About the Comment Ratings
Large group discussions inevitably generate a mix of good and bad comments. We don’t want to read inappropriate/off-topic/spam comments any more than you do, so we have put in place several mechanisms to highlight good comments and weed out bad ones.
Spam we are taking care of using a sophisticated, automated anti-spam filter. Separating the wheat from the chaff is a more interesting problem. It’s tough to automate, and we don’t want to have to approve all comments by hand (after all, we have real jobs!). Our solution takes a page from digg.com.
When a discussion starts, you will see a little green and red +1 / -1 link above each comment. These links let you give feedback on comments. If you like a comment, give it a point (+1); if you don’t, give a negative point (-1). A selector at the top of the comments lets you hide comments whose total score falls below a threshold you specify.
We look forward to some good discussions with you!
