I agree that in such cases it can help identify certain individuals or maybe bots and alts. To work, GOG would also have to implement a timestamp recording votes, so you really got proof when you report someone for abuse. If it turns out to be the same person always down voting someone, regardless of content, it is clear proof.

Let's assume they are going to implement a function to display nicks to votes and timestamps. The next step to solve the problem and prevent further abuse is to build up a voting history. This will take some time. Even though you can now see who voted what and when could be just a one time thing. After a certain amount of time and posts will it really become clear that it's about the other person.

In theory it could work to stop abusers while in reality it may not. Reason being that the new system and how it is going to work will be no secret. So instead of voting seconds or minutes after a topic or post had been published, abusers will wait for an hour and start to selectively down vote. Another problem will still be to make proof that some other member is a target because there can be many reasons why that button was pressed, either up or down. Though never has anyone complained for being upvoted.

However it's done and voting systems with up/downvote exist, they poison discussions, there is a risk of going off-topic because OP or someone else asks: 'Why so many down votes?' Since no reason must be given for a vote, neither positive or negative, it is worth nothing for the OP to eventually improve and do better. Finally, having the option to up-/down vote, precludes the need to write a reply and share one's opinion. A negative vote does do and the other party moves on to rate the next post or topic. A wonderful thing to have in a discussion forum. Or comment section on other websites.

I find that many good ideas to make a up-/down system work have been shared here. The suggestions made clearly shows to me that much thought has been put into it. In reality, before making any decision every which way, GOG could test drive several of the suggestions:
Only up-votes (it is difficult to believe that when there's only this one option, people really start thinking whether a post is actually worth to be up-voted.)
Up/Down votes with names (and maybe timestamp) shown
Up/Down votes with a selection of reasons to give for a vote (maybe even with a form field to input one's own reasons)
Up votes only for question topics to award points
No voting system and no rep count but display of number of posts made and number of helpful ratings

Implement an alternative system like the following:
Each member of the community is able to award a star to someone perceived as being particularly helpful in general, someone who is know to start interesting discussions, a kind person always gifting games or sticks out as being positive and always trying to contribute instead of squash a discussion

The stars would then be shown and can be taken as an indication that that's someone you can turn to. Something no up-/down vote system will ever do for you. Because high number of positive to negative votes (and only the total number of either one shown) doesn't say anything about the performance of the individual member. In our case it is totally worthless as an indicator, because there is no access to a full posting history. Nor does post counts because there are spam topics and they can boost both it and the reputation as it was.

That said, as long as the old rep system is not making a comeback, I'm fine with almost anything ... :)

Personally I don't think the UPVOTE ability is worth keeping, because it can also be abused and so you cannot trust it.

All of us who come here and post daily, get an upvote for our first post of the day, and those who answer a question and have that marked as the solution get 5 upvotes. That should be enough ... though that last can be abused too, but more easily detected by all of us, and so it can be reported.

REP should just show forum participation and helpfulness, and not be based on views and opinions or bias.

you are one of those "disreputable people"

I just want my opinion [that will be ignored] on record:

I don't think this is the right decision, unless it's interim (and not long). It's useful to know who's known as a positive voter in the community. The thread-specific upvote/downvote buttons are very useful, outside of the abuse.

The whole issue is the abuse... And there's NO WAY GOG can't track and mitigate the abuse if they spent any real effort on it. The data is there in the database. Just do some spelunking.

The "report as spam" button needs to work [and with a human element to verify versus the abuse]. I don't know if it ever did.

I'm pretty sure forum guidelines prevent us from having a "circle of trust" thead where we say "I think these people are good posters" and "these people are generally not so great". Plus that'd also not help much with the bot [as in spam bot; not voting bot] issue.
Astute. Between their "DRM is OK now!" stance, and the forums [which used to be among my favorite on the 'net] just going to hell from abuse and misapplied rules and just general abandonment, this is apropriate.

Spam posts are fairly frequent on this forum. A quick way to report such posts is very useful. Forum users have nothing to gain by not having a convenient way to report spam. You removed the only way to distinguish between forum regulars and old timers, newcomers, and trolls. Again, there's nothing positive about that. Auto-downvoting is still continuing in the background same as before, so you didn't even address the one and only problem with the reputation system.

You could've handled this any number of ways, e.g.
• Put a cooldown on downvotes
• After [X] downvotes in [Y] period of time, require reCAPTCHA confirmation
• Remove downvoting altogether and set negative reputations to 0
• Remove reputation altogether and publicly display the number of posts made instead. This has been a feature of most forums for ages. It lacks an indication of whether the participation is positive, but at least it's not open to abuse and it's better than nothing.

Well, that is the main problem with the GoG system.

Nobody has the option to see who voted what. Not even Mods and Admins. At last not without diving into the database I would say.
Users don't need to see this. But if a mod could see it, he could identify the used bots within less then a min. Because we talk about bots here and only bots...

I know other forums, that do allow several reactions to a post by Smileys. Some can considered good, some bad (and those won't give rep to the user).
The biggest difference is, (higher rank) mods can see who voted what.

There were several users who spammed certain reactions to every post of a certain person. There where even users who tried that with bots.
Most of them stopped very fast, when a mod said that he can see every name of who did what. The others did so, when a mod PMed them directly.

In that forum, i wouldn't call mods trigger happy, but mods can give you verbal warnings or warning points.
You got a point, you got a temporal ban, with the time increasing with every point.
You got a certain amount of points, you are out. And we talk about something like 3 or 5.
So, they are much more strickt than the GoG mods.

On many forums, braindead "forum games" are used to artificially inflate post counts. I loved the gog system when rep was incremented by 1 point per day where a post had been made. It made the forum games gratuitous and innocent fun.

