Off-line ЧАТ

Please enlighten a newbie who dreams of becoming a big and important moderator.
(For this, you need to accumulate a lot of posts or reputation (or something like that... I forgot) and it's given only by other "forum members" or even admins, or something else??!) I'm still not very good at internet forum jargon, but as they say... ehh... how does it go...? :)