I agree with dallasflyer that people are making a greater effort at civility and helpfulness since the board came back up. I attribute this to reputation points. This is a very good thing.

I wonder, however, if reputation points that can be awarded by an individual should be capped at some arbitrary amount. I went to the FAQ on reputation points, and discovered that a person gets one point per year on FT, one point per 1000 points, and one point per little green box of reputation points. This means if I could persuade Doc to give me reputation points - and I use his handle as an example since he is rarely posting, and thus not into the reputation game - he could give a 50 point swing. There are a handful of people who can make 20 point swings or greater.

Personally, I would suggest that the maximum points that any individual can bestow would be 10. This prevents a handful of people from having the ability to dominate the reputation process.