Does the new reputation system take into account past contributions to the platform? For example if someone has made a bunch of contributions in the past, will they start as a higher reputation level or will everyone start at newbie?
And second is there a way to see how far away you are from hitting the next rank up?
The reputation system does take into account older contributions. If you visit a page of a previously active user, you should see their reputation is much higher than that of an user just starting on Utopian.
There's currently no way of tracking your progress towards the next rank, but once we are absolutely sure the ranks work as intended we will consider adding that so users are incentivized to level up.