Thanks to everyone who's signed the petition so far, and to everyone who will sign it in the future. There have been some good ideas and insights regarding the situation.

Not Signed.As I ain't giving out my email or personal info to sign something that will go nowhere.But I haven't seen any evidence of down voting abuse, myself.....And for the thick heads, yeah that's an attempt at comedy.
But, this is like flogging a dead horse and will go nowhere.

Would someone so nice who knows the German language be able to open a thread in the German forum?
I would do it myself but not because of the negative rep.

Signed

I agree (signed), but rep is just one of the infinite problems of the forum. Imo, GOG should ditch it completely and use a wholly new one, what we currently have is beyond awful in all aspects: neither to no funcionalities, a terrible search engine, the rep system, reporting spam with no control, general brokenness, moderation working when the dice roll right...

Just ignore it, it’s not going to get changed, unless it becomes a Galaxy only feature. In terms of what to do, it would need to be removed completely. Positive voting can be used badly in just the same way, a nasty post which gets upvoted for instance. So just remove it completely.
(And no, I do not bother with petitions, sorry).

Edit: And what is your proposed solution? And how do you show dis-appreciation for certain topics, I am all for posting, however the mass of them is not viable to reply to all as seen with the “why my free game not come” posts over the last several weeks?

The anonymity provided by hitting one of those buttons is a big thing. While likely true that plastering a list of names across a given post is untenable and likely to serve no real purpose in stopping this nonsense, it would at least shine the spotlight on who does it arbitrarily and with heavy frequency. It would also likely serve to put a definitive stamp on claims made by those that are frequent targets of it as to whether they get flooded with votes from tons of "fake" accounts or not.

It also doesn't help that the only way to report posts is to first hit the negative and then see the report link come into view. The latter is just archaic design - the report option should be a separate and readily visible thing, not hidden beneath another function. If it's necessary to show posts that are flagged, then code something into the interface to show people that might read a reported thread that it's reported - a visual indicator, a message or even auto-hide the offending post and/or thread until a person with the ability to review it can deal with it.

This. Yes, it would be best to get rid of rep (as long as there would still be an option to hide posts without pressing "-"), but in the end getting downvoted just isn't worth a second thought. I know having a perfectly civil and on-topic post downvoted for no reason other than people being trolls or idiots can be annoying, but ultimately it just doesn't matter one iota. The fact that someone could get so upset over this as to stop using not just the forum but also the store is honestly quite mind-boggling.

Well, you do have to have a positive amount of rep to be able to start a new topic and to drop a link without having to have the link in a quote. Not being able to use basic functions of the forum because you've been bullied by trolls is completely unacceptable, and it's quite understandable that it would drive people away.

Finkleroy, you are an absolute champion. For real, thanks for doing this. I know the rep system doesn't mean a whole lot but it does get old having my posts downvoted just because trolling morons think it's funny.

After so long doing nothing I don't expect anything either but it also surprises me because, come on, the effort to disable this should be absolutely negligible, don't they have any programmer intern with a couple of hours to spend on this?

Unfortunately I've seen good intentions of "naming & shaming" completely ruin some other forums in the past when it just triggers off a wave of counter-downvoting, counter-counter-downvoting, counter-counter-counter downvoting, etc, and everyone engaging in it just ends up creating more and more fake accounts so you still never find out who's doing the downvoting. Likewise, forums run by profit making stores are unlikely to want to make creating new accounts too hard for obvious financial reasons.

Sorry, but not signing.

Personally, I like being able to give a positive or negative rating to a certain post, or seeing its overall rating. I think it is quite a valuable feature in a discussion forum, when used properly (which is the majority of times, imho). Besides, it is one of the few defenses we have against spammers and trolls around here.
I know there have been some serious abuses on this system, and have even witnessed a few of them myself. But that's not enough reason to disable the whole system, which works well with the exception of those cases. However, some tweaking on it to avoid those situations could be implemented. Maybe removing the anonymity of the votes could solve it, or on the other hand it could just escalate things, as some people could start regarding votes as a personal affair, downvoting every post from their downvoters and so on...
So I prefer keeping things as they are, but I won't complain if some changes for the better are implemented in the forums.

Signed

I think that what StingingVelvet said just a thanks will be a better option.

Signed.

Since the downvote button is also used to report spam I'm not sure if removing it completely is practical.

I had two options I've stated before:
1) Make votes public, showing who voted what, so that people have to show their face when they vote. I'm all for anonymity in many cases, but here it only leads to abuse.
2) Disable up/downvotes for accounts who haven't spent any money here. This disables downvoting by alt- and bot-accounts.