[erica647]

1. Does a ratings system help the community promote new and exciting mods, or does it just turn everyone into BorgUI 4.3?

The ratings system can be beneficial imo if some sort of requirement would be in place requiring the user to at least give some reason as to why they gave a particular mod a low rating. Maybe something like a required field that has to be filled in for a certain level of rating(s) or a check box with a basic reason.

2. Would a positive system that only allowed users to flag a mod upwards be beneficial, or would it require too much administration/policing to prevent someone from launching a "ZOMG PROMOTE MY MOD111!1" campaign?

Does that mean a user could only rate a mod as positive or just not at all? That would probably confuse me as a lot of users may just choose to not rate their mods while authors would be wondering what's wrong with their respective mods.

3. How else can we work to spread the news about the exciting user interfaces that are available on WoWInterface other than the current methods which show the top favorites, new addons, top downloads, our addon spotlight on the addons tab and our weekly picks, etc.?

The rating system can be a good thing but it would actually require some honest and constructive criticism from users. I would hope that all users would rate mods to help authors understand various perspectives and to be able to learn what people want... to hopefully be able to make their mods even better. Maybe we could setup a poll to ask users if they would honestly rate mods if we had a scale of like 1-5 (1 being the highest rating for this example) if they had to list a reason to be able to rank a mod at a 4 or 5? What I would still fear is that users would just rank it a 3 just so they wouldn't have to give input and possibly offend someone.