Clicktard
Once upon a time, Yahoo had some finance message boards. They weren't great, but they were home to a number of online communities, one of which was the Y!SCOX Message board, filled with all sorts of people who don't like SCO, and some who do. Two notable members of this board are Esker Melchior and Jeffrey Vernon Merkey.
As is the way of things, Yahoo! decided to improve things by making their message board system worse. Amongst other atrocities committed in the name of Web 2.0, a "ratings system" was added. Not that the old system didn't have a ratings system all of its very own, but hey. Instead of "recommending" a post, one now clicks a retarded javascript widget in order to assign a post a rating of between one and 5 stars.
Now, with the old system, you could not only see what posts had been heavily recommended, but also, and this is the important part, who had recommended it. With the new system, one only sees the average rating given to a post, with no way of knowing who has rated it. And this, of course, has resulted in some massive abuse by someone known only as the "RecBlaster" (although, technically, this is the tool used by this cretin), "Clicktard", or, possibly more correctly, "Jeffrey Vernon Merkey". Here's how it works:
- Someone makes a post that brings on the ire of the clicktard.
- The clicktard, either aided and abetted by a bug in Yahoo! code, or by simply having a massive number of sockpuppet accounts, tries to rate the post into oblivion by frantically clicking on stars.
- Everyone else lulzez, 'cause it's only a stupid ratings system that nobody really cares about.