Douglas Crets for ReadWriteWeb:

Disqus is quietly testing an interface that allows site owners to rank and give credentials and labels to their commenters. The feature takes advantage of a trend towards being able to find experts through social search.

[…]

The commenting features mimic those already used internally by bigger publishers, who evaluate a user’s influence by assigning badges to confirm to the network and community some measure of a commenter’s significance.

Put simply, it’s gamifying comments, but there are some interesting criteria you can set up, and it’s nice that the site owner gets to weight the various “point” systems:

This brings comments a step closer to the kinds of systems you see in discussion forums.