Looks like there's plenty of good discussion. Time to comment.

@Pheace, post 6:
"His arguments seemed perfectly legit to me, a system like that doesn't do enough."
Please explain.
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@itchy01ca01, posts 11 and 14:
"But this just moves power from one base to another. Like the rich getting richer thing. Not something I would agree with.
DivisionByZero seems to have some good points."
-> Good insight (and +1). The current problem is that the GOG forums are currently anarchy masquerading as democracy. That's why there are so many people demanding that the voting system be abolished in favor of an oligarchy (reputation requirement to vote, or appointed moderators).

An oligarchy wouldn't work well either and could very well cause just as many problems. For example:
-Suppose a 100 reputation requirement to upvote/downvote gets imposed. What if a large number of people with 100+ rep form a group to block people below 100 reputation through suppressive downvoting (so no one else can get 100+ rep)
-What happens if a large number of people with 100+ rep start offering votes to users in exchange for favors/gifts? Corruption at its worst.

"But once again, a shift in power, and with power come corruption. Get enough of the regulars together who don't like a person and that person is then bullied into silence. This can go either way. At least with the system we have now it is completely open and free, with no community players being involved. It's not perfect or even great, but at least its honest."
-> Exactly. The advantage of my solution: providing equal and fair protection to everyone, no matter how popular or unpopular you are.
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@yyahoo, post 9 and BKGaming, post 10:
"Or you could have a rep minimum for voting like you do for posting links, but make it higher, like maybe 100. It takes a while on the forums to get a 100 rep and would be quite a bit of work to create a legion of alts with at least 100 rep in order to screw with the post voting..."

"That's what I said too in another thread, seems to be a logical quick to implement solution to me."
-> See above explanation on why an oligarchy implementation (rep requirement or appointed forum users as moderators) is a bad idea
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@yyahoo, post 13:
"The problem, as others have defined it, are users with zero or negative rep creating innumerable alt accounts (also with little to no rep) in order to abuse the voting/rep system. The system as proposed by the TS would not stop such a thing. Earning 100 rep takes some time and work, hopefully too much to make creating a ton of alt accounts with enough rep to make a difference voting-wise worthwhile. "
-> Read my last suggestion on weighting votes based on the total value of games and gift codes registered to a user. Trash alts will have few/no games registered to them so their downvotes wouldn't be worth a crap.
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@Bookwyrm627, post 16
"Anyone that continually provides help in the same thread can't get credit (such as it is) for continuing to help. Example from personal experience: User One installs a game to play, then creates a thread to ask a few questions before starting. User Two comes along and answers those questions. User One starts playing and has a few more questions, which User Two then answers. Rinse and repeat. User Two is limited in getting rep for being a helper as both users have one bookmarked thread for the Q&A. The work around would be for User One to create a new thread every time he had a new question, which User Two might or might not see. "
-> You bring up a very good argument here. I'm thinking that perhaps the restriction on upvotes shouldn't apply to threads marked as Question/Help.

"Damage to rep for being a jerk is limited. A troll gets free reign to crap all over a thread after taking that initial hit. Other users either have to migrate to a new thread (with the troll happily following along), or just suffer through the trolling."
-> Except that trolls and trash alts would have a low voting weight and actual proper users would have a higher voting weight.

"You want to require people to participate in spam threads before being able to mark them as spam? I'm guessing you didn't help out when the korean spam bots came visiting, some time back."
-> No, that's why there's a "Report spam" button.

What's stopping this from happening now? What does allowing users with under 100 rep to vote do to prevent this?

There's no incentive to create power blocks when there is no real power to have.

One hundred percent agreed, we don't want another half arsed overhaul like Chat replacing the old PM system with pertinent features missing again. Not to mention the abysmal unbundling effort which no one really asked for as far as I know even if it has made some people glad to have their game library size increased.

Like itchy01ca01, you are again also assuming this will be an issue when it currently not.. If it was then it would already be an issue now and in the past because we could already do this now. There is nothing from stopping us from doing this right now. But we never had to much issues with rep until Galaxy and the flood of new people most of which are normally low level rep accounts or negative rep accounts. So this doesn't really support that view.

Personally I would just make it like every other forum, post count raises rep. More post you make, more rep you have. Simple. Then later they can introduce a separate feature like Like/Dislike and list what actual people liked or disliked your post. That way they can't hide.

This is similar to the system used by the unofficial GOG forums, which I set up as an alternative to these forums.

It's a matter of principle - equal privileges and protection for every user. The best solution should block only the trash alts while maintaining regular users' current upvote/downvote privileges.

And Im a lot less concerned with a bunch of alts running around causing mischief than a conspiracy that can actually ruin an entire community. Again, I've seen how this ends. Oligarchy is not the way to go.

You're more concerned with something that isn't happening than with something that is happening. Okay then. I guess I really don't have anything more to contribute.

well if you have to post in a thread to up/down vote at least there is a face to the vote kind of and he/she also said to make the votes public, so you exactly know who did what. Yes, you won't know who owns the alt, but at least you see who is being malicious. it's not a perfect solution, but at least he made suggestions in an organized and thoughtful manner.

1984. That's all I'll say. If you can't see what might happen, then it will happen. Happens all the time, in business, war, society..

I still prefer the rep system be removed and we get a profile for each member, a post history.

Oh, and obviously a solution for multiple accounts, even with the rep system out of the way it's easy to create havoc with free acess to multiple accounts...

That didn't really answer my question.

Except your solution really doesn't do that, nor does any that I've read so far. In fact, what your solution does is discourage people from voting at all. In truth, instead of using your solution, you might as well eliminate voting entirely. Because the only users that will vote will be users *under* 100 rep.

Regardless, it's all okay. I'm done with the debating. It was a simple solution to a difficult problem that I thought I might mention.

Unfortunately, difficult problems usually don't have simple solutions like create oligarchies.

I have a feeling that will come eventually, kind of hard to have Galaxy and not have some form of a profile system. Would defeat the purpose.