Just noticed. Althouh you can only see your rep in the forum settings now, I've suddenly jumped up like 300 points and am at 1913 now, whereas I was at like 1650-ish before. So the removal of downvotes also increased your rep.

Probably means that even people who were targeted for downvoting or just had negative rep before should be able to post links now.

This needs further explanation than is given in the OP as it is currently written.

How, exactly, did they calculate how much rep to boost a user's rep by?

Many users should indeed have several hundred and/or thousands of rep given to them due to them being abused and stalked by downvote-abusing bot users...and they would also need to be compensated both for the rep lost to that directly, and also for the rep that they should have but couldn't earn during the whole period since they started being targeted by the stalking bot-users.

I highly doubt GOG would have implemented a calculation that fairly calculates all of those factors and compensates the victimized users accordingly.

But please explain it if they did.

I have no idea about the specifics. Just noticed a sizable bump in the forum rep number when I was adjuating something in the settings, whih I assume came from the downvote removal.

When downvote got removed I got aroud 915, now am at 933.

The increased forum rep is only for VIP's

Hmm, or I might be drawing a blank here. Could be that I've been ignoring the rep for so long the last thing I remember is "nowhere near 2K"

Could be apotential false alarm then. Or I've somehow farmed 200+ rep since the removal which I doubt.

I have a screenshot from when they hid the rep, I have now slightly more (+5 or so, but wasn't very active), so I don't think anything is retroactive.

Cannot really confirm. At least not in such high numbers.

As it happens, I took a screenshot on 07/05/22 that shows my rep at that day.

Looking in my forum settings right now shows a number 36 points higher than the number on that screenshot.

Now, the daily plus of 1 (if you commented) only accounts for 15, maybe 16 points, and I had two of my comments "high rated" since then, which accounts for another 10 points.

So, that's 25 to 26 points, that have been "naturally" collected.
Of course, that still leaves a rest of 9 to 10 points, for which I have no explanation.

But now that the only possibility for people to (silently) react to comments, is to click on the (+) button, maybe the rest of the points has been accrued by users who clicked the (+) beside my comments - just not in high enough numbers to actually "high rate" them?

To be honest, I'm not sure if you could (can) get an increase in REP without having a comment visibly "high rated".
Never really cared enough to take notice.

I lost around 150. O.o

It's only the 'downvote button' that was removed. Not the downvotes themselves.
I can still see those old-low-rated-posts still low-rated.

If they could reset those downvotes casted, since those are recorded and stored somewhere, then that could theoretically reassign those losses. ^This, or your other posts scattered throughout the forum got upvoted / chosen as answer on question thread(s).
People does search for threads outside and inside the forum. The legitimate user's occasional necro / thread bumping proves this. (disregarding the obvious spam accounts)
So helpful, humorous, aligned-bias, etc. post gets randomly upvoted from time to time. You could.
When you hit the minimum threshold of votes to receive the "high rated" tag, the initial rep increase is as low as 2.
So if you receive enough votes for it to increase by 1 rep point, yet insufficient enough to reach 2, then your rep would increase by 1 without it being high rated.

Now, I won't imply these are hard facts, but I rarely post. So with any subtle movement on my reputation, I do tend to notice.

I observed this behavior back in the Ninja giveaway thread. Where there would be always(almost) someone who would appreciate a dropped code.
But that "some" isn't always sufficient in numbers for a "high rate".

Ah yes...didn't even consider that. Yes, two more "high rated" posts of mine that I haven't noticed, would accouont for those 10 points. Interesting.

My REP count did not change the slightest bit, and I have had plenty of downvotes over time. Mostly my REP is just going up now with the usual daily addition of one vote.

Either GOG accidentally upped your REP, maybe it was meant for someone else, or you are misremembering.

And as ARD says, how would they know how many REP to give you for past downvotes.

Unless maybe they are slowly working through user accounts and have a database that shows number of downvotes. Even so, many accounts deserved at least some of the downvotes. Without close investigation of each post, how could you determine whether it was a valid downvote or not. What staff at GOG would have the time to do any of that, and why would they bother. I can understand zeroing a few accounts that are in the negative, but mass positive REP outside of that seems very unlikely. Folk here read older threads all the time, which could easily account for the extra.

I think I had like sub-80, and now it's 95, so roughly a 20 point jump. Take that, downvoters.

Makes me wonder what people who had a negative rep now have.

I didn't keep close track of my rep before, but I can't say I notice much of a change.

now i have more points that the cat pic users :P
Take that, downvoters.

What's wrong with cat pics?