Account registered today, I suppose?
Who are you, really? I'm assuming you are a regular that doesn't want to express their opinion publicly, hence making your point questionable to say the least. If things were fine as they are, you wouldn't be afraid to speak without an alt account, aye?

If you want GoG to pay attention to this thread, you will have to consider both sides as they will be doing and come up with constructive criticism of counter-arguments rather than simply making basic attacks on people who have the opposing view. So far everything you have done has supported my argument.

I think bringing this to it's own forum is a good idea and I do see both sides of the argument, downvoting for the sake of it when people make valid posts (which almost certainly happened to OP and others he witnessed to fire them off in the first place) is definitely a bad thing and I hope you guys come up with a working solution. But downvoting a series of ranting posts that are clearly just trolling (and I'm sure you all have had experiences of that) is what the system is for and at the moment is what makes this forum better than Steam forums.

To OP, in future, try not to become the forum troll you are trying to keep the thread clear of and try to be a little more democratic and open-minded than:

"If you agree with what my petition says, please sign it. If you disagree with what it says, you need to leave the forum. Nobody wants you here. Go away."

Anyway sorry to have disturbed the party people, I had assumed this was going to be a place for rational debate on the matter, I'll leave you all to it.

Signed.

Signed and supported.
Fixes to the forum are long due and as long as GOG does nothing against bots and such the rep system is totally obsolete and useless

If by 'clean and friendly' you mean nearly empty(due to people being chased off for one reason or another), then yes you are correct.

You're honestly calling finkleroy a troll? Really?

You're either trolling with that or delusional.

(And he didn't say anyone had to leave. 'Nice' of you to try putting words in his mouth that he didn't say in an obvious attempt to discredit him though)

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By them saying down rating a series of posts is better for the forums and using a likely alt, one would guess there is a decent chance they are one of the ones finkleroy has objections against (And by that I mean the silent mass down raters) or they might be ok with such practices.

I was comparing the forums here to the ones over on steam (where most threads quickly turn into troll arguments and rants), the only functional difference being the downvote system.

I wasn't calling him a troll, just asking him to try avoiding becoming one - I'm referring to the his last 6 posts on the massive giveaways thread, on the last few pages - go take a look.

The quote I posted was copied/pasted verbatim from his last post on the same thread - again go take a look.

Both the steam system and the gog system are flawed. If the gog system was perfect the OP would never have created this thread. Yes, trolls will be trolls, here they may simply downvote unreasonably (still not good but how do you create an effective filter for trolls - the real problem here), whereas on steam they will make openly hostile posts which often leads to arguments and ends up leading nowhere.

At least on gog, if you ask a question there is a pretty good chance it will be answered and with respect. On steam there is a strong chance your question will be buried under the pointless arguments. If you have spent any time over on steam you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. If you remove the downvote system there is a chance the same will happen here, so I still prefer the system that is currently in place.

PS I still can't help but laugh that on a thread that is petitioning for removing downvoting, people are downvoting my posts for disagreeing.

I think we would be better with just the flag for spammers and posts that violate the forum rules, like strongly political - eveything is politics but I refer to flaming or violent posts openly despising people, or gross, or lesive of another user dignity and such. Of course some users might still abuse the flagging system but I think that it could occur less than with the minus button. I don't think that a scary environmment where good users are scared to express their opinions because the downvote could be a source of anxiety makes a good community. I don't think it's what makes these forums a bit better than Steam. It's just that people here are older and more selected, and with less users we are like a town where we tend to be more polite to each other while Steam is broader and so less personal, and people are less polite, like in a metropolis. The more users the GOG forum gets, the more it's going to be like "shut the f*k up you idiot" Steam-like in aswers to simple questions. I have seen polite explanations on how the basics of the website work, while on Steam you'd get "N00B U a r374rd?" as an answer.

PS I still can't help but laugh that on a thread that is petitioning for removing downvoting, people are downvoting my posts for disagreeing.
I couln't fail to see the irony of that, DP. I'm up-voting you.

So are you implying the down vote system is the thing that makes it better here?

I think it is more the smaller more nice user community(on average) than that.

Going to go look. I expect it is possibly justified (he rarely says anything rude to anyone as it is) but I will look at it now.

I couldn't have said it better than finkleroy. I agree with your noble intentions, although I am very skeptical about Internet petitions. But, as others have said, it can't hurt to support it. At worst, things stay the same. I just added my signature.

The thing is, the report button doesn't even seem to do anything. Contrary to what logic dictates (and what the pop-up window says), there is no spam report sent. I think at some point it auto-deleted posts if there were several reports, but I'm not sure that's the case anymore: the bot posts stay there until a moderator manually deletes them.

I think both things are problematic and both should be limited if not removed from the boards(down rate spam and bad posts).

As to solutions. Well they could block new users or those with no purchases from rating posts, as others posited.


Not all your posts are low rated.

If you get rid of the downvote system, it is very unlikely that the trolls will just shrug and go away.

You obviously know finkleroy better than I do, and I am happy to believe that he has been worn down over time with this problem and his posts over on the other thread were borne out of sheer frustration. However, without that context, he does come across in that thread as someone throwing their toys out of their pram with other people simply posting round him.

Most of them likely don't troll outright in threads because they don't want to get mod actions against them, or they are lazy and don't want to type up a response. This is supported I think by how little they reply to such threads.

And we don't need to remove the button.

I think maybe if the downvotes were left but made public it would work(as but one example that might solve the issue without removing the system.).

He seems to genuinely be upset over this. I think he should not have kept 'derailing' that thread(even if he had good intents) and shouldn't have told others upset at the offtopic to leave. But I can see somewhat where he is coming from.

The negative downvote button seems mutually exclusive to a nice forum experience and ripe for abuse.

Signed.

Spam probably refers to advertising rather than troll posts.
I must admit I am very glad to learn that this is not his usual behavior