People seem to miss judge what ratings actually are and what they mean. People may think it's immature at some moments in time on how they are used. Who do you think? Because I'm lost. .-.
The rating is a simple feature on XenForo, and many other forum site tools, now, why people get so hot and bothered because of pixels on a screen is beyond my comprehension, they do, but it's not so much the pixels that bother me. Ratings are used to express one's emotion towards a post, status, or otherwise, this can be misused by the following: - Rating something unfairly (I.e rating a post somebody put effort into "dumb" because you don't like them, or because they gave you a "dumb" rating on a post once so you thought it would be funny to do the same) - Excessively giving a negative or positive ratings farm(I.e giving somebody a like for every single status, post, comment they make so they can get trophies) These are how it can be misused, but the only way to really show "rating abuse" is going to somebody's recent activity, if you see a page of dislikes/likes/dumb ratings they've given to one person between 1-5 minutes of each other, it is most likely rating abuse.
Ratings should be deleted, but if not then you rate peoples posts how they should be rated. Also if someone rates your post something you should give that rate back to them no matter if it is good or bad. And don't rate farm IT'S NOT L33T
The rating system is like a way to record reputation by what content we post. My usual way of rating is only if I think it needs to be seen. For example if you find a post useful, well go ahead and rate it useful in hopes people will see this post. If you disagree with someone its fine to use that rating, just do not over use it. The dislike and rude ratings should be reserved for very offensive posts, and not used to rates abuse people you dislike. The most over used rating I think is the like rating. Its simple to like a post rather than reply and add to. Ratings should not be use to force a goo reputation, or give someone a bad reputation.