Yeah, that was why I brought back points the last time I tried removing them.  Without points it was harder to read comment threads.  But I have some other ideas about how to solve that problem.  For example, I could distinguish comments by users whose recent comments are over a certain average.  That approaches the score of a specific comment as the window size decreases.  If I didn't discard outliers, as I currently do when calculating comment averages, I could probably even catch the case of the high scoring comment made by a user with an otherwise low average.<p>I may also try letting users specify other users whose comments they're interested in, and distinguish those in the display of the thread.<p>I don't know whether these will work, but I want to try them and see what happens.  If anyone has other suggestions for things to try I'd be glad to hear them.