Reputation redesign

I was looking at the reputation that is displayed on my sites and I was thinking on how useful it really is. I don't know the exact way it is determined but is basically seems to be just an incemental number based on the number of comments one has made plus any votes he has been given. This unfortunately does not provide much of any information for anyone looking at the reputation of someone. How can you tell if someone posts little but says interesting things (thus voted up a lot) or if someone just comments a lot with short comments (think "I agree") which are never voted up. How do you know if someone is voted up because he is funny, insightful or Interesting. How do you tell if someone is a troll if he can just make a few comments somewhere else (on a friendly or fake site) and rank up his ratings again?
Generally the reputation system seems a nice idea but is not well thought out and I'm afraid it going to turn into something even less interesting than ebay.

I would like then to propose an alternative for the devs to think about.
First, I would suggest you read about ratings here. Take special note on how Ebay's simple system is a failure and why.

That said, the idea I would like to propose is this:
Instead of a simple voting button for each comment, have a system more similar to what Slashdot uses but not necessarily the same. Specifically, what I was thinking is a three (or optionally 5) different rating buttons for each comment that readers can press and give a point for that category to the comment and commenter. The categories could then be: Fun, Insightful, Interesting and optionally trolling, abusive and lame.

This way people could rate a comment (and the commenter subsequently) for the type of comments he makes with an easy system. The "Bad" Ratings could be optional (perhaps up to the blog owner) but I think trolling should always be an option. That way someone who misbehaves a lot on non-friendly sites would be painfully visible which would hopefully force them to change their ways (or switch to anonymity and lose all IDC benefits).

This rep system would, imho, really make IDC shine as commenters would have a real tangible and most importantly, descriptive rating for their account. And it would also allow space for further options in the rep system in the future (like pushing "good" commenters to the forefron (so to speak) or automatically hiding trolls.