Whats the deal w/member ratings?

[jmidolo]

Mine says I have 20 points...what's that all mean?

[Big Mike]

I was wondering the same thing.Could some one exlain.

[Turbo Brian]

User Reputations are similar to what is known as Karma on many sites such as SlashDot. It is a way of rating users based on the quality of their posts. Users can opt to not have their reputation displayed, but they cannot opt to not be rated. The reason for this is quite simple: if a user posts something inflammatory, and had the ability to turn off rating of his posts, he could do so before posting, wait a few weeks, and turn it back on, and his reputation would be none the worse despite his subpar post. This way, if a user turns their display back on, their bad post would still count against them.

Currently the user rating is for information only - there is no mechanism to filter posts by reputation level. However, each user may keep an "ignore list", whereby posts by users on the list are not displayed to the user. The reputation could also be used as a basis for inclusion of the user in the Tachy Goes to Coventry list, which allows a "global" ignore list to be kept, where the posts of users on that list are only viewable to the user doing the posting, and no one else.

You can set various levels of reputation, both negative and positive, to be displayed when a user reaches (or falls below) set levels of points. Users become able to give other users points by performing certain tasks, such as having a certain number of posts or having a certain number of points themselves. Users can also be limited to giving a maximum number of reputation "hits" per day, and can be made to "hit" a certain number of different users before being allowed to hit the same user again. Administrators are exempt from most of these limits.

--ripped from the admin panel help