Those mentioning the ability to click to see who upvoted/downvoted a comment: Another forum I participate in (paizo.com -- one of the most hostile, unwelcoming, excessively moderated environments BTW) has only upvoting, and you can click to see who upvoted in addition to the count. It works well for there.

[The unwelcoming issues are rather unrelated to the post rating.]

I welcome the efforts to improve the forum experience, but I think the priorities here may be somewhat back-to-front. Imo, being able to (privately) report abusive posts to moderators is important and should be allowed. However, the upvoting/downvoting rep system is deeply flawed; is being abused on a daily basis by downvoting bots; does little except foster a toxic atmosphere; and should be completely removed.

I am willing to believe that all mods are able to see is the number of votes. I don't think that there is a module tracking votes, IP and other metrics, else they would have been able to step in whenever someone complained about mass down-votes.

Sounds very much like a tagging system like the one Steam offers in their review section. Could be an interesting addition and way to make money for GOG and at the same time improve the quality of reviews. As far as reviews are concerned, the number of characters should be increased! For this forum it would make sense to be able to add tags. For instance, when a topic or posting is assigned "funny" it will receive 0 points, and a "helpful" or "insight" would be awarded with 5 or more points.

The system would work like this. Once a tag has been added, another click on that tag will increase the number of points and any additional tag added will add or deduct points. For instance someone assigned the "helpful" tag which would be worth 5 points and it has been voted for 5 times, makes a total of 25. Someone else decided it is spam so 3 points will be deducted and 5 for "off-topic", it ends up with 17 points. Another member then adds the "insight" tag for 7 points and that is voted on 10 times for 7 points, that post will end up with a points total of 87 points for that post or posts that day. At the end of each day either the full amount of points can go towards a reputation count anyone can see or, better yet, only 5 || 10 || 15 || 20 points max/day. Depending how many points total a user has reached, from 5 to 20 they will receive 5, 20 to 40 earns them 10 so on so forth.

With this dynamic system in place the chance that it gets abused will be rather small, it will earn members points going towards their reputation and other members should then be able to sort and display posts tagged with "helpful" or "interesting" to display those first or hide posts receiving an overwhelming amount of "off-topic" or "spam" votes once that gets assigned. Based on the tags and number of votes they also become able to determine who is just a jolly joker and which member is trying to help other members or is generally a very positive and generous person, contributing in a positive way to the community.

The queue word is mods and their willingness and ability to proactively monitor the forum to step in and take appropriate action. This is why, with a system like the one outlined above, with a way to determine who has an overall amount of certain tags and points awarded, that they could as well be approached by GOG and invested with a limited set of rights to moderate topics, remove spam posts and have paid staff as an instance members can turn do if they feel that a wrong decision has been made.

Something that's not possible here and will not be, my guess - mind!, unless and until GOG switches over to a different forum system to accomodate new features necessary to achieve that goal.

Slashdot used to have the best member-moderation ever. I don't know if it's still around, or how it's done now. But it was the best moderation. ("tagging" was part of it)

On downvoting bots: Does GOG require a certain dollar amount transaction [not gift and freebies] attached to an account before being able to vote in forums? If not, why not?

Agreed. The forum games can easily be used by non-contributors to spam post numbers. The rep system had the advantage of rewarding appreciated participation more than this ... but obviously it was open to abuse.

First and foremost GOG needed to dig into the guts of the downrep system and start knocking bots (and abusers) on the head. Then they could rethink the system later if it continued being a problem.
Despite not normally liking a "buy in" ... I'd support this one for voting only. I actually prefer a graduated system which after you reach a certain post number your rights to do certain things are "unlocked", but as it stands right now it might be easier to code in a "limited/unlimited account" system.

No.

See second word of your first question.

Of course, a lot of the work the moderator is doing could be automated. The Something Awful forums have a series of rules and systems in place that allows their automod radium to not only take swings at the spambots, but also at users generally being absolute jakenapes. Of course, that forum also has a 10$ registration fee, which does curtail most of the idiots and spambots. There's maybe 10...12 regulars at most, and I can't imagine many of them being willing to participate in a conference call, especially when so many of them are several timezones away from Poland. It's just into 21:00 here as I write this, and yet it is 3 in the morning in Warsaw. The forums would need a much larger core of users for this kind of idea to be feasible and desirable. The simple fact of the matter is, they bring money if if their character is that of a ne'er-do-well, and I'm not even sure this forum software is capable of permanent removals. Plus then they'd have to introduce an appeals process and much more work would be introduced. While suggesting the curation team communicate more is one which I laud, the "create a thread for every wishlist entry" is not a feasible or even prudent idea. The wishlist is filled with redundancies, impossibilities, and worse still is that there's no way to even track wishes or pin them to keep track. I think what would be a better improvement is if users could help GOG track down the rights and information on games so they could spend more time negotiating and less time banging their heads because the creditor's office won't talk. I largely agree with the ethos of this, but I have something of an addendum, in that GOG should at the very least try to avoid releasing games which fall under these three creatively named criteria:
A) Ripped from the Headlines!, a game which serves no purpose but to cash in on some event which won't be relevant in three days.
B) Maypole of Controversy, a game which only seeks to shock mothers who were never going to buy the game in the first place and throw rude gestures to ratings boards, and
C) A Witless Color Commentary on {____}, in which some "clever auteur" uses the interactivity of gaming to directly point at some obvious issue and uses it as a soapbox to commentate on it. The curation team are guilty of releasing games of all three criteria, and much to the ire of us all. I'd include further categorizations, but I'd be nitpicking at this point.