[Nic Name]

The implementation that I'm suggesting is exactly the reverse of K5 and other community sites, where the threads don't get published up front, until they have the weight of positive votes.

In this implementation, every voice gets a hearing ... but if it is nonsense to start with, or turns into a garbage thread, in the judgment of the members, not me, not the site Administrator alone ... why should it be at the top of the pile?

I say, if the proposed rating system shows that a vast majority of the members thinks a thread is horrible ... by all means get it off the forum.

Why make the members and guests wade through the garbage in search of the nuggets?

I trust the members to create their own environment by natual selection.

It is, perhaps, just semantics whether a thread is moved off the forum to Trash or just moved to the bottom of the forum, by a sorting by ranking idea, as you suggest, dhamsaic.