Another one of my forums has these reputation points, I like them. If you make a particularly insightful, funny or useful post, you will see your rep points in your profile. Over there, the system shows who's leaving them, which I think is a must in order for the system to be equitable. The comments others leave are nice too.
There's no reward for receiving or giving them, other than personal satisfaction. The only practical use they have is that if you can see that someone has a lot of them (a lot of green bars), then you know that they are generally a good member and a credit to the forum. But if someone has a bunch of red ones, you can surmise that they have a habit of being a tool. Generally speaking of course.
If you get enough green bars (over there they are blue), eventually you will accrue silver, and then gold bars (like differing value poker chips). I don't know how many points it takes for one bar, but over there I have 6717 points and seven bars. Not sure how it works here, but over there when you give enough rep, you will see a second line of "rep given" bars above your existing rep received bars. As I understand it, the more rep you have, the more "power" the rep you give will have. In other words, if I have 7000 rep points, when I leave rep for someone's post, let's say it leaves 200 points. But a newbie, with no rep, would only give like 50 points for favorable rep. So it pays to be on the good side of people, especially those that have been around for a long time.
The system has some flaws, especially when there have been occasions of shameless "rep building" threads. But I think it's useful to see who's the most valued contributors, as decided by the members.
