In summary, for people who previously had many positives and no negatives:
- The first negative rating defines a border between pre-controversy and post-controversy.
- Don't move this border unless you have a really good reason. If you must add more info, leave another negative or neutral rating.
- If you agree with the border-negative, leave a negative rating.
- If you disagree with the border-negative, leave a positive rating responding to the negative, even if you already have a positive rating for that person. Don't delete your old rating. You should also consider excluding the inaccurate-rater from your trust list.
All I'm saying in the above posts is that a simple change could prevent such illegitimate use.
It's not really simple... For performance reasons, I need to keep the trust algorithm fairly limited. It's computed ~20 times per topic page (and hundreds of times if you go to ;all), and this web-of-trust stuff is pretty slow already.