Why not just have the option of disabling your rep once you have a 1 year old account?

Sorry, but this wouldn't accomplish much.
Also, various trolls and scammers have old accounts.

Indeed but if the rep was made to keep out spammers then there is no need to restrict certain features from 1 year old accounts if they have a low rep.

I don't think the rep was introduced for that purpose.

Either way, checking for account age, etc. involves writing new code. Removing rep altogether involves commenting out a single function in the existing code. I'd say the latter is an overall better solution, plus it's much less resource-intensive.

Why do we need rep anyway? If someone acts politely, I don't care if they have -2319 rep. If they act like a complete vile untermensch, then a rep on +3259 isn't gonna make them any more pleasant.

Okay, but not being able to post links can be annoying.
And checking or the account is older than 1 year is not resource intensive at all.

Not resource-intensive as in "a load on the processor" but rather resource-intensive as in a living person will have to sit down, find the right place in the code, write a new function, test it, etc.

// PHP
$accountCreationDate;
$oneYear = 60 * 60 * 24 * 365;
$accountTime = time() - accountCreationDate;

if( $accountTime <= $oneYear ) {
allowPost();
} else {
restrictPost();
}

That's all it takes.

Because some users act friendly in public (expecially now with the CM), then proceed to harass\scam\leech at the first occasion.
Rep was useful (even if not perfect) to identify such bad people.
The problem is that Gog never addressed the exploits to the system (alts,rep scripts,impersonators,etc).
Removing the rep would just make crappy alt accounts identical to legit ones.

I know. (Though I revile PHP.) But the problem here is not in that it's difficult to do, but in that GOG has no spare engineers to actually do it. So this (and a good long list of other things) has remained in an undesirable state or outright broken for years. Some users have written gigantic browser extensions to try to mitigate these problems, search the forums for Barefoot Essentials and Adalia Fundamentals.

Basically, but I imagine they won't without something to replace it with. They could also just leave the rep system in place for now but hide it via two "display: none;" in the CSS... or remove that part of the CSS, literally takes 2 seconds.

There are much better ways to highlight good posters or active posters that won't be abused like rep is... at the end of the day we just need a new forum with actual modern features.

I don't feel this is an issue. I've had the rep removed for the past 7 months and didn't suffer any of the issues you describe. Realistically the vast majority of forums and other types of sites where people interact have removed it altogether and are better off for it. Sure some remain, such as Reddit, but there it's abused all the time. There is really no valid reason for this system's existence.
We do. =) It's just that this is even less likely to happen.

One sensible solution (at least from the business standpoint, but not necessarily the one I personally would like) would be to close the forum altogether and "outsource" it to something like Reddit.

I don't like either PHP as it sometimes makes no sense at all and is very confusing at times. (A problem with pretty much all high-level languages)

And a simple if will not break the forum for years, also this can be written in 5 minutes they definitely do have the man power to do this :p

Those extentions look cool but I'm not going to install them since I am very distrustful towards extentions meant for specific websites.

Yes but it's different when you work for a big company like GOG. As a lonely developer would be assigned projects and would only be working on those projects alone or in a group spending on the size of the projects. Anything not assigned to you would require permission and then probably code approval before it can be pushed to the live site seeing as most time development like this is all done locally.

Basically there are butch of hoops to jump through even to get small things like this changed...

Source: Have worked as a lonely PHP developer for a large company. ;)

FWIW, I think rep is a potentially worthwhile idea, that's just suffered tremendously from neglect. If there'd been active oversight of the forum, then the first time rep started being abused, action could've immediately been taken on it, and that would've been the end of it. Instead, it's been allowed to linger on in an exploited state, with this just getting worse and worse.

I'd invite the website team to spend a bit more time looking at the problem. Maybe put in some logging, try to identify patterns. I can very much imagine that a much more elegant solution is possible than just ripping out rep altogether. Hypothesizing wildly on what's happening precisely, I can imagine such a solution to looking similar to just putting in the following limits:
* A downvote by user X only affects the rep of other users if user X has a rep of 100 or greater.
* A downvote by user X can only affect the rep of each user once a month.
* Downvotes by user X can only affect the rep of max 5 users per month.
Other than that, everything stays the same (so individual posts still get "low rated" without restrictions). The bad apples still get the full penalty from downvoting, because that's universal, but the effects from abuse get a couple dozen times harder.

Similarly, for auto-deleting posts by marking them as spam, start by restricting this to users with a rep of 100 or greater. Then just log who's doing the marking and the contents of the deleted posts. Once a week, look at the top 10 markers. If a significant number of posts marked by any of those users were deleted without cause, remove spam-marking privileges from those users. Repeat until the problem has gone away (I'd give it 2-3 weeks tops).

The problem is one cannot possibly know why someone has been "low repped" and you cannot expect GoG to put the manpower into figuring who "deserves" it. Is it because they are a scammer? Or is it because some ideological mob group decided to attack them?

Negative rep has been abused on every forum that allows it. Look at any website or video advising new community managers or new forums and one of the first things they tell you is not to include negative voting because it causes problems.

Whether rep itself has to go, that is another issue. Theoretically, GoG could issue a rep "reset" or even award maybe 1 point per 2 or 3 days since registering as part of such a reset. But as it stands, rep is meaningless. It's not like there weren't always some users who cheated the system in uprepping themselves. Anyone who has been around awhile almost has to know of few. And with the vast number of people who have had their rep destroyed to various degrees unjustly, rep hardly says anything anymore.