Where are the ratings? Don’t political blogs always have ratings?
Actually, political websites did without ratings for years until Markos of Daily Kos purchased Scoop software from a site called kuro5hin. Markos introduced a ratings system for a single reason: to prevent the complete hijacking of a website by bile-spewing trolls. Just a few days before Markos’ Scoop-based site came online, Daily Kos was snarled by a resourceful troll who posed as presidential candidate Wesley Clark’s son (who had actually posted on the site as well), said hateful things about other candidates, and then posed as Kos himself and “validated” that the poster was in fact Clark, Jr. The resulting brouhaha proved beyond a doubt that ratings were needed to take such destructive comments off the boards. But Daily Kos functioned fine without ratings until it became big enough that it was attacked by serious trolls. Until ProgressiveHistorians becomes that big (and I sincerely hope it does), any obvious trolls can be weeded out by me without the need for community moderation. I
