I generally keep my mouth (keyboard?) shut on topics like these unless I have something useful to say, but since this is a thread devoted to 2 cents...

I personally don't care whichever way the forum goes with rankings and such. I don't look at people's post counts, and I think I'm a pretty good judge of what sounds like BS or trolling, and what sounds like careful reasoning or honest theorycrafting/questioning just by reading a post.

However, I do agree that anything that contributes to rewarding people for posting for the sake of rank or post count doesn't really help the community. The post ranking/digging is about the only ranking system that I feel actually carries any value, as it's a way for the community itself to help bury useless information that mods otherwise really shouldn't be involved with censoring. But I don't feel that a forum really NEEDS this ability for the threads to be useful.

If you really want to put some ranking on a person themselves, it should be based on the relative worth of their posts (i.e. average post rank, total number of posts over a certain ranking, etc). Preventing someone from ranking other people's posts until after they either have a sufficiently high postcount while maintaining an overall positive ranking themself should largely discourage people from self-bumping with dummy accounts (though this is far from a real roadblock).