removing serendipity karma plugin

I had noticed recently that all of my blog entries were getting spurts of voting that was negative, and so I took a look at the access log to see what was up.  To my great surprise, 90% of the votes were from MSN's web scraper, even though it requires javascript to access the actual URL.  Taking a closer look at the non-bot votes using cat and grep, I could see that most were multiple votes from the same IP address, clrealy designed to skew the karma results.

When I originally enabled the karma plugin, I had hoped it would allow me some insight into what the silent public thought about my blog posts, which ones were useful, which ones not at all, and use this to gauge what might be best to focus my limited time on, since I am interested in way too many things for 24 hours in a day .  It looks like the karma plugin just doesn't cut it, unfortunately so I decided to disable it.

If you have any good ideas on better ways to rank the popularity of articles I've written for the list on the right sidebar, please let me know, I am also interested in the feedback on what people find useful on this blog, so that I can write more articles that don't suck .

Thanks in advance.