Background discussion and reading:
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/extreme_downvoating/page1

Inauthentic/targeted downvoting has been a severe problem on these forums for years and nothing gets done about it despite numerous pending wishlist requests.

Everyone who speaks out against the "low rated" censorship regime ends up getting targeted for low-rating of every post. I'm being targeted for this as well.

I'm calling on every decent supporter of civil, intelligent discussion on these forums to join me for a 1-week boycott of the General Discussion forum here to protest against rampant inauthentic/unfair downvoting and staff inaction. The boycott will start on August 4 (Sunday next week) at midnight UTC and end on August 11 at midnight UTC. For that week, all participants agree not to post on the General Discussion forums here. If you want to discuss specific games and franchises, there are subforums to do that.

Why a 1-week forum boycott is a good thing:
* The best way to stop trolling is to stop feeding the trolls. Coordinated abusive downvoting is a form of trolling, and cutting off their supply of posts to downvote leaves them bored.
* GOG staff will see their General Discussion turn into a ghost town overnight. No replies to their sales or new game announcements, although I encourage you to buy anyway to support DRM-free gaming.
* In the best case, a 1-week forum boycott potentially helps us identify who are the bad actors behind the toxic downvoting. Well-established users who continue to post over that week basically end up identifying themselves as either being part of the problem or at least being complicit through inaction.

Now before anyone makes the disingenuous and fake argument that "GOG can't afford to do this, they are already strapped for cash"...
There's a painfully simple/obvious reason that the Battle.net forums and Warframe forums already did: Remove the downvote button. That should take the forum software devs no more than half an hour to implement by commenting out some code. There's no reason why this shouldn't happen.

I'm expecting to get downvoted to hell by the bottom-feeding forum-cancer downvote trolls for having the guts to openly declare war on them like this. I ask every supporter to upvote every post made here. I also call on all those with a grain of courage left in them to openly list their participation in a post here, although any and all participation is welcome and encouraged - if you wish to participate and not tell anyone, that's fine. I will support everyone who signs for the forum boycott with upvotes, and encourage everyone else to do the same. Go through the discussion and upvote everyone who signs for it.

If the 1-week forum boycott fails to produce an improvement in the situation, I will propose a later 2-week forum boycott. Stay tuned!

As a formality, let this be considered my endorsement on next week's General Discussion forum boycott:
From August 4, 2019 00:00 UTC to August 11, 2019 00:00 UTC, I pledge to uphold the forum boycott and refrain from posting in General Discussion on these forums.
- DivisionByZero.620

Sorry, you lost me right there.


Besides i can't let Tonto beat me to 2k.

Too bad, I upvoted your post to help him.

Enter into stupid contests, win stupid prizes.

He's abusing the rating system, get him!

It will do absolutely nothing.

I have some ideas that could result in some sort of action by GOG, but I don't think people care enough. I don't think I could get enough people onboard, and it's not effective if it's only a handful of people.

They wouldn't even notice. Because they aren't looking much unless someone complains to them, and a handful of people vanishing for a week would be just like just another holiday somewhere in Europe.

Nothing will happen, except next week there will be another thread on down voting from someone else. Your boycott will fail and the only one effected will be you.

Please, by all means boycott the forum. We'll pm you when the rep system changes or means anything at all.

You seriously think they'd care the slightest over people not posting on the forums?

This is incredibly stupid. I say that as someone who wholeheartedly agrees that the rep system is a steaming pile of shit.

Know how I've been 'boycotting' over this, and many other issues? I don't buy shit from this site. I haven't for over two years. You need to be far more obnoxious and oblivious if you ever want to catch up.

Oh, boy. You poor soul... This is more of a sidenote, but the Wishlist barely matters. GOG at most uses it to lure in potential devs to go "Look how many people are interested in your game! Please bring it here!" If I had a week, I couldn't list all the ways in which the thing's broken. First off - not all, not necessarily even most, but many of those "speaking out" are often either trolls or political flamebaiters who are desperately grasping at some way to turn themselves into a victim and either full well know why they're getting downvoted or are too stupid to see it.
For another thing, it's not "censorship". If the post was removed, it'd be censorship. Heck, you might even be able to argue "censorship" if it hid it for everyone or something, but no, it still sits there exactly how it was, the only difference is that it has a red mark. As for rep, it doesn't make a practical difference and nobody's given an actual crap about it for years. Some even went so far as to write scripts just to remove rep and high/low ratings. While it works as a good example of how much this forum is broken, it's far from a pressing issue. We've barely had any of those for about 3-5 years. Again, downvoting is a minor issue compared to all the other crap going on here. If you think downvoting is trolling, there's a good 30 or so users who I'd like to introduce you to. The staff doesn't give a crap. Ever wonder why the forum has seemingly no moderators, or that it only seems to be one at a time and the mod seems to change a lot? That's because there is no moderator job. In fact, there's no employee officially in charge of the forum at all. After several conversations with various members of the staff over the years (who, by the way, tend to be pretty decent people who are just as frustrated as we are about the forum even if they can't say much due to NDA), I've learned that, 9/10 times, if one of them are showing up here, they're doing it as a side-thing to their normal job, not because they're officially in charge of the forum. At best, the forum would be 10% of somebody's job compared to their normal duties, including duties on other social media people actually see, like Reddit, Twitter, etc. If they noticed (which is unlikely, because they usually barely ever read the forum, with the exception of checking on a reported post), they'd chuckle to themselves, have a giggle around the water cooler, then move on because it would probably cost corporate more money to actually do something about it than it would for them to ignore it and let whatever happens happen. More like the exact opposite. If we actually had the coordination to do this, GOG would probably not even notice it. If they shut down the whole forum overnight without so much as a heads-up, the most they'd lose in profit is maybe a few hundred bucks, perhaps a thousand or so if we're gonna be super generous, a loss that's gonna be recouped as soon as Cyberpunk 2077 is released.


