Well, it wasn't "general practice" among the people I respect, and it certainly wasn't general practice with me!

And to compare it with "a secret ballot" is (IMHO) utter nonsense. No one (with a few exceptions) is holding him/herself out for "election" and indeed some folks had to go back to posts made long before the reputation "feature" even existed in order to find a post with which to ding their target.

The only similarity to a "secret ballot" is the similarity to black-balling, another practice I find truly reprehensible and cowardly (although, so far as I know, I have never been a victim of such practice). Even in those cases, however, the victim has affirmatively put him/herself up for something (membership in a club, whatever).

People were not "voting on whether or not you liked a posting" - you can do that by rating a thread. The point and effect of the "reputation" feature is not to rate a particular post, but to rate the poster. If it were simply to rate the post, you could click on some icon in the post to find out how it was rated (there is such a software capability - to rate individual posts).

No, the point is to bless or dump on the individual him/herself.

Now, you may argue that at first the raters didn't realize that if they didn't put their handle in the box next to the "rating" it wouldn't be known to the recipient. The first "reputation" I left, I figured that the recipient would know it was from me since I was signed in, just as a post I made while signed in carried my handle. Someone (and I remember who it was) wound up getting an anonymous blessing from me.

But that innocence could not possibly have survived the first "hit", plus or minus, received by the rater him/herself. When he (I'm getting tired of the "he/she" nonsense, and reverting to the unstressed usage - the reader is invited to mentally fill in anything he deems politically correct) first saw reputation feed-back on himself, he had to notice that it was not automatically signed. (I doubt anyone didn't look to see who had said what about him - and that includes the folks who then turned the "reputation" feature off.) From that moment on, any anonymous dinging was done with full knowledge, intent, and malice.

But each to his own taste.