Lack of ratings and attention to alerts good and bad

As far as I can tell, ratings are no longer being given for good posts in the News forum.  Is there any logical reason for this other than moderators not being on the job?  I know that I have given a number of good alerts and have posted some of the best articles I have written and yet the only ratings I have seen in many weeks are ones which were posted in another forum as the primary forum.

I thought that the whole idea of the rating system, besides simply recognizing good efforts, was to call deserved extra attention to important information so that more might be able to benefit from it.  To be educated instead of medicated in other words.

One unfortunate result is that in many instances no one is bothering to go to the trouble of giving a good message alert.  Or a bad one either.  I suppose that members must be thinking "why bother, since no one seems to be paying attention", and I can certainly understand why they would think that.

Here is an example of one downside:

One poster has spammed the news forum (and infertility forum as a cross-posted forum) no less than 5 times over the past two weeks:

http://www.curezone.com/forums/s.asp?f=762&c=0&ob=d&m=theCHR

Until I just gave bad alerts, not a single bad alert had been posted.

As a moderator of two forums myself, I am not aware of any instructions to suddenly become the Grinch when it comes to giving out good ratings or ignoring alerts.  Neither are other moderators I know.  In fact, one moderator contacted me and wondered why no one had given bad alerts on the messages in the above link.

So what is up?