[Brandon Martus]

Its a built in feature to the vBulletin code.

If people use it how it was designed, and rated threads accordingly, in any forum with a large user base (1000's of users), you could know what threads are really interesting/relevant/etc, because they would be rated higher than other threads.

But, since not too many people rate them on this forum, you are correct in saying that its not really useful.

Maybe one day people will select a rating while replying to a thread...

I think thats the reason the vBulletin developers put a rating drop-down on the reply screen ... to make it more accessable & hope that people would start using it more than in the past.