Reputation

[Animeniax]

Sorry man, give it up. gotwoot fears change.

[KitKat]

We have been over this is great detail in the past, but let me lay it out for you, so you understand exactly why the system functions as it does.

First off, rep is not a pure and empirical measure of the quality of your posts. At best, it's more of a popularity contest than anything else. You just have to accept the fact that people will give you neg rep just because they don't like you. They can do that. It's perfectly within the rules. Conversely, people will give you positive rep often on the same whimsical basis, because they like you. I don't think you need to know the identities of all your reppers to figure out who likes you and who doesn't on the forums. Our members here aren't too shy about telling someone to their face if they think they're an idiot.

Second, there ARE ways to abuse the rep system, and the rules in place try to prevent that. In the past, we had a group of a few people that repped each other 90% of the time, as much as possible. Some people in this group also frequently signed their name when repping outside of the group, which created a sense of obligation in the beneficiary to 'return the favor'. Thus, their rep skyrocketed on the forum. Likewise, some people would give out 'retaliatory reps' when they thought someone had neg repped them. Gotwoot is more like a school playground than you would think, and it can get ridiculous and petty like that. Hence, we have rules in place to try to protect the ideals of the system. They're not perfect, but they will hopefully prevent repeats of these incidents. If you want to read the entire history of how these rules came into being, just search for the previous rep threads, and read the drama as it unfolded.

So what it comes down to is: don't take rep too seriously. I doubt the rules regarding it are going to change anytime soon.