Here's what I'm doing in Moodle 2.2:
Most of my course is based on projects. I'm teaching statistics, so each week my students have to construct a question they will answer with data, select the appropriate data, analyze it, and post the result with a supporting spreadsheet. My grades for this activity are as follows:
20 points for posting a well-formed question by mid-week
20 points for selecting appropriate data to answer the question, and posting this to the forum
20 points for posting suggestions or other substantive comments to peers on their projects
30 points for posting the final spreadsheet and interpretation.
This is a total of 90 points-- the other 10 points each week are calculated on the basis of a short objective quiz that the students can re-take as often as they like-- there is a large question pool and they get 10 questions at random.
So I've assigned a "rating" total of 90 to each weekly forum, and as I read through the forum each day, I assign ratings to posts that meet one of these criteria. Typically the posts to peers should be worth 10 points each, but sometimes I only grant 5 points if I thought the response was a bit weak. Students can see their own ratings, but not the ratings assigned to the posts of others. They can see the cumulative total in the Gradebook.
There are a couple of problems with this method. One is that students don't always understand which component of the assignment they've done well on. In particular, students don't understand that they lost a lot of points through not posting substantively in peer threads.
The other problem is that Moodle doesn't accurately track which posts I've already read, so sometimes I miss posts. I try to follow up with the "Recent Activity" block and report, but that involves right-clicking each post so I can read and rate it, and still be able to return to the list easily.
So what would help a great deal is:
1 - Allow more than one rating category, each to feed into its own gradebook column. Perhaps the rating function should be attached to the "Activity Completion" settings, or structured more like the "Restriction" settings, which are nicely flexible.
2 - Provide a means of viewing and rating all the posts by a specific person within a specific date range on one page. The selection logic would be like the current "Recent Activity" report, but would include the full text of the posts and the rating widget(s).
Someone may think to suggest that I could create a separate forum for each phase of the project, but I think that would really disrupt the learning process. It is much easier and more natural for the students to have the process taking place in a single forum, with each student "owning" a single thread.