Users evaluate the articles they read to create objects we call votes. A vote contains the name of the newsgroup in which the evaluated article resides, the unique message-id assigned to the article, and the user's evaluation of the article. Evaluations are one of terrible, ok, good, or great.
Although a single article can appear in more than one
newsgroup, each vote only contains the name of the newsgroup in which
the user read and voted for the article. This decision should make
the accumulated votes more useful for filtering as newsgroups are
organized around topics. An article cross posted to several
newsgroups may be extremely relevant and important in one newsgroup,
but totally irrelevant in the others. This decision will also
discourage users from posting their articles to more than one
newsgroup in hopes of garnering more votes for the article.