Our veteran members remember the reputation points system. The reputation point was aside from hosting credit system that your fellow forum peers gave to build the trust. It was mainly to gain credibility of this person's advice, post and information.

The new forum version 2.1.4 features RATING system. This is similar to the reputation points. But instead of evaluating members individually, the rating system will rate individual topic. This allows two key factors to happen in this forum: 1) the topic will be evaluated by members for its relevance and usefulness 2) a member will spend extra time making a new topic and posting with quality contribution--which eliminates many redundant topics or spam topics.

As you can see, if your topic can be evaluated by how much contribution or usefulness factor there won't be spam topics or topics with one-liner. A member will then spend some time carefully thinking about making a new topic and put some effort in by making a topic worthy of lengthy discussion. This benefits us all because not only it will stimulate, challenge and intrigue our discussions but the search engines will mark Trap17 as the best source for various discussions. And that, my fellow members, is our ultimate goal

The final value of a rating is the average of total rates given.

Am I allowed a couple of stupid questions?
Well, I suppose I will ask irrespective of the legality... *sigh*

Can replies be rated? As far as I can see they cannot be, and I don't mind it that way, but it'll be nice to _know_. *grin*

Do these ratings somehow reflect on the members' profile page? I think that would be interesting... an average post-quality-rating in the detailed profile page. Again, i didn't find anything noticable on the few profile pages I'd been to...

Thanks for the feature. It is rather cool... and in some respects perhaps better than the rep-points scheme, which was perhaps vulnerable to manipulation (no offense intended).

I still like the reputation system better. Even though it was abused it kind of let you see what other people thought of a user, and let you put in your own thoughts.

Very good suggestions! I'm not sure if one particular reply post can be rated but I'm sure the script to show average ratings received by a member's topic can be shown on the member's profile page is in works...OpaQue mentioned that few times.

As soon as OpaQue is finished with the rest of Xisto servers (optimizing and modifying to bring us the ultimate services) I'll bring this topic to his To Do List