One thing the rep system can not reflect is someone's real world reputation and personality as well as other relevant traits everyone has, however everyone who posts here has a variety of traits both good and bad and the combination of their personality and all of these other traits forms their actual reputation in the eyes of each individual that observes them over time. A single numerical score like "rep" can never reflect that, and a single person can have a terrible reputation to the community at large but have a good reputation to a select few or subset of the community. Likewise a person could have a wonderful reputation to the community as a whole but a bad reputation with certain select individuals or subset of the community. The "rep" score can never replace one's actual reputation as seen through the eyes of the individual though, no matter how high it climbs nor how low it drops (for real or artificially).

But anyone who uses the forums long enough eventually is likely to realize this and join the ranks of people who don't care about the rep score at all nor use it for anything meaningful. A handful of giveaways in the forums use a positive rep score of 50 points or similar as an entry requirement, but many of them will make exceptions and allow people who have a lower rep score but have demonstrated their worth to the community via their personality, their generosity or some other positive traits. Likewise, someone could have 1000 rep score and be a real jerk, and be excluded from things too, and I've seen that happen as well.

So the rep score is really truly meaningless, and the best thing anyone can do for their reputation here in the forums or anywhere online really, is to just be a genuinely good person to people, and try to avoid conflict and have a mostly positive attitude and be friendly and courteous etc. Nobody is perfect at this of course, but if one genuinely prefers to be this way then they will tend to do it more often than not and people do notice, and then one's reputation speaks for itself.

I have to admit though, it would be cool if GOG replaced the rep score system with a more intricate D&D style system that had many multiple attributes and a plethora of smart code behind it to make it mean something and avoid gamability of the numbers. :) Not sure if that's doable, but imagine if we all had a D&D style character sheet in our profiles, complete with savings throws against Insomnia sales and the like. LOL