following checks: a) When trimmed of leading and trailing spaces, did not contain any characeters. The nefarious "empty" comment. b) Comments must have X number of characters (this prevents the simple "asdf" example provided by Chris. I would think 30 characters would be enough. c) Comments that don't contain a certain percentage of spaces. Statistically speaking, Chris (or whoever) could take a reasonably long sentence out of a well-written article, and calculate the percentage of spaces in that sentence as a baseline. d) If the comment passes all of the previous validation, come up with a vocabulary file and compare all of the words in the comment against it. Assign levels of coherence based on the percentage of word matches achieved and an ultimately lowest acceptable value that can be used to automatically reject the comment/vote pair as invalid. So, if a comment matched 80-100% of its words with the vocabulary, it would be automatically labeled as "probably valid", and the vote/comment would be viewable by the article author who could then read it. The article author would be able to see the vote, the comment, and the member status (platinum, go