So there's a huge gap there.
Again, I pose the suggestion as a way to respectfully take this board and the posters into the future. Many progressive boards are and have been doing this and it's been highly used and welcomed. This isn't some gimmicky thing and serves a distinct purpose that "followers"/"membermarks" COULD never accomplish.
Members would start off with lets say 0 reputation. They also would have a bank of 100 reputation points that they can give away as example. so you can decide to "rep" certain posters for posts they make and other reason. Similarly you can "neg" a poster for the same thing. So there's a balance there - you get both sides +/- added to your score and the posters would only have a finite %# of reps they can use.
These either would replenish per annum or those with higher reps would be given additional reps to use.
This is a much more utilitarian system than follows across the board.
You addressed one thing around the system (credibility) but there's other usecases particularly around redemption of said "reputation" points, which self polices a member. I would not want to be in negative, so I would cease doing things that put me there and help improve the types of posts as an example. I don't want you taking one use case and making simple rebuttals to fit your "no", but rather give the other admins the ability to look at this system holistically with all use cases, which I'm sure your forums adminstrators probably already have the ability to implement as this technology for bulletin boards has been in effect for at least a decade.
