In my experience middle sized communities/forums operate on trust, but due to being bigger than small communities, it is hard to do. So people often don't know

In my experience middle sized communities/forums operate on trust, but due to being bigger than small communities, it is hard to do. So people often don't know everyone else in the same forum/subforum, or at least don't know for long. And seeing open ban list with reasons and dates, reputation counters with open results who voted +/- for this person or post or comment keeps reputation of semi-anonimous users in check. You see a subforum which banned a lot of good users? It's a dumpster and you can go away and don't waste time there (or remain and troll a bit). You see a user with close to zero reputation counter but it actually a lot of + and a lot of - votes negating each other. That's interesting, possibly he was mass downvoted by some sub. Etc. In short - public reputation and ban info is fun, interesting and somewhat a social limiter if the reputation still exist on a particular forum. And there are no negative factors for this really. I'm speaking from experience on other older forums I've participated.