Finally! The Rep system is dead. Let's see what all these people that use downvote bots will use their bots for now.

The bots still work. Check the comment above.
Now you cannot down-vote anyone, but you still can be down-voted by bot :D

But strangely it's only example. Other orkhepaj posts or any late post in this thread is not downvoted so far.

Yeah, you might be right. I thought the change was made much earlier, I was sure I noticed missing Rep before.

I'd of liked this as well. They could of kept the minus just changed what it did so rather than having it downvote rep and saying this post has been lowrated it could of just hidden the post from whoever clicked it.

But at least something finally got changed, just need to sort out the many other bugs and other issues on the forum, site and offline installers now.

So does this mean that there will actually be moderation? As moderation is very lapse especially over the weekends when the forum turns into a bigger cesspit than normal, as there are no moderators around at all.

Edit: Also relying on a thread is not a great idea more so as the forum starts to struggle when a thread reaches a certain about of comments, and if thats the only way to report posts now with the amount of spam GOG gets it will most likely reach that limit pretty quickly.

So what we see now in the future is that someone makes a racist, discriminatory, etc. comment which gets upvoted and there is no chance to hide it. I've said it earlier. The "upvote" function was already used as a bully function in this forum. And we will see more of this.

It is also impossible to hide spam and troll posts now. Here is a direct example:

https://www.gog.com/forum/general_de/neuerscheinung_bxelb_7b776/post5

I can't hide this obvious spam post with the forum software anymore. The user in question is using a bot to create the same message with an auto-generated account in the German news threads again and again. You can see the message and the username scheme in the post above. It started 3 years ago and it is still ongoing. If one of these messages gets deleted the user will create a new message with his bot. There are threads with dozens of deleted spam posts. Reporting these posts is therefore pointless.

You know you're doing something wrong when you end up doing the same as YouTube.

Okay haven't really used much the downvote button but i've seen several places removing them since the bots were all over it where they could be making posts going in the negative score.

Don't cripple around with, just get rid of it entirely!

Edit 3 hours later:
My used_to_be negative rep user, finally recovered the URL posting privilege!
Please receive&pass to the GOG team, my thanks for this.

Pretty sure that those who left are not willing to return no matter how GOG is handling the rep issue now. Unfortunately GOG probably lost them for good.

Well, assuming that this does also block those bots for good, it does remove the harmful effects of mass/scripted downvoting, but in the worst way possible.
So how do you hide posts now?
And using a thread to report spam/violations is a really bad concept. A report function (one that works, obviously) is a fundamental feature of any forum.

I'd still want the voting, both up and down, and the rep, kept, but made entirely public, so a post rating would be a statement, not cowardly, and so the bots will be immediately visible and there will be pressure to take immediate action against them.

That would be the opposite of youtubes reason which had fake up ratings and user down ratings and the score would be roughly be in line with what you would expect.
For example when a beloved franchise is taken and made a mess there will be more fans there to leave a thumbs down. .