There is no meaning in reputation, and there's no reason to search for meaning in downvotes.

Sometimes members get downvoted systemically because they're acting like trolls in other threads. Sometimes members said something mildly offensive or just unwelcome in one thread and get downvoted in others for it. Sometimes a person feels slighted by others, makes a bunch of alt accounts and goes on a downvoting spree everywhere on the forum. Sometimes a person sees that someone has a negative reputation, thinks that it must be a bad person, and starts downvoting the guy no matter the post. Sometimes a person makes threads about topics that others deem inappropriate, so he gets downvoted universally for it. Sometimes a person thinks he's being downvoted by this other person, so he starts stalking and downvoting him. Sometimes people get called out as 'scammers' in the trading threads, which usually starts a witch hunt regardless whether it's true or not. Sometimes people get called out as "downvoters" in other threads, that's another reason for a witch hunt.

It's a huge, insensible mess in a fundamentally broken, negativity fostering system.

GOG will never fix it.

https://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/remove_option_to_downvote_posts_or_untie_downvoting_from_rep
https://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/remove_reputation_from_forum

Well thank you for the response and the quality post! It seems basically your telling me, I got down voted just because for a variety of reasons. :) Just was making sure, because I don't get down voted, I try to raise my rep so others know I am here to help or just game on!

I will not take it personally then, just wish GOG wouldn't allow that, like they should ask why your down voting and a forum moderator should approve or deny the down vote upon looking into it,

BUT that would be huge mess and nightmare with thousands of posts daily, but its a shame, the system can be cheated on and just down vote others.

What Vainamoinen said.

Rep is utterly meaningles, and you simply shouldn't pay it any attention. Your own and that of others. You'll find very good people here with negative rep just as easily as the worst of trolls, and the same goes for high rep. Just ignore it. No one here who's opinion you should care about even a little will judge you based on your rep, only your actions.

Thank you for the kinds posts! I try not to let it bring me down, its just I hear some boards only allow reps of 50+ etc.

I think rep should even be a factor, and I see a wishlist on the feature, but yeah.

Oh ic. well, I did post a un-fair equal trade... without realizing it. I never traded before, so I posted about my Brutal Legend I was trading for Stardew Valley, well, maybe because my game was $7 and SV was $14? I don't know, I have sense edited those posts.... if I was thought to scam I apologize.

Well thanks for clearing that up. I didn't even know what it was worth until I posted it! No wonder people thought I was being a scammer. See, like I said I never traded before LOL first time and I mess it up.

Unless the reputation points were tied to an individual pricing system, it really doesn't matter.

I'm a little worried about not being able to post links in a few months when I get below 7, but evidently there are ways around that.

You still lose rep daily?

Of course I do. Until I buy NES those games he wants he is going to keep doing it, he promised. :P

I'm down about 1000.

You can post in any thread of this forum that you care to post in. Some people may get annoyed by it, but it is possible. Some giveaways are effectively locked (the giver won't pass the key to someone breaking their rules), and that should be stated up front. Few individual gift threads have minimum rep nowadays, due to the rampant rep abuse.

One thing I didn't see mentioned in Vain's reply: sometimes every post in a given thread gets downvoted. This is probably what happened to your post in the trade/gift thread; it just got caught up in rampant downvoting of the individual thread.

No worries, you can put links in quote tags and the forum accepts it even with negative rep. Tried and tested.

If there's one advantage to using a forum software that predates the internet...

A practice which I believe is pretty despicable and only serves to lower the perpetrators to the level of the trolls/scammers. Not to mention that it is wholly childish.

We have a couple of members here who started out here as trolls or scammers. Tauto started out as an alt account of a prolific scammer, but has since come to - I think - be a quite constructive member of the community on the whole. I rarely see anything hugely troublesome from him nowadays, and I find it pretty poor form to keep downvoting even the most harmless of posts from him.

There are others who started out as quite sane members of the community - like KingBradley - but have since become quite intolerable since the wave of political extremism of late and the way this forum has become politicised.

I believe there was even one case where a user publicly abandoned their account and willingly handed it to a scammer.

That being said, as others have pointed out, rep itself is meaningless. Just make sure you switch off the option to auto-hide low-rated posts. Most low-rated posts will be low-rated/hidden for a reason, but on occasion the poster is simply the target of a bullying campaign.

Edit: Scrub what I said above.

I give up, what the hell is that? A sloppy Joe? A hamburger?