let author do the sorting. Allowing him/her to comment on individual posts. this allows the user to see that the post has been read and addressed by the author.

If they are just normal comments then you lose all control. Either the jerks can post anything they want including comments like "This mod sux and the creater should die becuz he maed her eyes green and i wnat them blue." or the modder can remove legitimate complaints like "If you install and use this mod for a day or so there is no way to remove the mod and continue using that save. Make sure to create a backup before testing this mod."

If the complaints/criticisms have to be labelled and approved, then the modder can clean his own threads of stupid comments, but the legitimate complaints/criticisms are still protected.

And the mini-moderators wouldn't have much to do. All they'd do is confirm if the post has legitimate content instead of being a pure flame and either approve or reject it. If rejected the user would have the chance to re-phrase their complaint. Most of it would be automated, and since the mini-moderators wouldn't have any significant power you could have quite a lot of them.

If the user feels the mini-moderator was too strict, they could re-submit and a different mini-moderator would get the chance to approve. To keep the real mods from being too busy, you could limit complaints about the mini-moderators to have a threshold, so that more than 20 people have to complain about a mini-moderator before a Full moderator is notified. Or 50, or 100.

That would require getting a number of "mini-moderators", who can be trusted in their judgment, and who understand enough about modding to actually recognise what they're reading as valid or not. If a mini-moderator only knows how to do simple things mod-wise, they could mistake a genuine post as gibberish, or assume that a gibberish post is meaningful because they don't understand it.
If you instead simply leave these as normal comments, then if they are gibberish they can be reported and a full moderator can step in and delete the comment, exactly as would be expected with regards any comment that is undesirable. This avoids creating more work for moderators, avoids requiring more moderators (mini- or full), and just keeps things simple while still fully functional. It just seems to me like needless extra work on all sides the way you suggest it.

No it wouldn't. There job wouldn't be to interpret the technical side of the post, just to filter out the completely rude and unhelpful comments. If a comment does not contain obviously stupid content it would be posted and the modder could then ask for it to be removed if it is irrelevant.

The point is to take the work off the main moderators, who have all the significant power, by allowing a certain amount of filtering before the message is posted.

Yes, it would require participation from the community, but it wouldn't require any excessive knowledge other than a basic understanding of tact.

edit: If you leave the messages as normal comments, then the modder has to deal with the barrage of garbage, and he has to report each stupid comment to a moderator who then has to deal with it.

@showler, you have some interesting ideas and i agree with most of them. But keep it real, keep it simple. It would be a great improvement if we would just do like Vorians said: having to explain the thumbs down and not thumbs up, not the other way around. Or completely remove thumbs down.

Well LHammonds response was the best that could be done for me. Don't get me wrong, I was thoroughly angry with a post that a player made. Endorsing the mod negatively because he couldn't get the mod to work when he actually had downloaded files that were months old and didn't follow installation instructions. I thought that his endorsemant should be removed, but since it couldn't be and had I removed the mod to deactivate endorsemants, then I couldn't get constructive input on bug reports. This was more important, so I svcked it up even as angry as I was. I do agree that the system should be revamped.

Agreed.

We have had for about a year and a half a specific rule against cross-site bashing - though of course it wasn't really allowed beforehand.

I note that comments so far have been polite, but it is still a breeding-ground for inflammatory remarks in a context where it is unlikely that the focus of your ire will have an opportunity to defend himself. That, basically, is just not fair.

I'm going to close this now. If you have a question, comment or criticism regarding the Nexus site, it's probably best to discuss it there.