Reputation points are the equivalent of "karma" on some forums. Basically, they're kudos to a user for really valuable posts. If you think that a particular post stands out, you can give a good rep to its author or comment on it. If you find a post to be rude, insulting, spam, worthless, false info, etc. then you can add to the author's bad rep. All in all, users build up reputation points (either positive or negative). Other members can see a member's rep and use that info to determine how "trustworthy" a user's posts are (e.g. whether they have a good or bad rep on the forums).

How does the system work? How many reputation points are donated each time? Please explain.

4 more months and the thread that you responded to is already a year old... :P

But it would be pointless to start a new thread if there is one that allready contains the topic in question savvy?

actually, I'm also curious of this reputation system... I never really understood how it works... can you see who rated who?

No, it is kept impersonal so that people don't get bad feelings around the forums. "MemberX, you gave me a bad rep! Here is bad rep for you!" When you rate someone, the amount that they are affected is based on how reputable YOU are ;) The more posts you have, your status (i.e. moderator), and what your rep is, all influence how much reputation is added to or taken away from another member when you rate their post.

So then, how does one "spread reputation around before giving back to member x" how much do I have to spread it around?

Thanks,

Slade

Basically, suppose you are Member A and you have a friend Member B. The forum system doesn't want you to give every single one of Member B's posts kudos so that Member B gets 1 million reputation points in one afternoon ;) Rather, "spreading it around" is a safety mechanism to ensure that you are giving reputation to more than only 1 or 2 people. Basically, you have to spread reputation around to 5 members before you can hit the same person again. So in other words, suppose you give reputation points to Member B. You must now give reputation points to 4 other members before you can give Member B more reputation points. In addition, to ensure that no one goes on reputation sprees randomly giving + or - feedback to everyone in sight, you can only hand out reputation 10 times per day.

Do you or can you personally revew the reputations that are givin from one person to another before they are enforced? Would you want to?

I don't think you should know who gave you a positive/negative rep. coz some people might take it personally and get back at whoever gave them the rep...

I don't think you should know who gave you a positive/negative rep. coz some people might take it personally and get back at whoever gave them the rep...

I fully agree! Even with the safetys in place that Dani mentioned, what's to stop someone from getting a gang togeather... It's a possibility.

what's to stop someone from getting a gang togeather... It's a possibility.

More than a possibility- I've even seen people register on a site under several different user names for the express purpose of mounting their own "denial of karma" attack against someone else- no gang needed. This kind of abuse of "rating systems" is what has caused many forums to drop ratings altogether.

If you honestly want to verify a member's reputation, the best thing to do is to use the "find posts by this member" option available on many/most forums and read through some of those posts. You'll be able to determine pretty quickly whether the member is worth relying on.

I've had a few reps points, but some of them say completely "nothing" so how can you see the difference in approval and dissaproval? is it like this?
Green=approval
grey=dissaproval

Green is approval and Red is disapproval. Grey means that the person who rated your post is a new member, has very few posts, or little rep himself/herself. And therefore it hasn't affected your reputation.

yeah I found that. It's annoying, I had heaps of gray positive rep lol.

So, if they are grey and don't effect your rep points, how do you know if they dissapprove or approve, if they forgot to input text? (I like to know if I give good advice/info or not)

Unfortunately, I just don't know :( Reputation is a feature of the vBulletin forum system, and your question confuses me too. As far as I can tell, the grey represents a "balanced reputation" :-/ I'll look into it for ya though.

when a person who can't affect rep TRIES to affect rep, it still allows them to approve or dissaprove. Yzk just wants to know whether they approved or dissaproved of his post...

Reputation states you