Not even 12 hours later and I'm down another 10 Rep. Seriously GOG this needs to be fixed. In less than a week I have gone from almost 100 rep down to 35. at this rate I will be in the negative this weekend. This crap has been goning on for way to long. It should have been dealt with ages ago.

Unfortunately you're also part of the -300 club it seems, GOG will simply shrug their shoulders as always even when your rep goes down in the negatives taking away your ability to post any links. Over a year ago when I was in the negatives I contacted support as well and asked them to do something about it since I couldn't post any links, GOG's response was that my posts were voted negative but there was nothing they could do about it at the time but maybe changing the forum structure was part of their future plans.

More than a year onwards and still nothing has changed with no sign of anything ever being done regarding this issue despite many users having left the forum or significantly reducing their activity here. None of this matters to GOG as you can see from their latest response regarding it, so in other words its tough luck for anyone whose rep goes in the negatives.

This. Let anyone post, but paygate the posting of links and modifying rep. This simple change would address at least the most egregious abuses via the "army of alts".

I still maintain though that we need true transparency. One should be able to view who up/down repped a post. There's no reason that a tool designed for public community feedback should be anonymous.

Yeah I stopped posting in the forums for a while before. I may do it again cause this is just getting ridiculous. 2 years ago I was at 600 rep and now I can't get over 100 and now recently I plus other are being attacked again and this time it looks like I'll be heading in the negative.

I remember more than a year ago, I (and a few other GOGnards) was losing some rep for no known reason. ( That was when stg83 went negative I think) I had considered contacting support about it, but decided it wasn't worth the trouble, because while rep is admittedly satisfying when you reach a 4-star milestone or something, it's also pretty meaningless. I also came to the conclusion long ago that GOG couldn't be bothered to make any changes or improvements to the system (or the forums as a whole, really) so I figured the best option would be to ignore downrepping. (Other than the 20+/- rep I lost long ago I don't think I got hit much)

That said, I still hope GOG considers all the solutions that the community suggested (what an optimist an I :p) and, if we're lucky, actually implements one of them.

That also said, the +/- buttons still have a good purpose. (I.e. upvoting giveaway posts, posts we like, etc., downvoting scammer posts, troll posts, etc) Yes they are being abused, however I've seen some users suggest good solutions to that.

Thank you Ciris, that'd be great. Of course all this won't stop passionate freaks from messing around, but should slow them down.

Let me add my vote to that suggestion. Seems like a simple enough hurdle (buy a single game) without harming a potential buyer's ability to ask about games and otherwise contribute to the community.

Gmail lets you use infinite email aliases by adding "+whatever" to your gmail address, which can be a very useful aliasing feature. ie: joeuser@gmail.com can use joeuser+gog@gmail.com for GOG, joeuser+steam@gmail.com for Steam, or any other number of +aliases for whatever purpose, without having to pre-configure anything. Inbound email to these goes into the user's standard inbox as well. Unfortunately, while "+" is a completely valid RFC compliant character to appear in an email address, many email mailing list systems or web forms and other things that parse email addresses are not RFC compliant and as a result these Google Gmail aliases do not work on many websites due to bad programming so if anyone decides to try this out - just a heads up that it may not work at some places. :)

Ultimately, there are many ways for people to have access to infinite numbers of email addresses, but they are not all just used by scammers either. I use the Gmail aliases mentioned above for a multitude of useful things when the given website or whatever doesn't barf due to the "+" in the address. :)

It's not possible to really determine if an email address is valid and can receive mail simply by looking at the address or examining it algorithmically, but websites have solved this problem decades ago by sending confirmation emails with links that must be clicked on to validate that it was received, thus confirming the person owns the email account and it is receiving email. Why GOG doesn't do this is a huge mystery as it's pretty standard stuff. :)

lets not get overexcited yet eh ?
lets wait for these things to be implemented first

Ok ok.. Hype down ... ^_^

I always meant to ask you. When you first came to GOG in 2013 and had to choose your user name, what made you decide to pick "gog a mess"?

Haha, no. It was more like a "GOG games" --> gogames, but I think that user name was registered. So I added a 's' then was gogamess ^_^

He knew! And he didn't warn us! :O