This is fascinating stuff. I'm scratching my head every other sentence but it's worth a read if you're interested in learning about the nitty-gritty of online communities and algorithms. From Wikipedia: >The motivating idea for Advogato was to try out in practice Levien's ideas about attack-resistant trust metrics, having users certify each other in a kind of peer review process and use this information to avoid the abuses that plague open community sites. Levien observed that his notion of attack-resistant trust metric was fundamentally very similar to the PageRank algorithm used by Google to rate article interest. In the case of Advogato, the trust metric is designed to include all individuals who could reasonably be considered members of the Free Software and Open Source communities while excluding others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato