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Well personally I welcome this change, I've never been a fan of reputation systems, in any forum I've been.
In the end they do a lot less good than you think they would. This isn't even the first time for me that I see a forum admin removing the reputation system.
Generally a reputation system is implemented with the idea to reward good behaviors and "punish" bad mannerism. In other words it's usually supposed to improve the quality of posting. However what it actually becomes in the end is a popularity contest.
The problem lies on the assumption that the userbase will make an appropiate use of the reputation system, but that's hardly the case in my experience. So what a high score actually reflects is how much one is popular, which isn't the same thing as how much respectful of the rules and good mannered one is.
One can easily get bad scores for saying things that are unpopular, but not necessarily wrong. And if one lets himself be affected by it, he might end up giving up speaking his own mind honestly when he knows that what he thinks is unpopular.
That being said I always had the impression that in this forum negative reputation detracted a lot less points than whan positive reputation give. So I don't think negative reputation had that much impact, but I have noticed in a few occasions people taking it way worse than they should have, and that's not something positive.
If you plan to reintroduce another system, I hope you'll keep this in consideration, but I am honestly very skeptical that you can make something completely devoid of problems. In the end the issue is not the system, but the people that use it, and they won't change.
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