I just want to say a few things about this;
First, I have been in a few message boards in my time. One had these really cool mods; you had fake money you got by posting, which you could buy things like a colored name, effects on your posts, etc. You also got a certain rating based on your post count. Now, it's great to see how many posts someone has made, helps you judge how much they offer to the forum. But I think in any case, too many people just use it as a way to gain 'higher authority'.
Second, the thing I notice the most on this board that irritates me, is certain people make useless threads every couple days or so, where everyone rates each other up in the thread. It's usually a joke thread, sometimes (as I saw recently) the title was something like "Post here and I'll rate you up, cause I'm happy." Also I believe certain other people rate up friends, while not directly saying it, but expecting to be rated up in return.
Lastly, while I do think it's important to rate threads/posts based on how helpful, informative, well written etc. they are, too many times someone makes a joke or 4 word post that someone else likes and gets rated up for. Also (which has been pointed out in another thread, which I can't find now), I don't think there is any reason to say "Wow, great post, I rated you up!!". That just sounds to me like you're asking for someone to return the favor, or like you're trying to make sure they know it was you so in the future they'll be tempted to do the same for you.
Don't get me wrong, not everyone does this, and it's probably not as extreme of a problem as I'm making it to be, but I'd just like to see more informative posts and less happy fun time "let's rate everyone up" threads". (Also please note, I enjoy a good joke thread as much as everyone else, but too often I think they just turn into a useless rate-up spam thread.)
And so I don't leave without a suggestion to fix this, I'd simply say to get rid of the statuses. Leave the rating power (I assume if you have a higher rating, when you rate someone it's stronger than someone with a lower rating.), but get rid of Scholar, Sage and Guru. Leave the effect where your post goes invisible if under a certain rating though.
Edited for clarity, & added the last paragraph.
Edited, Sun Jul 11 07:44:54 2004 by Tarutatu