Removing the dislike button would be an interesting idea.

Also the threads about religion and politics are allowed, unless it turns into a flame war.

What about a separate tally?  I.E. Instead of "Total Post Ratings:" have it be "Positive Ratings:" and "Negative Ratings:"

Removing the dislike button would be an interesting idea.

I would remove post rating all together. Feedback is a lot better when in words.

My opinion is that the rating system might be causing a fair amount of problems, but I think a larger amount of it has to do with the frequent misunderstandings and jumping to conclusions that someone is always trying to do something wrong on purpose that I see happen all too often. The practice of assuming good faith is absolutely essential if you want to maintain an environment that is to be “free of hostility” as it's put. That doesn't mean that nothing should be done to willing or repeat offenders, just that the full story needs to be known first without simply assuming things.

There is a fine line between keeping things friendly and trying so hard to do so that it backfires and ends up doing the exact opposite. JosJuice has an good point—bans should be used as sparingly as possible; potential offenders should be made sure they know that they are doing something that is disallowed without feeling like they are automatically being treated as a troublemaker even from the very first offense.

If you go too far, though, this is what happens: sensitive people like me stop using the rating system altogether after seeing more than one incident where people apparently got banned simply for rating posts up or down that a staff member disagrees with, get tempted to leave completely right now while we still can after seeing people threatened for leaving because it's seen as “drama” (though banning would seem to have little effect since the person is leaving anyway), stop participating or posting much because we feel like anything we say (including this post ) feels like somewhat of a risk of being misunderstood and blown up at, etc.

In other words, the spirit of the principles Omnimaga is founded on are reasonably sound, I think; the problem I see is that so much effort is put into attempting to reduce drama and problems that it backfires and only causes more.

There might be other things necessary, but I think that finding just the right balance between one extreme and the other could make a significant positive difference overall.

Given experience from August 2008 to June 2009 (before the rating system existed), if the voting system was removed entirely, Omnimaga would need the nDoom policy 12 months a year. That said, I think that given there are more people here who supports the friendly environment for the site compared to back then, where there were about 6 active members, maybe it could work. However I think it would suck if rating was removed completely, since some people care a lot about it.

My suggestion would be to modify the rating mod to change the icon with a Like/Dislike/+1 button and make the redirect to the "Report to moderator" form, changing the icon with a ! or something. There would be two report links but it may encourage members to report posts more because sometimes there are just too many for mods to check.

Talking about the report button, I realized we couldn't report our own posts and the message I got was WTF

But then I thought: Why the hell did they leave a report link on our own posts? Easter egg?

It's there to scare n00bs.