Keith, it is turned off for now. That subsystem seems to act quite strange.
Basically, the amount of points you could award someone was directly related to the number of posts you'd made on the forum and how long you'd been on the forum. For example, I've been around a long time and due to admin nature have made a lot of posts. If I positively rated you on this thread your rating would be something like 1200 and the highest level possible.
Now, if you went round and acted like a complete a$$ after that no number of ratings from most users would do anything to you. There are a few guys with enough "points" to lower your rating, but not many.
In fact, you've got over 857 posts, a lot, but haven't been around that long. You could have a fairly large effect on a newbie, and effect that s/he wouldn't recover from unless someone like you, or with more posts, rated the newbie.
Anyhow, bottom line is I'll do some research on the system over on the VB Forum.
The new version of VB has a cool "Warn" feature. What it does is display a bar essentially showing how close you are to being kicked off the forum based on admin and user ratings. Cool feature, but what is even cooler is that we don't need a feature like that on GT40s.com because folks do make an effort to treat each other with respect.
Ron