I wonder... How long would it take for me to get a 1:1 Post:Respect ratio if I stopped posting...
Because old posts do get upvoted every once in a while. Maybe I should just do good things in places where it doesn't count to get an upvote so that people would link to a random post of mine to upvote 
Ah, the problem is, once somebody has read a post and not upvoted it, the likelihood of that person to upvote it later is close to zero. So as time goes on, the chances that an old post will get upvoted decrease roughly at the same rate as the temporal rate of new forum members. So if your posts are old enough and your respect:post ratio is not high enough, you might never reach 1:1.
The corollary is that the winning strategy is to keep posting, unless you have so few posts that you want to rely on a statistical anomaly to reach the magical 1:1. Of course, you should avoid question posts, which almost never give upvotes.
However, not all posting strategies are equal. We could extract three parameters from any one thread:
-V = visibility of the post: how many people are likely to see it. This depends mainly on the board, and the thread title. You want to maximize this.
-T = half-time of post creation: how difficult it is to find something to say in that thread, measured in the amount of time spent reading/thinking/writing. This depends on the subject of the thread. While it technically doesn't affect the capacity to increase your respect:post, because we have a finite amount of time, you want to minimize this.
-A = Affinity of readers: how likely each reader is of upvoting any single post. This depends on the subject of the thread. You want to maximize this.
And a constant:
-K = Respectless Board Proportionality Constant: the conversion rate between "virtual" upvotes and actual "random post" upvotes in boards where it is not possible to upvote, because people mostly can't be arsed to do that. If you expect a lot of respect from one such post, consider if it's possible to post it elsewhere.
You will notice that you have no control over these parameters (mostly; when respect reaches a critical mass, its visibility gets maxed out independently of its parent thread; and some forum members are known to game the affinity of readers). You can, however, choose where you spend your time. This explains, for example, why the Random Stuff Thread is a good source of respect: it has high A, low T and high V. Conversely, trying to get respect from RSP is madness, because not only A and V are low and T is high, but K is in effect too!
Another technique not to be dismissed is thread creation: because you control the title and subject, you can set V and T as high or low as you want, and then you've only got to work on A. Coming up with a thread takes time though, so your perceived T will be lower; try to make it a long lived thread if you want to minimize your relative T.
Now of course, the problem is being able to get V, T and A from all threads, and the exact value of K, to be able to work out your strategy... But I am sure that with some data gathering algorithms and a bit of machine learning, it shouldn't take excessively long. The sky's the limit!
Respect is a science, gentlemen.
PS: I've got that plugin that changes respect into VPs...
