Agree. Always inflate them naturally.

Hard to prove until someone is caught multi-logged. :)

Immaterial to me. If someone needs this site's helpful, funny, agree buttons to validate their own opinions I pity them.

For a while, back when we had "unhelpfuls" I used to get all my recent comments clicked unhelpful when a certain reviewer showed up (no I won't name him, but he and I know who we're talking about) I always had an image of him going "Seventeen more unhelpfuls, that'll show that bastard irishgit."

As far as I was concerned, it was fine. It was keeping him off the streets, anyway.

Surely you can only give one vote per review? But I see what you mean, as in giving a certain reviewer a biased amount of votes.

This is probably a very good, valid rule but I suspect that it is the hardest to enforce. And Planetary, I'd be happy to explain why I rated your post unhelpful. It's quite simple, really, there's no mechanism to rate your post stupid, egomaniacally self-centered and inappropriate in that you, who do not abide by the rules yourself suddenly want to make suggestions about how the rules of the site might be altered to better suit your idiotic idea of how the site SHOULD work. Your post accuses (nobody in particular) of multi-id use, without even so much as a shred of evidence against anyone, simply because YOU received a barrage of unhelpfuls to your part in a sophomoric, immature exchange, where your adversary mistakenly thought you to be someone worthy of an intellectual debate. Grow up, kid. The site was here long before you came along, and will be here long after you get sick of getting it shoved down your throat that your arguments are spurious, ignorant and without any basis in logic or law. Also, when you insult or offend someone with a remark or statement you regret, it's up to you to take the first step in that direction, not them. That's why your comment was rated unhelpful by me. Got it? MY FINAL: Well it's the first time I've been derogatorily called an old man particularly by a grown man, with an astronomical IQ and a college 4.0 cum but that's just life here on RIA (thanks, Lance). Thanks, Gear, for making my point for me so articulately. You wiped the floor with my argument? You couldn't wipe the floor with your own ass, which I would give you ten minutes to find using both hands and a flashlight, condfident it would remain among the missing indefinitely. You admitted, in your private message to me, that your argument had no basis in law or logic. Like to read that again? I usually cut/paste things that people are likely to delete or regret, like your original flame war with HeyKate, in case someone misses it and want to know how the flame war got started in the first place. At any rate, I've already wasted an inordinate amount of attention on you, particularly someone with such a weak grip on political discourse, an apparent inability to hold temper and someone obviously willing to break rules when it serves his purpose, then justify it when so accused. Come back and debate me when you develop some maturity, and maybe, a clue.

Evidently, this is not too strictly enforced. UPDATE: As of late, it seems that RIA is finally cracking down on multi-ID reviewers. It's about time.

If anyone feels the need to do this, I strongly recommend getting up from your computer and getting laid or something.

We don't even need these buttons on here. Most people either abuse them or ignore them entirely.

From my limited time at RateItAll and after reading the other comments, one solution to the problem of some abusing the helpful/not helpful buttons could be that each member is limited to how many not helpfuls could be hit against another single member in a 24 hour period. Another possible solution is to get rid of the not helpful button entirely. This second solution seems to solve several problems since the feature isn't all that beneficial in that the helpfulness of a comment is better measured by how many positive hits it registers rather than the unhelpful hits. If one's comment isn't getting any helpfuls, it's a sign that the comment may need to be more detailed. Of course the root of the problem is that too many people confuse helpful/unhelpful with agree/disagree. I may disagree with a comment, but that doesn't mean it is either wrong or unhelpful. In fact, some of the most helpful comments to me are those with which I ultimately disagree. Other than this type of abuse, I can't see how one can inflate their own helpfuls without multiple accounts or collusion.

Really pathetic that a person would do this, but as someone pointed out stopping multiple accounts would stop it.

Irritating, just not quite as irritating as having multiple accounts and posting the same thing 20 times. The helpful/not helpful buttons, to some, seem to be some sort of half-assed popularity contest. If I like someone's comments, I like it regardless of how many other people seemed to find it helpful.

Seems to be yesterday's news - if you take care of the multiple accounts you will take care of most of this behavior. It's kind of disturbing that this was even an issue.