Rewarding Points

I'm not differentiating Blogs, Articles and Forum Threads. But I am concerned with any of these media containing something that might interest me, but not the general public or the group as an entity, and missing it simply because it wasn't "elevated." Then again, I may not grap the finer points of the Slashdot system.  There are a articles, blog entries and forum threads that get a lot of hits, a lot of comments, and even praise, which I find medicre at best. Similarly there are those that receive little attention, and are even criticized, which I think are pretty good.  How, exactly, does the Slashdot system help me?

I don't think that a Slashdot like system is intended to solve the problem that you describe.  As I understand it it is intended to provide a uniform measure of perceived post quality as judged by the community in order to allow users to filter out content that has been judged to be of poor or even detrimental quality.

It is not context specific, and not intended to replace a search function that would direct you towards the content that is of interest to you based on subject matter.  Again, I think that there are other solutions available for what you are looking for that would improve, or at least augment the current search functionality.  One such solution that has been put forth a number of times is a keyword tagging system such as the one used on Flickr that would allow far more refined searches and hopefully as a result better search results.  In terms of allowing the content to find you as opposed to the other way around, well, again that's another lengthy topic, but something as simple as allowing users to set up a keyword watchlist might help or at least serve as a jumping off point for further discussion.

I like the idea of keywords, as well as an advanced searching tool.
I think you may be right, that I'm on a different, though similar, mission.

I suppose a Slashdot-like system would work on chess.com for the comment section of daily puzzles. Most users would surely agree that "easy" and "first" replies are lame, and moderate up posts that actually discuss the puzzle. But I would not trust it to rank news articles or blog posts as people have very different interests.

             I noticed today someone has 175 points (for one day)!  Just curious, how is that possible?  I just broke 1000 points after 9 months and I am on Chess.com
constantly and blog and post fairly often.
             Are certain activities rewarded very high amounts of points?

Nope. You only get points by posting.

One point per post, but if a user wanted to amass them without pissing off the rest of the community and probably getting banned for spamming they could conceivably create a blog entry and spam themselves silly....

Good strategy! But points used to be important to me a long time ago but not anymore.

Currently, just adding to the site content will get you points. I am of the opinion you get a few too many for uploading photos.

Yes but what about the op, she may be a bit of a tomboy but rather photogenic nontheless.

>:)

I think it would simply be too tough to implement this idea well and even if they did how great would it really be? I think what they might want to do is allow members to rate forum topics with no reward, simply to show players where the best stuff is.