I wish then they would remove the ability to rate posts as well. There is no point having any of this functionality if it is so easily abused by bots. You can imagine that the bots are also artificially boosting some users over others as well.

Bingo! and an upvote for both of you.

If you find something, that you think should not be in the forum, copy the link and write a PM to Clownski or another moderator.

However, be aware that you can only send PMs if you also accept PMs. So you might need to change your privacy settings first. After that you can always set them back.

It's not really rating a post, just a vote, and you can't see mine or anybody else's and we can't see yours, so who cares.

All we see is that a post has been given an upvote, and not how many.

I personally believe in LIKE and not upvoting or downvoting. So when I see someone got a vote for their post, I just translate it as someone liked it. Whether it was worthy of liking is of course another story, but everyone is entitled to their view on something, though if it enters the realm of obnoxious or abuse, we can just report it. There is even a sticky thread for that I believe or just contact a known MOD directly via PM, changing your settings for allow them to converse with you privately.

Things have markedly improved here since downvoting was disabled. And if you get lots of upvotes, you can still see the count in your settings, if you care about that.

You can even hide a user or a post if you investigate the scripts available out there, and I find that useful now and then, though not very often.

But not the report as spam button...

Yeah, but it is all but meaningless, so no harm to anyone, and no-one knows who upvoted.

Alas for the use of emoji, to make things clearer.

I also see it as a way to say you liked a post, without having to make a post of your own, so a quick reply if you like.

I've always seen downvoting as a negative thing, even for posts that deserved it. I've never felt that way about upvoting, though it can of course be abused. There is a positive aspect to upvoting despite any abuses.

In short, downvoting is disagreeing, and upvoting is agreeing.

In the end, it is what the community collectively make of it all, that counts the most.

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And at the end of the day, we can still post and make our feelings known. So if someone does a post you dislike, then do a post to counter it. In a very real way, if others like your post by upvoting, then that can also be seen as downvoting the other post. But really, we don't see a count, so all pretty shallow, one way or the other.

They were also downvoting anyone posting in any specific threads making every page 'low rated' on everything. This was usually topic or user specific OP posts, the whole system was a disservice at that point.

Personally if they weighted the value of the votes based on purchases and some double square root value, then free/new accounts would have had nearly no effect (unless you had say 100,000 bots, but so many identical posting usernames would make it easy to ban empty accounts...) while say anyone purchasing $100 or more of stuff would have a full weight of 1 in their votes.

But it was far easier to rip the whole thing out...

Back at ya!

Thank you for pointing this out. Of course it should not be possible to downvote posts anymore at all and when GOG introduced this they were also asking to contact them if this happens again - because it should not be possible anymore - so that they could look into it. I will forward this to support in the hope that they will really look into the issue.

Edit: Apparently the original post is not downvoded anymore ... makes me wonder if they fixed it or if it is because of upvotes from other users. Anyway your screenshot shows what happened before and they should be aware imo.

The downvote is still here... they just removed the button to do it... just change the code on the browser client side and you will see that you can still downvote...

Well, I just noticed the orange mark of shame on a post in another thread.
A post so innocuous as to make one wonder what type of tweezer tossers with too much time on their hands would bother downvoting it.

My guess is the mark went away due to the kind +1s of our fellow forumites. That said, if I spot any more in the future i'll post links/screens/etc here.

How many upvotes does it take to get a high rating? It looks like only two. Maybe I'm wrong.

I suggest that everyone here should look at older threads about the downvote topic. It is funny that you see the same usernames in these threads popping up again and again. Of course, it is "coincidental" that they are the most vocal in these threads. It is also "coincidental" that now the "bots" are supposed to have "returned". Yeah. Sure. It looks more like a certain group of people are trying to play the victim card but what they are actually saying is similar to this song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2g5Hz17C4is

Yes, it is THAT obvious. LOL.