It's really funny how much opinion relates to discussion of the forum thread rating. It has nothing to do with the service or quality of the provider. Just the thread itself. It's a built-in feature of the vBulletin software being used.
Since it gets under the skin of certain posters, that just adds fire to others to go around and click on the "*" or "*****" rating.
Or maybe in a time when we feel our vote doesn't count, it's refreshing to see that our rating does count, or at least until the next person puts in their rating. If you really wanted to tame it out, you can change the setting so that the rating only shows after a set number of votes.
I myself just rate to see the pretty patterns go round.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kx2PbA8bCI