Having recently introduced the concept of a '+rep' button to an online community I manage, I've noticed a couple of things. It functions as the thanks button does on vBulletin (user says 'thanks' to a poster, and the poster has a record of all the thanks they've given and received. There is a listing of who has thanked a person below a post).
Primarily it has become a way to add a voice to a discussion, without actually requiring the effort to type out a fully formed response. This brings the advantage of easily gauging popular opinions, and is a fun way of indicating good contributions to a thread.
However, is has also been detrimental, particularly during disagreements where people feel 'ganged up' on by a crowd of non-participants. Fortunately this doesn't happen too often, given the size of my community (70-100 actives), but there have still been requests to disable the feature.
I have a couple of questions.
What is the best way of keeping the concept of '+rep' or thanks without letting the mechanism be abused during personal disagreements between two members?
Are there any examples of such a system scaling well to larger communities? How was this achieved?