I understand you, I really do. I was like you when I first got here, too. "Oh, no! I got downvoted by trolls! Help, you guys!" About a year in, I quickly learned that what matters are the actual people here and not the pointless ratings. And most of the people here are crap. Yes, we have plenty of good folk, but such is the law of anywhere on the internet: 90% of the time, most of the people in any given community will be crap. Some users, tragically, have never quite realized this and it's driven them almost to the point of literal madness (if they were even that stable to begin with). You have to let it go, my dude, or this place is going to drive you crazy and eat you alive like it's done many others. I've watched some of my favorite posters just flip and let the negativity become part of them like the forum is some sort of Eldritch horror that consumes them from the inside and turn them insane. Don't let it do that to you.

You want to protest something? Protest how much the forum is a piece of crap. Protest that there's little to no moderation and people can get away with the most ridiculous things here and leave the staff largely helpless to do anything about it. Protest not by boycotting, but by leaving entirely and finding a new place to call home. I mean this not as an insult or an attack, but as genuine advice. Even I've sort of unofficially "left", only sticking around because my duties with the Community Giveaway tie me down to that thread. Vote with your wallet, if you're so inclined, but know that the forum would make, at most, a negligible financial difference to GOG due to the low volume of regulars who give a crap. If you can bear it and still enjoy it, then continue by all means, but if it's messing with your head and making you paranoid, seriously, just leave. Again, I've seen the place ruin people almost permanently and some legit only got better by taking time off the site. It is what it is, and there are other and better places out there.

I'd say I agree with the majority of your post but...

excuse me...!? You've seen this place... almost permanently ruin people...? Plural...?

On one hand I'm extremely curious... on another I'm not sure I want to know. I don't think someone is all there if they were 'almost ruined' by an online forum.

Sorry dude. While I admire your intent (being a victim of "extreme" and agressive downvoting myself), I simply don't see how such a boycott can work. No. Trolling is an entirely different thing, as trolls want attention. Downvoting is basically griefing, that immature folks stoop to when they don't have arguments for their point of view in civil discussion. Thus they want to shut down other side through psycological pressure (downvoting, harrassment, false reporting). So your boycott is essentially giving them what they want - forum free of anything and anyone that they don't like. Here is another inconsistenciy right there. "Supporters of civil, intelligent discussion" are a small minority on this (and any other) forum. Most people are either don't care and only want info or play forum games (like mafia), or are in fact trolls, political activists, etc. No way forum will "turn into ghost town" even if all well-established and well-meaning users will follow you. And this point makes least sense of it all. Even if people will join your boycott (already doubtful) nothing stops "bad actors" to join too for the sake of not being caught.

I'm not going to name names, but yes, I have seen users who used to be very different, got caught up in the insanity of the forum, and then proceeded to act like nothing resembling their former selves. Could it be their activity just altered? Possibly. Was it just in them to begin with? Likely, sure. Perhaps they had some circumstances in real life that were driving them up the wall? There are an almost endless amount of third variables one could bring up that are all plausible options. All I know is that, for the ones I've seen go back to something resembling how they used to be, it usually only happened after they took a significant time off from the forum. Surrounding yourself with negativity and obsession over things like rep wars, politics, getting into fights, trolling, etc. will do that to you. I even watched myself start to change for the worse to some degree before I went "This is just some backwoods forum on the internet, for crying out loud. What the heck am I doing?" and stopped. Hang in a crowd long enough and you'll eventually begin to resemble the crowd you're hanging in, such is human nature.

Well DivisionByZero at moments you piss me off, but in general I agree with the heart and spirit of your post, but boycotts on this site never work, the only place GOG even pays attention to is reddit.

GOG dont give no fucks about the forum.
but I give you well wishes in your quest.