In my idea, the algorithm also determines how much moderation power they have. (Rather than being able to absolutely rate anything, they are given moderator points in certain amounts.)

A user-moderated system would be a good idea but there is a lot of potential for abuse there. That is why sites like Digg are running into trouble because people are unnecessarily burying submissions and flagging sites (such as ours) as spam. So while I would like to think that a user-moderated system would be a lot of fun it could also cause a lot of trouble.

On digg, anyone can moderate as they please. I am suggesting giving the power only to people who have proven to be good contributors…and they only keep that power if they continue to be good moderators also.

Sounds about right as I moved the Blog to Wordpress on September 6th to support your pingback feature (which doesn’t seem to work anymore BTW). So I likely found you guys in August and I think I was searching Firefox 2 info.

If you schedule posts in advance WordPress does not ping the site otherwise a hyperlink to your article would show up on the blog being pinged before your article is even posted. I’m not sure if you are publishing your articles immediately after finishing, but that could be one of the problems. If you post your articles immediately without scheduling let me know so that I can look into it more.

Also, I have changed the “Current All-Stars” on the Management screen to only reflect those that have commented in the last week.

FWIW my number could be a lot higher if I found all the comments I had made prior to registering (BTW Ryan when DID I register) and if I e-mailed all the article for the tips. But I won’t do that to y’all, because then I would be knon as “the guy who messed up the curve.”

I’ve been in the first upcoming spot since you started tracking comments! People only pass me when they get All-Star, and then when I’m finally there you move it.
You seem to be encouraging people who just post “good job” or “interesting” on every article, rather than people who actually contribute with every post. I think you should reward insightful posts with more points, and give more points for tips that are useful. Obviously a “good job” comment is not as valuable as an insight that makes your blog very useful for the readers.
One possibility for such a system would be a user-moderation system – so you wouldn’t have to do all the work. Limited points could be given to individuals contributing useful stuff (they are getting modded up more than not). If you want more details into this system, just shoot me an email.

A user-moderated system would be a good idea but there is a lot of potential for abuse there. That is why sites like Digg are running into trouble because people are unnecessarily burying submissions and flagging sites (such as ours) as spam. So while I would like to think that a user-moderated system would be a lot of fun it could also cause a lot of trouble.

Providing more stars for insightful comments, as you mentioned, is definitely a possibility and is something that I don’t mind doing myself. With how I have the backend setup I can add stars anytime to any account, but I have also received several more tips than usual in the past 24-hours so I think rewarding people for tips will also help the community.

We went ahead and added a few points to your account for the tip and we also realized that the All-Star limit was increased too much so we dropped it back down to 125. I think it should stay like this for a little while because the upcoming All-Stars are a little more spaced out in terms of stars.

It ignores any posts that you make yourself but sometimes the browser has a hard time writing to the necessary cookie to let it know when you have viewed an article. I notice this happening if you open multiple articles in tabs at the same time which would make the browser try and write to the cookie for each of those tabs…and some of them are bound to receive an error. If you continue to see the problem let me know and I’ll look into it more, but I haven’t changed much in the comment tracking code from what it previously was.

We lowered the score back down to 125 so you should be there in no time.

This is true and we have been considering how we should handle this. We don’t want to remove the All-Stars because they have earned it at one point or another, but we might make the list only show “Active” All-Stars where they have commented in the last 2-weeks. If they comment again they will be added back to the list but it helps promote continued participation. Let me know of any feedback you might have on this.

If the point of the “All Star” label is to encourage commenting then why double the number of comments required to be an “All Star”?