Thread rating

Hi, after all the work (and debate) on reputation and belts, it would be nice to see some enhancements to the thread rating tool, which right now is quite useless but could become a great aid in pointing out those excellent threads that are so important for devshed users. It could also be used to improve search results ranking.

I don't think I have ever rated any thread in the time I have been on DevShed, but do think if used right, then it would be a useful tool for searching for threads, especially for those frequent problems where questions are always asked about the same thing - but then again, I suppose that depends on users searching the forums rather than just posting..........

Perhaps rating of answers, allow only the OP to rate the answers given? I think it would tie in nicely with the suggested status hack (i.e. a tag on the end of a title identifying whether a sufficient answer has been received).

It might also be disabled in the outhouse/lounge

Yeah, and lets put page long adverts underneath the first post too.

Seriously though, this is what rep is for. In my experience, it works
fine outside the Lounge.Outhouse. If posts are good and provide a
good solution, they get ++'d, if they're not, they get nothing, and
if they're really bad, they get --'d - pretty good rating system IMO.

Yeah, but rep is great to have an idea of the knowledge level of posters, I'd love to see the most interesting threads at a glance, and this would be better accomplished by thread rating than by repping individual posts IMHO.
The best would be to have rep+thread rating integrated in the forum search engine.