By jingos,then that must be the safest site on the internet and yet.....I refuse to submit any personal info so you run along and play there as I never will.

I think we are all on the same side, there is clearly a problem here and the recent vandalisation of this thread demonstrates this. If GoG does make the changes you suggest and this leads to the results you are hoping for then that would be a very good outcome and I would regret not having signed the petition. However if, as I fear, the trolls start taking over the forums then it would be a very sad way for the forum to go (and I doubt the trolls would simply go back to downvoting again once they gain the confidence to post troll posts if downvoting was reinstated).

With no community moderation, if similar themed threads on steam and some other forums are anything to go by this thread would probably be over 100 pages by now with the majority of the content flame wars between trolls. At least by only getting downvotes it still pretty much only contains relevent posts.

I have been a user/customer on GOG for several years, but have only started investigating the forum over the past few days. The amount of downvoting in this thread has definitely been an eye-opener and it's clear this forum is quite dysfunctional. By itself, this is disheartening; however, it is more so to hear from others that GOG doesn't have the will and/or manpower to address the issues, even though there seem to be some fairly simple changes that could be made to improve things (removing the downvote button, adding a report button, resetting users who have a negative rep to zero).

There is another gaming site I frequent that has a forum that seems to work quite well - fumbbl.com. The whole site is run as a hobby project by one person (who has a day job). For the forum, I believe he uses phpBB, which is an open-source forum module for php. It seems to work very well and although it doesn't have a rep system or up/down voting, people are generally civil to each other and there is not a huge amount of spam. The forum is well moderated by a handful of volunteer moderators who have stepped up from the community.

Anyway, my point is that there are better ways of doing this, which I have experienced, that don't involve significant cost or paid manpower.

Look, I'm just going to call you out as the obvious sockpuppet/plant that you are.

and why?

Although I am newly registered, I have followed (unregistered) the massive giveaways thread for a very long time, mainly to top up my steam, epic and itch accounts. Finkleroy came into that thread out of nowhere and seemed to go out if his way to derail it despite people either ignoring him or trying to get him back on topic. Go and take a look at that thread and you'll see what I mean, I still believe the downvotes he received there were justified.

I registered and came to this thread as I honestly believed finkleroy was a troll starting a petition to make life easier for trolls - however BigBobsBeepers has convinced me otherwise (despite finkleroy's hell-bent attempts to push me back on the fence).

I have had considerable experience moderating other forums in the past (though neither gog nor steam) and I understand the trolling issue from the moderator and admin's side. If there was an easy fix, you can be sure it would already have been implemented by now. This thread needs to decide whether it is a place to vent frustration (although I would advise some posters to take a beat before posting so that their anger does not come across the wrong way) or a place to get something done.

A petition is one way, but a company is not a democracy and GoG reserve the right to ignore it even if the whole community signed it. If you want to get something done, you need to come up with a solution that GoG hasn't already though of and that they are convinced will work and won't cost them too much time or money. Remember this is an issue for some of you but not an issue for GoG.

I would still think finding solutions to keep trolls out in the first place would be better. In an ideal environment you wouldn't get troll downvotes only deserved ones. Imagine you posted a good point in another thread and someone made an unreasonable response attacking you for it. Downvoting that post, knowing others in the thread will do the same is an immediate action rather than summoning moderators who may or may not agree with you. (Note - reporting spam would not be appropriate as this is for reporting advertising, pornography etc).

The thing about GOG is that this is entirely a digital storefront. There shouldn't be any physical presence required.

Yet it clearly seems that "work from remote" is a dirty sort of phrase.

Then again, it could be quite the baffling truth that remote accounts aren't allowed to log in with superuser/administration privs, meaning that instead of basically being able to sit at home and do code and refactor the website majorly, they're all on sit down at home and do nothing vacation.

Edit: This also refers to their stubborn hiring practices requiring physical presence.

In Poland. It isn't that Poland is a bad place to live, but for most people, Poland is anywhere from 100km to 10,000 KM further away than they'd prefer to work. In my case, 7k. There's just so much good talent GOG is missing on with their restrictive hiring practices.

You know what else is suspicious? Someone registered just now with no games getting all angry about the forum. Surely not an alt at all.

You've got to be shitting me? Physical presence ... for a website?! :O

My jaw ---> floor

(note: nothing wrong with Poland at all. It's a great country, I've been there)

Uh, you just make a new report link, disable downvote.. Why would this be difficult?

Go ahead, browse the job postings. You'll notice each one of them has that as a "one last thing" that turns a good prospect into a hat stomp.

Every last listing has this phrase: "The hired individual will need to work in-house, in our office based in Warsaw, Poland."

It is sad that there is little rational discussion on this topic and again all the counter-arguments are in the form of personal attacks. If you could focus that energy on being positive and trying to get something done, this thread might actually lead to a positive outcome. Posts like this are only undermining the forum's cause and credibility.

Also GoG is GoG, Steam is Steam, YouTube is YouTube. Sometimes I am distracted or forgetful and don't correctly capitalize and sometime's I'm not.

It has to be stored somewhere, I can't upvote a post multiple times because there's a SQL database that says I already did so. Same with downvoting. They COULD ideally figure out a way to log this, but they choose not to.

The downvote patrol is busy here.

Yeah that really sucks but you probably wouldn't want a job there anyway.. according to Glassdoor, junior web devs make up to around 6k PLN, FE engineers up to 9k + profit share (for a total of around 11k). That's like 30k USD tops. Interview experience looks like a crap shoot too.. and I get the hunch that there are some internal issues. If you're qualified for the SWE roles, you'll have no trouble finding much better offers and probably overall better companies to work at.