[Ken Leung]

I've spoken many times about how we shouldn't be too serious about the reputation system, but since the decision was to keep it in this forum, I think there are ways to improve it. Otherwise we might as well take it off if it does this forum nothing. There is no reason we shouldn't make it better just because we don't take it seriously.

As mentioned above, the problem with the current reputation points system is that new members will never get enough points to be any where closed to the current reputation leaders. In other words, the current system isn't very good at demonstrating the reputation ranking of the current season (whatever that ranking might mean to people). The only benefit right now is showing the top ranked people since the beginning of time, and that has its ups and downs.

The suggestion is to reduce the current ranking so new members have a chance to catch up, and there are ups and downs for that, the biggest concern being that older members who used to contribute a lot (and received big reputation points because of that) will drop away from the ranking because they might be temporary unavailable to participate in the forum in the current season. In other words new members will not know to look for these members' posts because they never heard of them before and they are no longer on the top of the list.

Here is my suggestion:

We restart the reputation count, but we don't erase the old rep points. Have archive pages of reputation points for each individual season and the overall count. This way we have an accurate rep point of recent participation, as well as the overall ranking since the beginning of this forum.

We might not like the system very much, but it was likable enough to stay around, so we might as well make it better.