You could start off the rep system as giving away your rep to people, and moderators start off with a set ammount, not to mention administrators.
I've never seen a reputation system that did anything other than inflate the already massive egos of people with high post counts.
Well, I mean, there's just not much reason at all to implement it. TouchArcade is a pretty drama-free forum. Adding an imaginary points system on top of things to somehow order the importance of people's opinions is entirely counterproductive to discussing 99¢ video games. Heck, if it was an easy toggle, I would have turned off post counts ages ago for this same reason.
I think you have a good point-- it would create some potential for drama. At the same time, though, I have seen forums where rep systems have turned out pretty well. It gives users a kind of meta-game incentive to be active on a forum. I know that's silly, but it's true.
I was backing the idea of repping individual posts, in some attempt to make them easy to find/search for. If the rep wasn't directly attached to a user's profile it's not like they'd get to "keep" it as a record of their importance and people with low post counts would be just as likely to get a well-written and informative post rated. I think the mods/admins have mentioned all of those "Downloading!" posts being a waste of space before. Surely if the useful stuff could be bumped above the likes of those it'd be easier/faster for people to get opinions (and feedback if you're a dev) on the game. I'm not even sure if such a system exists on vBulletin, but it's definitely better than just repping users.
Yeah, I agree with the anti-reputation sentiments. I think it often just leads to a small group of regular posters all bumping each other's rep. Ignoring the trolls on a forum, I would expect that rep would be highly correlated with post count anyways, which is already a silly (overvalued) metric used on many forums.
