I'm a newbie here too, though what this site is in a nutshell is it's a community for regular people and math enthusiests to post questions for discussion. When someone answers a question they get points if their answer is relevant. Points really don't affect anything but how high you rank as a user. Also there's a really neat calculator here, if you haven't seen it yet.
Good luck.
No problem, I haven't been here for long so it makes me an unreliable source. You can message a moderator for any help or questions.