Aggh.. not through cookies far to easy to cheat. Much better to do it through mySQL,

arr. one thing. Are we rating threads or are we rating posts. I thought posts as rating posts..

so... each post has another column in the table for "average rating", and "rated_users". The average rating speeks for itself and the rated users is a list of the users that have already rated that post so they can't again.

The user bit, ie popular user would be harder i guess because some how info would have to go in the member table as well but perhaps a column for number of "excellent ratings" for example could go there and then you can just sort the memberlist by the number of "excellent" post ratings.

More thoughts ...

"I also like Chris' idea of making the ratings all positive, wouldn't hurt feelings."

Thank you, i like giving out ideas just wish i could make them, will slowly learn - only been here 3 weeks