can I easily do the below with your software

[grandd]

Tell me if you can do this for a commentary board
If I gave one commentary per week on say social issues and
individuals who sign in are allowed to give comments only, could we
provide rating buttons at say cool,neutral or
disgusting that would let an individual that is signed on to give a
rating to either
the commentery(me) or individual responses/comments by the signed on
readers and only one time, otherwise they can`t sign on again and
rate the same commentary or response.
Then could we provide the statistics to see who had the most votes
good/bad etc. for various commentaries or responses and be able to
bring them up for the readers in general to see what people thought
was good or bad and in the case of a commentary
to see what the ten most good or ten most disgusting responses are to
a particular commentary.

In other words is this doable for a novice with your software or what kind
of exoerience would he have to have programming wise and would it require
anything outside the range of your software.Please request any clarifications
about my question if it is not fully understood.

example--I come to this website and see the forum and out of a 100
commentarys made by the author 2 have 50 or more good votes then
I could call those up and see the original commentary and say the top
ten highly rated responses to it.

thank you, gary

[.:mak:.]

I don't think that's an option in the default vBulletin packadge, but you are more then likely able to install a modification from vbulletin.org that can do that for you.

[feldon23]

It is very easy to set up a forum or subforum so that only certain usergroups can create posts, threads, etc. You could create a forum where only you can create threads and only registered users of a certain level can reply to those threads. You can close each thread after you are satisfied.

For the postive and negative ratings, why not do a poll that also allows discussion. I think you can request/require that users reply to the thread before voting with free add-ons at vBulletin.org.