Any good ideas that die you could always use for Episode 2 (though I’m sure you’re well aware.)

I’ve always thought that in a voting system like this there are certain precautions you can add to avoid retards.

1. Give more weight to people who use both upvote and downvote frequently – someone who only downvotes should be effectively castrated from removing an idea, and someone who only upvotes should be taken a little more lightly.

2. Give more weight to the people whose votes agree with the general consensus. If this person appears to just be randomly upvoting/downvoting, nerf them. However, if the person had only been downvoting, but seems to downvote things that would drop off the chart anyway, or by the same token, almost only upvotes things that win, then this should override rule 1.

3. Give more weight to users who have contributed winning or high-scoring ideas. If the person is voting on thread titles and has submitted 12 winning ones already, chances are they know what makes a good thread title.

4. Give more weight to users who vote on a high percentage of the items. If a user just votes on 2 items every week, they’re not really helping the system much. Encourage more participation by crediting active users who don’t get swallowed by rule 1 or 2.

5. Give less weight to users who only vote up on specific users. If there’s a trend that user A ALWAYS (or almost always) votes up on user B’s submissions … pleh. This one’s obvious and you probably have something in place for it already.

It should be noted that by “more” and “less” I don’t mean HUGE values – these would have to start off low and be slowly tweaked to find a good working set.

Also, I think submissions for thread titles/posts should be required to have at least 1 randomized entry in it – or are there safeguards against the same thread ever showing up twice? I have no idea how the system works, but I usually frown on entries with no randomizers in them.