But what's the point of a -rep system if admins just ban you? O_O

We don't ban people based on reputation, we ban people for bad or anti-social behaviour, and only in cases where the offending behaviour is repeated after warnings have been issued or for particularly bad offences. It just so happens that banned users often happen to have a low reputation because the community objects to the same behaviour we have warned and banned them for.

Unless you do something really bad (posting porn or signing up just to spam might be examples) you would usually receive several warnings, and perhaps be temporarily suspended once or more before we resort to a ban.

To provide a concrete example, the aforementioned BB1995 was unofficially warned (that is, told in-topic to behave, but no official warning was recorded) a number of times, given 4 official warnings, temporarily suspended for 7 days once, and was then banned. They were trolling with pointless and/or simple-to-answer topics in which they then complained about the legitimate responses they were given and/or simply ignored the replies, and were abusive to other members and/or staff a number of times. The low reputation is a result of the community objecting the this behaviour, and is independent of the user being banned.

[quote name='Michael Tanczos' timestamp='1303014538' post='4799370']
Reputation can go below zero now.. we just don't show it.

So now it is impossible to distinguish between someone new on the forums and someone who is persistently hostile and has already proven on numerous occasions to give unsafe or counterproductive advice?
[/quote]That's a pretty good point really -- perhaps you could consider showing the real value again once it gets below a certain threshold; say -10 or so. You then get a bit of both world, where new users aren't affected immediately by a couple of down-votes, but so that consistently being down-voted shows up. Genuinely unpopular posts do still show up though, as it's just the total reputation that has been clamped (and I don't think it has been in the profile, only the forums??), the per-post votes will still show up on each post now that part has been fixed.

To counter that, I find rep goes down based more upon having a non-popular opinion on a subject than the validity of what your saying regardless of hostility. [/quote]
Indeed. There is an asshole who rates me down every time I criticize down-rating. Should I stop saying that because he is an asshole? I DON'T THINK SO.

Remove downrating privileges from assholes and make Jebus smile.

I am shooting for triple neg digits. If a bunch of people who take 5 years to get std::cout << "WHY ISNT THIS WORKING" << std::endl; compiled hate me that much I am doing the right thing!

There are always problems inherent to rep systems in forums where there is a "technical" section and a "lounge" section. In the same way that some people's rep gets slammed in controversial threads (almost always a lounge thread), other people go rep farming in those same threads. Unless the site admins want to divest the rep gained in the technical forums from the social forums, these issues will continue to exist, and rep within a certain range will more than likely represent social prowess rather than programming ability/helpfulness.