Reputation is the number of ++ votes placed for an article, minus the number of -- votes placed for the same article. In other words, think of a node's rep as saying "at least X people agree this is a good node" (assuming X is positive...)

Reputation is invisible unless you own the node, you've voted on the node, or it's on special pages. This helps to prevent artifical inflation of votes or personality voting in some cases. Basically, if you saw a really good node, and before you voted you saw that it had a 100 reputation, would you still vote for it, even if the node was *that* great? Keeping it hidden helps to reward those nodes that are extremely valuable to the PM community.

If you want to get an idea of the range of reps that we have, I suggest you look at Best Nodes and Worst Nodes. Particular good is a daily mediation on the Best Nodes of the day. You'll notice that right now, the highest rep is above 200, while there are highly negative nodes as well, but those deserve what they get.

I don't believe the searches return anything by reputation order; if anything, it's by forward date order. The best thing to do if you are looking for the best advice on a topic is to use the Super Search (much more selective than the titlebar search), find articles that appear to be root nodes (eg, are not preceded by 'Re:'), and look through the entire discussion on those nodes.

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Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain

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