Not that it really matters, but what exactly determines a person's reputation points? Mine keep increasing and decreasing for seemingly no reason, so I was just curious what causes that.

Edited because the post which was previously above this one has been deleted as spam and I don't want anyone to think HeresMyAccount is an aborted fetus. :D

You get 1 rep for posting every day, the rest is determined by people down/upvoting your posts.

It's worth noting that the reputation system on this forum has been abused to the point where it's no longer a useful number.

A couple other things of note:

Having a post marked as a solution awards 5 Rep. (Note that this can easily be abused by a user with multiple accounts.)
It seems one can't lose more than 6 Rep in a single day.

Going from memory, so don't blame me if some of this is a little off, or I miss something:
- You gain 1 point for every day you post at least once
- You gain 5 points for every "Question" topic where you're marked as the solution
- You gain ? points for a post that's "high-rated", and lose ? points for a post that's "low-rated" (I think the number you gain or lose might also have something to do with how many users hit the "+" or "-" ; at any rate, it's kind of a slow-drip gain or loss, at least from any one post)
- You lose LOL,000 points if you post in any of the scammer threads, political threads, giveaway/contest threads, or trading threads

There is one way to stop rep loss. XD

Unbelievable! This is downright criminal.
My daily downrepper, whoever he is, has not yet stooped to that level.

As time goes on, all forums go to shit. Something to do with entropy.

I sent that into GOG support......two weeks ago.

Could be revived by there being at least token moderation to get rid of the worst influences and ditching rep points entirely. I've seen similar revivals elsewhere. Moderation can get a bit purgey. The trick is knowing when enough's been done and leave it at that.

But GOG never have shown anything like that level of interest in the forums. So yeah, it won't get better.

Basically, posting 1000 times 1 word in a single thread and rarely elsewhere.. doesn't work.

That, or just disabling the "rate this post" function would help a lot, since it's clearly not making the world a better place.

That or keeping the upvote button in order to mark particularly helpful replies in game-specific forums and replace the downvote with a report-button so flame-posts can be brought to the mods' attention while people don't get their posts semi-censored just because a downvote-triggerhappy person disagreed with part of their posts.

Alternatively, keep the upvote/downvote in place in game-specific forums, but ditch it for the general forum.

That's not a bad idea.