Not everybody has a program installed that can read that type of file. I, for example, do not.

Punish those who break the rules by taking away rep......yeah that's gonna work, laughable.
Uphold your own rules first, because sure as shit the trolls aren't stopping anytime soon.
Hoped you'd scrap rep, and just leave the spam button, once fixed so it carn't be abused.

RW is full of it.

I don't just derail threads I don't like.

I do it to threads I like all the time.

I'd like to report rwarehall for pathetic alt account up- and downvoting, which has been utterly proven here.

Today is Monday.

Since your claim is untrue (as usual), I expect your report to go nowhere. Another example of Vain and his typical exaggeration by calling this "utterly proven" when I know, in fact, your claim is utterly false...

If I had an "alt army", do you really think I'd be losing the maximum 6 points a day for this many months? [Mitigated occasionally, I hope, by those who think I've contributed something useful].

But let's not let the truth get in the way of a good story...

Several posts are up/downrated in ways that (presumably) you think shouldn't be so, therefore RWarehall has alt acounts that he is using to do it?

Did it ever occur to you that your downreps might be due to the fact that people here are sick and tired of your obnoxious bullshit?

Keeping and uploading a pdf file over some other user's infractions. Who the fuck does that???

As a long term observation, I think it is safe to say that any type of system intending to change human behaviour here in the forums by adjusting one's rep score in either an upward or downward motion, whether automated or moderated via human control, whether such human control is internal to GOG or an aggregate of community voting or other factors, is going to be completely ineffective.

Rationale:
- People's rep score is already adjusted up/down every day by a combination of GOG's algorithms, community concensus, community abuse of the system, and alleged violations via bots/scripts and alternate accounts over time.

- The rep system appears to serve no practical purpose other than to do very primitive spam filtering which is easily bypassed by adding forum quoting markup to it if one so desires.

- The rep system continues to be seen by many users as something useful to either be happy about it going up or upset about it going down, like it means anything at all other than what I said in the previous point.

- The rep system being ineffective at what it is alleged to actually exist for, causes people in the community to measure their dicks against each other as some kind of yardstick at times and/or to feel abused by being downrepped or similar which causes no end of heated debates and anger/frustration between people in the forums.

IMHO, if GOG internally finds some actual legitimate benefit to the rep score in their algorithms that is fine for now but they should disable it from being visible to the public because it does not help society seeing a yardstick number beside everyone's names.

Imagine if you walked down the street with a digital sign on your chest informing everyone else what your "rep" was. People often judge others for being "newbie" in the forums due to this, or other judgment which really should not exist.

I say either completely do away with the rep system entirely, or at least remove the rep score from being visible to users of the forum or via any APIs that are available. We simply do not need to know what someone else's rep score is.

In addition to that, the "rate up/down" should be replaced with a mechanism to flag posts and indicate why they are being flagged clearly, as well as giving someone the opportunity to remove a flag they have set such as if they accidentally clicked on it. I accidentally marked a post as spam yesterday without having any way to say "oops, I didn't mean to do that" for example.

ie: Flag this post as:
[ ] spam
[ ] a violation of GOG's forum rules
[ ] etc...

The software should try to make everyone feel as at home as possible, feeling equal to others whether someone is new to the forum or been here for 7 years. One's tenure and actual reputation here can easily be kept track of in the minds of the individuals just like it is in real life. No need to assign numbers to people. If GOG needs to keep track of thousands of users using some kind of scoring system internally such as keeping track of how many times someone has violated the rules or whatnot, that's fine, make it a database that GOG employees can access, and GOG customers can't access and don't even need to know it exists.

IMHO, doing this alone would go one step in the direction of removing a lot of inequality some people feel here (both those who state it outright and those who keep it to themselves perhaps too afraid to speak), and it would reduce the rep flamewars of people feeling abused by others attempting to manipulate their meaningless rep score.

Furthermore, if there are spam/etc. controls present to flag things and someone abuses those features GOG can communicate with them privately to stop abusing the spam control system or they risk losing that privilege, or perhaps for repeat offenders they risk losing their forum privs entirely. The less that this stuff is fought out or angered out in public, the better for everyone across the board.

If such things were implemented and new problems arise, they can be dealt with when the time comes.

And now for something completely the same- basically an entire thread of RWarehal insulting people just because he can.

While the principles behind your ideas don't bother me, these two points have some specific implementation issues.

As long as rep is tied to things like being able to post links, then end users need to know. Otherwise you have complete newbies showing up going "why can't I post links", and people who know have to say something like "you've got an invisible rep score that is influenced by x, y, and z. When it is high enough you can post links, but there is no way to check its current value. Also, don't piss anyone off or you might suffer serial downreps, thereby hosing up your linking ability".

There is disentanglement that needs to occur before hiding/discarding rep entirely. That also means inventing replacement systems to deal with some of the issues that we've got (like when someone can start posting links). And talking about it here made me realize we probably won't see rep go awhile for a good while.

For this method to have any meaning, GOG would have to have staff available to check on these flags. Thinking about the implications of this statement will be left as an exercise for the reader.

Edit: I do like the idea of having a neutral button. Currently, the only recourse to a misclick is clicking the other button, and I'm not entirely sure what that ends up doing on the back end.

As is abuse of people and their families, yet you don't seem to have a problem with that.

If you want moderation, I assume you also want tinyE banned, as he has done all that and more?

And that applies to anyone whining for moderation.


tinyE does that, and has repeatedly boasted about it.

So you want him banned, or is it only for people you don't like?

The reason I don't want tinyE banned is the very same I don't want you banned (and I continue to amicably disagree with tiny on that last one).

Fits of trolling doesn't equal chronic abusive xenophobia.

Oh great. Now I have to start another collection. THANKS OBAMA.

Which is especially great because I absolutely agree with rwarehall's opinion ("piracy is theft") in that thread, but exactly zero of his abusive posts.

If it was just trolling I would agree with you.

But he's abused, wished harm and said the most appalling things about people and their families.

He's also abused mods like Fables.

So I ask again to all those wanting moderation, do you also want tinyE to be banned?

If not, then it's not moderation you want but dictatorship and favouritism.