Hi all,
This is a true word. You win some, then you lose some.
On the technical forums there are lots of -often new- users who do not seem to understand the rating system. An improvement over the old forum is that you can now hover over the user-id to see its posting history. If this does not include rated posts, you can consider that as a warning that your efforts may not be rewarded. It even seems that these users are getting less answers from any of the top posters.
To boycot them is one solution although it will be impossible to maintain this boycot with so many new and eager people looking for questions to answer. I guess we must give everyone a chance to get his or her problem resolved.
What I have seen also is people using a final sentence like "Please rate helpful posts." This may help to educate users but I hate to beg for points and I guess I am not the only one. Still I must admit to having used this strategy a few times. Perhaps it helps more when an outsider who is not contributing to the question posts a warning about rating or even rate a post because he/she think the poster deserves it. Sometimes I do this but in general I tend to keep it for the real sorrow-cases and I am not actively surveying for them.
There is an alternative which not many people seem to use. This consists of giving a humoristic reply to anyone who thanks you for solving his case but has forgotten to rate. Or one which clearly has gotten the right answer and never responds. (Yes, there really are this kind of dorks around.) What I generally use in such cases is: "Thank you for not rating." but perhaps someone else comes up with a better idea. When this does not help to bring the ratings more in line with reality, at least it can bring a bit more fun into the technical forums. We could also use a bigger set of emoticons.
