Reputation meter. THE SUM OF YOUR EXISTENTIAL WORTH (and decency as a human)

Hmm, I figured I'd dig up this week-old bird... Good idea! Ehum!1!!one And good job, some of the people who posted here, for commenting on what karma absolutely isn't. Internet 'karma' is, at its core and when well-implemented, a method to reduce trolling and flaming. People who exercise such tactics will get abominable karma scores. The ability to influence another user's karma in accordance with post quality, general online behaviour and adherence to etiquette also lets the users themselves keep a passive neighborhood watch, which in turn may allow moderators to pay attention to prospective troublemakers by keeping a closer watch on those few folks whose karma scores plummet. Any system made by people, for people and powered with people can be abused by the people, so while it can just end up being something pretty that serves absolutely no purpose, it can be used correctly just the same.

In most karma systems employed on forums, each member has the ability to either boost or reduce the karma of anyone other tham him by one 'karma point' per day, the resulting karma score is the positive karma score minus the negative karma score and can be abused the hell out of. Or something like that. Problem still is that despite the 1 day time lag between subsequent karma boosts, such scores tend to keep piling up and are therefore highly susceptible to karma campaigns that retards with no life might just initiate to boost their own - or their friend's - karma. That is, of course, thinking that it's a reputation score, which many people will think even if you were to blatantly announce it's not.

I think the Karma system has merit if you can only ever give a single bonus or penalty point per person (other than yourself). Flag any person by giving them a -1. Exhonorate them by giving them a +1, or proclaim them to be 'meh', by keeping your thoughts neutral (default or 0). This would mean that any karma score will never be higher (or lower) than the number of members that have suscribed to the forum. Clearly, for this reason, you don't want guests or IPs to be able to contribute to karma, and should a user be deleted, his input in karma should be gone as well. This would also mean, of course, that the fall-out of karma campaigns is greatly reduced, since any member would have one point per person. This has several benefits.

Keep an eye on the assholes (i.e. those that need a touch more moderation than the other, law-abiding posters) by looking at the 'bottom 50' user karmas, or whatever.
Flag trolls and flamers (see above)
Identify sock puppets. (has there been a mass amount of karma alterations in a short period of time? Has one person's karma gone up or down by more than 10 points in the last 30 minutes? Then there just might be a sock puppet or two at work)

A high karma score should not allow a user special privileges, nor should a low karma score impede with a user's browsing and posting. The cipher beside your name would still be purely cosmetic, even though if a drop in karma can be attributed to your latest inflammatory lark the mods might still be hot on your assbones.

The real question, though, is this. This place can hardly be compared to a bustling online madhouse like SomethingAwful, Cracked, Blogspot, etc. Are we callous enough to consider this forum an important enough hub of internet activity to need implement such a measure?