Greay means the person who gave you the rep was a newbie. newbie rep isnt worth anything, its neutural. you have to accumulate a certain amount of time/posts in order for your rep to count for anything. This is to prevent people making multiple accounts to wage rep wars

> And can the comment box be a required field when giving reputation?
Why? Sometimes I just want to give someone kudos for a good post without having anything more to say. Overall, the simpler it is to give rep, the more accurate it will be in the long run, because you're not limiting giving rep to the people who want to take the time to type out personal messages.

That's fine. But I'd be interested why someone gave bad rep on an innocuous post.

then, why not better make the comment box a required field when giving bad rep? this way at least you know why you are being bad repped... how about it?

That's the way it used to be. But people just typed a period or some random letters, making a forced comment absolutely useless.

I guess it would be a pretty hard work for mods... but, why not validating bad rep points? I mean, before they are assigned to someone, being checked if the reason is valid by a mod?

Because reputation is subjective ... it's someone's personal opinion as to whether "they agree" or "they disagree" with someone else's post.

It wouldn't make sense for it to be moderated any more than it would make sense for voting in a poll to be moderated or rating a thread from 1 to 5 would be.

And the people that need their reputation to be "moderated" obviously are taking reputation far too seriously. I used to care more about, but now, eh... It's also a feature that is somewhat broken, in my opinion.

The only reason to monitor rep comments is to filter out objectional language and the language filter should do that. Otherwise I could care less about the comments, other than to read them and possibly find out any problems I may have caused.