You both seem to assume that GOG hasn't assigned us all UUIDs that could be easily associated with all this information.

No. I'm not assuming that. I even know my UID.

Yeah, there are tons of great forum packages out there to archive (NOT DELETE!) this one and consider. So long as it's not Discourse. Ugh, I hate Discourse and its infiniscroll, and its keybinding hijacking, and its achievements, and... I just hate it.

But that also requires staff time. All solutions require staff time. They need to spend staff time. A bit up-front to make moderation easier? Why not?

Thank you for adopting my approach! Even though I wasn't active in the community it seems my dedicated disciples made enough of an impact :)

I thank you all for the cooperation, may we all prosper in this new age of enlightenment.

Bless,
TheDcoder.

hxxps:||www.gog.com/forum/general/fight_the_bullies_lets_abolish_the_reputation_system]✊/url]

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There's another factor. Their master of forums needs to do the following:
1) Be willing to commute into Warsaw.
2) Be willing to get paid salaries that are paltry when you remember Germany is over there.
3) Be willing to deal with whatever arbitrary management decisions come from on high and outside.
4) Be willing to work in a place with a low company morale to little to no actual benefits.
5) Be willing to deal with a workplace recruitment program that seriously included a bulletpoint of "Strong Meme Knowledge", and the terrible culture of which that entails.
6) Be willing to work daily, because the internet never rests, and neither do us posters.
7) And as far as I can tell, have no union. Which I want to highlight, means you have less rights than the average German construction worker.

Can you post links now?

Yep, many of us are enlightened about the superficial part measure. ;)

P.S. I can't believe some pathetic person downvoted you already.

We spent over $10K migrating our access database to a new, better database. It took MONTHS, and it wasn't done particularly well. I get the feeling that outside manually migrating 10s of 1000s of database entry by hand, it wouldn't get much more accurate, and even then you have more human error introduced into the process.

Instead of waiting way to long before reacting at all and now suddenly removing the user rating completely I would have preferred to remove only the downvote buttons and see how it works. I think it would have improved the situation significantly. And even when it would not work you still could remove the whole rating later.

That's precisely what I meant. I think doing this right would be way beyond GOG's capabilities. So we'd probably end up with a "solution" similar to what I described: A forum that doesn't work with the rest of the site and means losing all the content of the old forum.

The "General discussion (archive)" GOG had to create (to prevent Atlas GOG Bear from taking over the whole site!) is telling a lot about how much (lack of) control their devs have when it comes to their own site. It'd probably be the best to nuke the old forums and start with a new and working software - even if it means to lose our post history (that we can't even access), firends and all that stuff. Sucks for us, but I think it'd prevent a lot of problems in the future and solve a lot of current problems. But at the same time it'd mean the next big outrage of their already pissed community...

If as another member has said, who knows a bit about the code editing required, they have just removed the portion of code that displays the REP count value, then they should easily be able to do the same with the code that downvotes, while leaving the code that hides.

I know for a fact, that you can use a script to hide a post without downvoting it, so clearly downvote and hide are two different bits of code, and also independent from the upvote.

At the very least, GOG should do this, as it isn't hard or any real work on their part.

[deleted]

Archieving the old forums (and breaking every single link during the process) shouldn't be too hard. But as you said:
We're living in the times of "outrage culture". I'm 100% sure we'd end up seeing discussions about GOG trying to hide all the negative feedback and "evidence" that they've abandoned their old principles, blah blah, yadda yadda yadda -.-

Honestly, GOG should switch to a proper software, start anew, just forget about the old stuff (archive it somehow) and bear the shitstorm. I'm running a few websites myself and I know how it is when something "works" but isn't done well and starts falling apart later on. You know you should put serious work into it to fix it, but you know that it won't be easy and cost you a lot of time and energy. So you keep on fixing stuff as it breaks until it is beyond repair. Been there, done that...

My guess is that they've done something as simple as setting a value in a stylesheet to false, b_u_rep { visible: false }

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Maybe it will help present day mods involved in this newest attempt to fix this to look into GOG's past:
Lets Discuss Your Experiences With The Forum
Suggestion Prevent Abusive Downvoting With No Need For Dedicated Moderators

So far in all the discussions found by both search-engines as well as the on-site search revealed that through the years, either GOG staff acknowlegded the problem and forwarded it and had an internal discussion or it was ignored. One prominent example is this The Monkeys are Listening and some days after Judas disappeared with the last known message:

I have been reading through the thread and I have to say you have come up with some interesting ideas :) Give me a moment to respond as I am currently waiting on my opponent for the community Blood Bowl match :)

The reason I bring this up is that there seems to be a genuine willingness to address issues and ask for suggestions how to fix problems or change the way things are handled. I don't know why it takes years, have your community waste time to discuss things, put time into coming up with solutions and then be ignored until the same issues reach a boiling point and members start venting their frustration, and when it can no longer be ignored someone is sent to the frontlines to have the same discussion start once more with the same result: nothing will be done about, but thanks for telling us.

Back on topic about ratings as tool to influence opinion, downvoting what some groups don't like, that's the most pressing issue that seems to finally get solved. Depending how the upper echelon is thinking about how much we - their customers - willing to enter into discussion here, how far they can push us without loosing sales, seems to be a deciding factor what can and can't be done.

Pushing an agenda is okay? But discussion about and opinions in support or contra their politics to push it, and groups lying in wait to enforce how the rest of us has to think about things, that's where this becomes a problem that needs be solved more than ever. For real, this time. To close this long reply: I have a hard time accepting much of what Jordan Peterson has to say, there's still one statement he's made that's absolutely correct: You can't enforce tolerance no more than you can force people's acceptance. To add to that, promoting free and open discussion instead of having tools to oppress or take it in a certain direction, that's something the staff should take into consideration before they make a final decision about the future of this reputation up-/downvote tool and the reputation system.