pg I believe that the simplest and most effective feature you could implement to resolve some of the comment issues would be to kill multi-accounting.
I have seen it too many times. I was in a discussion with a prominent user here and noticed that every one of his comments would shoot up 4-5 points within seconds of being submitted while mine would go down as many points.
In a later thread, around a month ago, I intentionally requested the page as frequently as I could to measure comment scores, and found that this users comments were spiking up to the top of the thread within a minute.
Comment counts are also self-perpetuating, which you have fixed now, but it would mean that with multi-account a simple 2-3 votes would spike a comment up with further votes from other user (eg. 'if he has had 4 votes in 8 minutes this comment must be good' - groupthink)
Multi-accounting should be easy to fix with IP tracking and some smarts (ie. I assume a multi-accounter would copy+paste the link to the comment). And although the comment counts are no longer there, the ranking and valuing each users vote as being equal is still there.
I have seen it too many times. I was in a discussion with a prominent user here and noticed that every one of his comments would shoot up 4-5 points within seconds of being submitted while mine would go down as many points.
In a later thread, around a month ago, I intentionally requested the page as frequently as I could to measure comment scores, and found that this users comments were spiking up to the top of the thread within a minute.
Comment counts are also self-perpetuating, which you have fixed now, but it would mean that with multi-account a simple 2-3 votes would spike a comment up with further votes from other user (eg. 'if he has had 4 votes in 8 minutes this comment must be good' - groupthink)
Multi-accounting should be easy to fix with IP tracking and some smarts (ie. I assume a multi-accounter would copy+paste the link to the comment). And although the comment counts are no longer there, the ranking and valuing each users vote as being equal is still there.