Of course there’s the allknowing wikipedia, that comes with some great articles: Reputation System and Reputation Management. So there you get the basic ideas how reputation systems work.

Board software, like vBulletin, comes with reputation features built in or some other board engines, like the popular phpBB or Invision boards, have mods that enable user reputation. So if you like the idea of giving more power to your powerusers you can add these mods and start using a reputation system out of the box. Christian Mezei of SeoPedia describes the features of the invisionize mod in his article Invision User Reputation System (mod)

Most of these systems let users score each other’s posts and give each vote a certain weight based on a number of factors like number of posts or their own reputation, like I mentioned in my last post User Rankings in Online Communities.

What about online games, like the MMORPG World of Warcraft?

Well, reputation in Wow is certainly different as users can’t directly vote on each others characters. The rank of a user in the community is mostly based on their gear and level. The more highlevel equip a character has, the more his owner is committed to the game. So it’s easy to tell powerusers from casual players in Wow, because of their high level gear.