Rep. points were a pretty big deal on a site I used to go to. As you get more of them you get more of the green boxes under your screen name. When you max out your green boxes they turned blue, and when you maxed out your blue they turned purple. The more posts and reputation points you have the more valuable your reputation is. They're pretty silly for the most part, but they can be useful to send a quick message. On the site I was talking about we organized ourselves so that we could gang up on bad posters and turn their reputation red quickly. It was an amusing way to deal with posters like Nutter. It's definately a throw back to junior high mentality where the cool people will only let certain people sit with them in the cafeteria though.
By using image tags you can send images to people. This caused a problem because since the messages are annonymous some people started using them to send people some heinous pics. as a practical joke. I'll never forget the day I clicked on my user CP only to be confronted with a picture of someone's menstrating, herpes infested genitals. After that the admins. started including your user name with your reputation so that everyone would know who the culprit was. Apparently they aren't used very much on this site though; I've only gotten a handful of them in all the time I've been here.
__________________  |