Not that it matters much, but it shot down overnight from 8 to 1? I thought I’m supposed to get a message when I get negged. And why would I get negged? lol.
EDIT: Just noticed that everyone’s rep is showing as 1. There must be something wrong with my comp or something. Go ahead and forget you ever saw this haha 
Hey, Scotty, your reputation is exactly what it was before. Yours is 487, very high!
Reputation “power”, however, has been changed to 1 for everyone, including people like me.
The “power” part of the reputation system was designed by vbulletin techies who didn’t consider the long term consequences. It’s been proven to tear apart and destroy communities with weird domination and power trip games.
This was never the place for that kind of thing. Now that I know that turning it off is better than having it on (and how to turn it off, it doesn’t exactly have a “switch” like many of the other features), we’ll have none of that now.
Now you just get 1 reputation point from admirers for good contributions to the community (or 1 taken away by detractors for bad contributions). If lots of people appreciate your contributions, you’ll get “huge rep”. If lots of people think you harm the community, you’ll get low rep. Much cleaner system.
Only people who’ve been positively acknowledged by another member of the community at least once will be allowed to give or take away reputation from you.
It’s more like voting in a democracy now, with the exception that only positive contributors to the community are allowed to vote. In most democratic countries, you don’t have to contribute anything positive to society to vote – but you do here.
Over time this should elevate both the signal to noise ratio and general vibe of the community. It certainly couldn’t hurt compared to the way vbulletin comes by default.
Thanks for the great explaination Jasmin. I’m a member of many forums and I’ve never been one to care about rep because at the end of the day it means absolutely nothing. For a second I was worried I had said something offensive and got negged for it, in which case I wanted to apologize. But I’m happy to see everything is okay 
. And I completely agree with the whole power trip stuff. I’m actually very happy that I haven’t seen that sort of thing going on here with people saying things like “rep me, I rep back” for absolutely no reason.