How Does the "Reputation Points" System Work?

[AdrenalinDragon]

I think the vote up/down buttons on each post serve to express approval (or disapproval) to its contents, e.g., to an opinion ("I agree"), to an announcement ("Looking forward to it"), to a funny comment ("LOL"), etc. I think that's fine. But the idea of adding up those counts for a user across all topics and displaying it as a ranking statistic - and further referring to that number as a "reputation" - does not seem right to me. So I think we should do away with that.

I did happen to down-vote post #9 in a certain thread yesterday - to express my strong disapproval of every statement in that post, all of which I felt were "wrong" (in every sense of the word). Such a vote is to do with ideas and opinions, not with people. If a negative number on individual posts too seems - well - negative, then we could get rid of down-votes as Miika suggests. But if we're going to stay with both kinds of votes, then it might make more sense to show the up and down counts separately - so that you know whether a 0 means that an equal number of people liked and disliked it, or whether nobody reacted at all.

- Madhav.

I think so far everyone is taking the reputation system well. I admit, looking back, that post was quite harsh and I downvoted it too for believing it was worthy. I don't usually downvote that much on forums, but giving out thumbs ups too often just seems silly as well. Obviously the system isn't perfect, but with a small community at the moment, it's fine I think.