As far as I can tell, the Forum Admins (sirius, theymos, and gavinandresen) have yet to post official guidelines on using the Reputation system. Please provide a link if I'm mistaken!
In my opinion, reputation should be based solely on quality posts vs. non-quality posts.
A
quality post should possess some of the following attributes:
- contributes to discussion
- on-topic
- well-organized
- thoughtful
- interesting
Non-quality posts could be described as one or more of the following:
- troll
- flamebait
- off-topic
- illegible -- hurts my brain to read it
Basically, we should be striving for a higher signal-to-noise ratio. I've seen a lot of threads get derailed by off-topic conversations and emotional disagreements where the same points just get repeated over and over by a small handful of users. It's time-consuming to read through and puts a damper on meaningful discussion. If users were aware that they might lose points, they might think about starting a new thread or requesting a moderator to split them from the original thread.
It would also be great to provide a comment for a +1 or -1. If someone bothered to embed a URL to an article they mention in a post, you should be able to say, "thanks for the link to X -- good read!". When people know their effort is appreciated, they'll keep putting in that effort.
I think this could really improve the quality of discussion on these forums, but we'll need the admins to officially define guidelines for using reputation. Otherwise it will be meaningless.
You have to be careful though, because it's also an excellent way to discourage people from posting on forums in the first place... especially if you try to define what exactly a + or - should be given for. People will try to start "policing" the forums - "He was flamebaiting!!!!11!!!!11", and posters will be afraid to post for fear of receiving said negative feedback. If you leave the +/- undefined, then it will fall back to a person's common sense, which will generally give much better and more accurate results as to the actual helpfulness or hindrance of a person.
It would also be a headache for the moderators if they were to lay out guidelines. People would start complaining... "He gave me a minus for flamebaiting, but that's not what I was doing!", and it would just give them one more thing on their plates to worry about.
Just leave it arbitrary. If someone likes a person (which generally happens BECAUSE of them being helpful), or reads something helpful/funny/otherwise worth a +, then they'll give it to them. If someone's being truly obnoxious, they'll get a few -. There's no need to put a bunch of rules or guidelines around it. Those who deserve it will get it, those who do not will not.