[Neo]

I knew when we first implemented the reputation system that it would need to be tweaked many times before we arrived at a fair and accurate system. The problem with rewarding people based soley on number of posts is obvious. Now this isn't so true now, but back in the day I knew several users with thousands of posts that were total douchebags. As it stands we have 21 users which are members of the P4 group, which is a large percentage of our active user base. There's definitely not a disproportionate amount of users with no special privileges at all.

A promotion system based on reputation obviously works best on forums with a large number of active users since you have a bigger data pool. I'm considering several ways of changing the system, such as increasing the rate at which users gain reputation-altering power. Another involves incorporating post count into the promotion system, perhaps by requiring a certain reputation OR a certain number of posts to get promoted. But it would be designed to where if you are a halfway decent poster you'll get promoted through rep faster than you would through total # of posts.

Part of the reason I wanted everyone's rep power displayed was to make the reputation system as a whole more visible and thereby encourage people to make use of it. If someone with a rep power of 10 gives you 25 positives then you're halfway to the next promotional level. The required levels really aren't that difficult to attain. Btw, I believe if you give someone (-) rep it doesn't count as much as (+) rep. If people need to be promoted faster (it's not clear yet if this is happening too slowly) I'd like to see that happen through increased user participation instead of giving users more rep-altering power.