I think that toucharcade should have a reputation system so you can see what points are good and bad, and to give kudos to a excellent post. I would write more about this, but I have to go to sleep.
Instead of giving points to users, i'd twist it a bit and support the idea of giving rep points to individual posts which a user finds particularly useful, helpful or interesting. A section could be created, filtering the most-repped posts of the day, week and month.
A rep system is useless and would do more harm than good, imo. You'd have people posting "Rep me!" nonstop. It would distinguish posters, but for what reason? If someone makes a good post, good for them. Quote it and tell why you agree with it. Creating artificial differentiations between posters usually just causes enmity. It's one more thing for people to get big-headed about, or get defensive about. What KtK is saying would be better, but it would require maintenance and I'd be willing to bet that more often than not the post of the day would be someone's smartass remark or ironical nonsense-rant rather than something that's actually useful.
Rep system is useless. But I do like the post vote system which MR has started using recently. MR articles tend to generate 100s of posts/comments and its simply too much for most people to go through the dozens of pages just to get a gist of what others think about the news. Especially considering the majority of them are useless comments. They now allow you to up/down vote a post and the posts with more up votes show up on the main article page. For example, if you've read the comments featured on this page http://www.macrumors.com/2011/06/16/apple-launches-2011-back-to-school-promotion/ you've pretty much read all the 250+ posts in 20x less time. So it can be useful if implemented correctly instead of the dumb system which most other forums use.
If it were implemented I think it would be simpler to only have positive votes and no negatives. If people agree strongly with a post or find it helpful, they can vote it up. If they disagree or don't like the post, they can keep their mouths shut instead of starting arguments. The best posts would make it to the top and the others would remain neutral, just as the forums are currently.
I don't think it's really needed. If I like or agree with what someone says then I can thank them, or tell them that I agree by quoting them in a post. Reputation systems have always felt pointless to me, and often they create more arguments and more work for the mods.
I'd be okay with it if you had a post cut off, like 200, before people can participate in the system. And maybe a length cut off too, like only after so many months.
Please , please toucharcade writers , administators, and Mods dont even consider this idea. I seen forums where the highly rep people feel thier words are from Gods lips. They feel thier fart's smell like fresh roses and thier crap is golden nuggets worth millions of dollars. They feel thier opinion is %100 fact and the only one who can question them is someone who is of higher rep.
If really this system can be carried out, post cut off and length cut off are not fair enough to rep anyone, while the quality of the post is the most important! That is to say if he/she reaches a certain number of high quality posts, he/she can be reputed by the mods and admins.
I took the cut off idea to mean where users can start giving rep, not receiving it. None of this is gonna happen anyway, the admins just laugh at the whole prospect every time it's mentioned.
