It may have been an alternate account of one of the scammers. Or it may have just been another frustrated member that is sick to death of rep commentary. I have zero clue since I never talked to the guy. Regardless, the thread needed to go - encouraging de-repping for the sake of winning something was pretty low to begin with and of course it was always going to degenerate into some kind of lose-lose commentary.

Which is why either the negative rep button needs to go - a report button in it's place that is monitored would be a good solution, or rep in it's current incarnation needs to be done away with.

Ultimately one or several people decided to make this forum as unpleasant as possible - hence the gundaa posts (now deleted) in the ninja thread. Hence every post being negatively rated in that thread 50 to 100 to god only knows how far back. Hence negatively rated posts in tons of old giveaways...etc. This is an attack on GOG's business by way of it's forum members...make no mistake about that. It's just as if they mounted DoS attacks but actually sneakier and more insidious...

Reworking the rep system might affect the players who use it for positive purposes though (Trading mainly) so I don't think it's the best of all solutions unless an element rewarding positive behaviour stays in.
Negative rep on the other hand should be scrapped, it's used both positively and negatively but mostly negatively. I think the suggestion of a report system is probably the best way to go.

A famous MOBA by the name of League of Legends has a tribunal system which allows players to judge other players actions after reports, if GoG can't manually handle the reports (We're mostly a positive community anyways, there's just the select few of us who go out of our way to cause trouble) maybe a system similar could be implemented.

I have yet to see this mythical ban hammer in action. Wake me up when it does. :-p

As far as forums goes, the rep system is all sorts of broken. We should have the ability to ignore posts. + rep to highlight posts and turn it green. Ignoring users should mean ignoring their PMs/posts forum-wide so we don't have to read the crap posts and stuff. A personal walled garden is what I want.

Shall I call the gardeners to send you ferns, maidens with palm fronds and peeling of grapes? ;-D

That sounds nice! I will leave you to that task, madam! :-D

I'll get right on it...

oh man, the maidens are on strike again - hairy, construction workers are my only source for palm fronding and grape peeling - you down with that? yeah, I thought not ;-(

This is why I say no to unions!

Who's this Paul Ranier guy anyway?

youtube embeds! would be Ideal!

BTW the reason I haven't posted much is because I 've been sick!

...some troll: http://www.gog.com/forum/general/letter_from_the_md_about_regional_pricing/post2562

I don't know what he did now but the sooner we forget about him, the better.

I see!
^^THIS^^

I'd write something, but most of my thoughts have been articulated by others here.

I'll add that I have not seen bullying going on, just pleasant chatting and helpful people. That's not to say it doesn't happen. Still, you guys here seem to be a pretty friendly bunch!

The only thing I would say on one topic is that of Rep. Is it possible to change Rep on a person to up and down votes for individual posts, similar to the "Was this helpful?" selection at the bottom of reviews? This way there can be some censorship, especially for spam accounts or trolling, but it doesn't get visibly attached to a person when they write elsewhere.

As for abusing the system, there is always going to be the threat of that and no amount of rule making or forum changing will fix that. We need to simply request that people act respectfully towards each other, and to think twice before hitting the Post button. Maybe I'm a little old fashioned in my upbringing when it was drummed into me that "if I can't say something nice, don't say it at all". This does not mean don't criticise; it means make criticism constructive, not insulting.

Positive rep is subjective also. I admittedly have not read through every post to see if this has been stated previously.

Actually, can we keep the (-) button? But instead of affecting rep, it just hides the posts you want to ignore.

I agree with this.

I think the (-) button does that already. To give us more flexibility though, we should have the option to hide posts and ignore users.