The star system scale is flawed. It goes from ‘Poor’ to ‘Fantastic!’ (with an exclamation mark, note). No-one votes ‘Poor’. If a submission is poor, you’re not going to waste further time voting it that. Two stars is ‘Works’. What’s that supposed to mean? ‘I get the joke, but it didn’t really make me laugh?’ Again, a waste of time voting.
Three stars means ‘Good’. Now this would be a better starting point for the scale, because if you think a piece is good, you are more likely to be bothered to say so. Four stars is ‘Great’, which would become ‘Better’ on the new scale (that is, better than the ones you think are good) and the current five-star 'Fantastica!’ would be the new three-star ‘Best’ (for quality satire, well-written, with a good gag in nearly every line and building up to an excellent punchline).
But a couple of extra buttons are needed. A fairly common situation which occurs for many NB Forum users is that they take a mouthful of their beverage and fail to swallow it before reading a one-liner so incredibly hilarious they suffer an involuntary physiological reaction whereby they spurt said mouthful simultaneously down their nose onto their keyboard and project it out of their mouth onto their screen.
Buttons for this might relieve sufferers of Involuntary Spurting Syndrome the tedium of having to spell out precisely which flavour drink / yoghurt, etc was involved, graphic details of the particular spurting technique deployed and the extent of the ensuing damage. Two buttons could simplify this: one to depict the act of snorting out fluid, and the other showing a screen with a huge splat across it.