Don't remember if it was or not. Usually if the OP of a thread gets downrepped, the thread turns gray as if you had already read it, even if you haven't. That usually warns people that things aren't exactly civilized if there's downrepping about. It might not be true or there might just be a severe difference of opinions, but if I'm not feeling up to debate, I'll usually avoid those. Most of the time, I just want to kick back and relax, not sword fight my beliefs or opinions with others on a forum.

Avatars are more important!

I agree with you 100%. We are all human beings here(except for me because I'm a monkey). There is almost no difference between real life and the internet. The only difference is the internet offers malevolent people the option to be let out their inner scammer, inner troll, inner asshole, inner douchebag due to the option of being anonymous but that could change in the future... These kind of people are more two faced in real life so I see the internet as the BEST place to be for interacting with human beings.

I don't think that most of this thread got censored quite this much - though a moderator did intervene once - but the tone was, I do believe, simply aggressive and nasty towards our fellows in this forum, and in real life, who shall not compete with our fancies.

I thought this was par excellence vote by medium opinion, quite cruel to a given individual.

Yes. In fact, they're too important to be limited to a mere 49x49 pixels, and should be doubled, if not tripled. Seriously, I can barely make out some avatars. Just being twice as big would be a boon.

Even just differing tastes can fall prey to this. This is why I get frustrated with Eurogamer's comment section. While often the downvotes are justified, there are also times when perfectly valid, well-thought-out opinions get downvoted simply for voicing thoughts against a game that is widely loved. It's just plain poor.

James Cameron agrees.

I take this place seriously. I don't like seeing people being pricks for no reason, and I don't like seeing good people being scammed by others. I float around here most of the time, but I jump in every so often I guess to "white knight" issues or help people.

I don't go by rep at all, myself. There are plenty of people here who have high rep I'd rather not talk to very often, and then you have people like me who've been around for years but don't talk enough to break out of the 300 rep range.

I am with this guy. Been here just over 2 years and I do not make allot of posts.But I do take the treatment of the folks here (majority anyway) seriously. I tell everyone that is interested in gaming about gog.com.And one of my biggest selling points is it has one of the best communities on the net.
As for rep points I don't even look at them honestly, I give out +1 rep points randomly for the hell of it. However I do take the opinions of the community seriously here. You guys all seem ot have good reasons for your opinions and often expressing a negative opinion is not frowned apon as much as it is discussed, which is great.

Eh, the problem would be solved if GOG would just put in the ignore users function that people have been asking for.

And yes, it's not real life. If you start getting bullied, it's easy enough to just leave the thread and not bother continuing things. That's usually what I do when I realize that I'm in a flamewar, just stop posting there and let it die on its own.

Which is substantially harder in real life with real life bullies.

I think the question is two-fold, as the discussion here shows.

1. Taking social interaction on a forum seriously? Of course, there's no reason to take it less seriously than social interaction on other platforms. Trolling someone on a forum, or deliberately hurting his feelings, and then saying "it's just the Internet" would be like calling someone on the phone, insulting him harshly, and then saying "It was just on phone."

2. Taking forum reputation seriously? That's like judging people according to which clothes they wear, or how many friends they have. By itself it's a completely irrelevant factor.

Rep is awesome. It's a means of (1) expressing agreement without cluttering the thread and (2) cutting down on RAGE.

GOG is a public commercial forum. They benefit from a lot of frequent visitors. Thus, any of the following is unproductive:
- not having rep
- not having up/down-voting
- de-anonymizing up/down-voting
- restricting discussion to gaming-related topics only
- hugboxey mod practices

I think the only time rep makes any worthwhile statement is when it's negative, then it's a fair bet that the person in question is a known troll and you shouldn't take much of what they say seriously.

Mind you, there were others who got off to a bad start and eventually made their way to become respectable forum members (ashout, if I recall, started out getting massively downrated), and there are members with 3-digit reps here who are still prone to the odd bout of twatishness (yes, Roman, I'm looking at you!).

Beyond that, I don't think it says anything in particular other than such a person subscribes to popular views and pretty much toes the forum line.

I expect I'll be hitting the 500 mark at some point in the next few weeks, and unless something spectacular happens at that milestone, I don't expect my view on this to change.

Avatars are thumbnailed to 49x49 but are stored on the server at full size.

Right click, view image, remove "_t" from the name.

A greasemonkey script (or equivalent) could easily change the image source to the raw one and set a width/height with CSS.
Same situation happened to me. Yay for good relationships started by the internet!

The story of my life... :D