I totally agree with Yrda and not just because I'm a new member as well. I don't really know how forums work but I would also simplify the system drastically – assuming that it's indeed simple to do. A basic +1 / -1 reputation system looks totally fine to me, that's what we have on the conlanging community ConWorkShop and people love it. You can see on my profile that I have received 2 748 upvotes and 108 downvotes.

There's a karma statistics page but I'm not sure it's accessible to users without an account so I'll just screenshot it (ignore the 255 downvotes given, it was a joke made with a bot :D ).

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There is a karma button on every post.

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But you can't downvote certain types of pages, like language homepages.

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This system is quite lovely. I never got bored of it and I'd be totally down to seeing it set up here if that was possible. ^^ I don't loathe downvotes, especially if we can forbid them on media pages for example – but an upvote-only system would work about the same. Besides, few people abuse it on CWS (they monitor it just in case) and I never found it to be a very warm community in the first place – unlike the CG as far as I can tell so far.

As for the vote, well, I'm too new to make up my mind rightly but I guess I'll hit the second option. :D