Yeshu: Anybody find it strange how some people get universally down voted on the forum for seemingly no reason?
I mean, sure, you get your usual a$$hole comment from time to time but it's always the same people and most of the time they don't say anything controversial or aggressive. It's like someone has a vendetta on these few specific people.
The "Rep" score on the forums is 100% completely meaningless and has been for years. Nobody uses it for anything meaningful because the entire Rep system is poorly designed and manipulated by people who use scripts to up/down vote others and GOG doesn't really do anything about it.
The only actual purpose the Rep score serves is to determine whether or not someone gets past GOG's spam filters or not (if it even still does that) in order to be able to post hyperlinks. Even that is fairly meaningless because it is well known you can easily bypass the spam filter by embedding any URLs inside of a false quote like this even if you have a low or negative Rep score:
If anything at all, having a publicly visible Rep score in the forums does a lot more to damage the community, divide people, and give some a way to make others feel bad about their experience here or about themselves in general, than it does anything good or useful whatsoever. This topic comes up fairly often and nothing has changed about it in more than half a decade.
The best thing GOG could do at this point is to remove the Rep score completely, and replace the rate up/down buttons with a single "Report" button to report posts which are believed to violate GOG's terms of service agreement, and a dialogue that queries you as to what the violation/problem is giving multiple-choice options based on the actual terms of services, similar to how Twitch.tv does it. Then, when someone reports someone for a violation, keep track of an internal score nobody else can see in which if someone reports someone for a violation and it isn't a violation or just seems vindictive, they get a -1 to their internal score, and if they report a legit violation they get a +1 internal score.
Have all reports put in a queue, where each report is weighted based on the internal accumulated reputation of the people reporting posts, and act upon them in-order. Posts that are only reported by people with very low/negative scores get the lowest priority to investigate, and those who consistently issue false reports end up at some negative threshold eventually being completely untrusted in their ability to report legitimate violations.
If GOG implemented something like this, they would receive more useful reports that get higher priority to investigate and handle, and reports issued in bad judgment would get buried over time because the people who do it solely to attack someone vindictively would have a very low internal trust metric and end up buried in the queue not wasting GOG's time and resources.
Likewise, if someone's own posts get reported for violating the terms of service enough times and GOG confirms the reports, they could automate temporary or permanent suspensions from the forums for increasing lengths of time based on how often and to what degree someone violates the rules here.
This false sense of "reputation" in the forums would vanish, and people would either be less divisive and toxic on their own accord or end up over time being untrusted and potentially losing their ability to continue posting things that purely harass/intimidate others and/or violate the terms of service.
It isn't a priority for them to change the forum software likely however, as the commitment of developer resources to something only used by a minuscule number of customers isn't likely the best use of those finite resources in growing their business at the moment.
What would be nice though, is if they updated the forum code to at least not display the Rep score at all. That wouldn't prevent abuse of the up/down rating, but it would hide the virtual "reward" some people get out of abusing the system at least.
