Sometimes this thread reminds me of watching CSpan.

Aha. So, then, do you think that limiting the ability to rate posts to users who themselves have, let's say, >5 rep points (or a certain number of posts), could improve the situation at least a bit?

Yes, no worries - you made it perfectly clear you're not looking for a civil and reasoned discussion... not going to indulge you, so have a nice life.


Sigh... and a nice life to you too.

Yes obviously, it still takes longer to report it to gog than to click on minus whenever you see them, so I am not sure why you wrote that. The point was that you apparently have enough time for either option.


Hey that is really nice of you, I don't think anyone has been that kind here to anyone ever. My life is already very nice, but it could always be nicer, right?

It would certainly help to some degree. Personally, I'd calculate the rep most reasonably active users gain in say.. 2 or 3 weeks and make that the limit before the post rating system becomes available to you to use. Most likely make it "latch on", once you get to that limit. Access can also simply be removed from people if they were found to be abusing(/misusing?) it (no need for a forum ban). It would be easy to change that value, so experimentation would be easy to do too.

The basic idea behind this would be to make the "moderation by community" limited to accounts that are at least somewhat established as part of the community, if that makes sense? The above solution may not be the best one to achieve that though.

So you don't have any alternate accounts?

Hmm?

The way you wrote it parses like this: "and" gets much higher precedence than "rather than". In fact, I can't see any way, even with added punctuation, to make the "track" be on both sides of the "rather than". It would require being explicted added as far as I can tell.. Obviously, this may not be the same as your first language (if it isn't English).

Besides, if the "track" was part of both anyway, there was no need to mention it at all.

Further besides, you're wrong anyway. Reporting them may take several minutes of collating the data and sending it to them but once you've done that, you're done.
Downrepping them "whenever you see them" could go on for months and months and months..
I have RepTest accounts for the testing, but I don't have any "alternatives".

They'd be useful for discussions like these though :P

Sounds fishy.

And congratulations on the coming baby, old chum.

There are a couple of outstanding questions on your plan that I have.

1)

If the people are doing the downrepping with alt accounts, how will correlating post dates help you? Surely they could be logged on with the any one of the alts. Unless you're suggesting that simply being around when it happens indicates guilt? I think you'd need a very strong test of that, e.g. prove that over a sample of a few hundred incidents, that user, and only that user has been posting on the forums in all incidents. However even then you probably wouldn't get a match, as it only takes a few times where they log in to do a bit of downrepping but don't post anything, in order to hide in with the other people who happen to post at similar times. I'm not even sure how (or if) you could develop a satisfactory hypothesis test for this.

2)

When you have your man identified to your satisfaction, and report him / her to GOG. GOG would not be able to take your word for it, as I do not believe they would take action against someone without definitive proof. So they would need to check their database and look at what this person has done. They must know who has downrepped who because you cannot downrep someone twice. This means they would (if they felt it warranted investigation) write a fairly simple SQL query to find this information. At this point the query would only differ from GOG just writing a query for everyone in that it would have the addition: "WHERE UserId = xyz". So I don't see how reporting one user is any different to just asking GOG to find out what's going on here and stop it for all users.

Furthermore because the downrepping will be stored against the alts, not the actual user, they still would be taking your word that this user is those alts. So they could burn the alts, but not the user. They would in fact need to put a more heavily coded solution into place to identify an alt (perhaps by using a technique like tracking information on the user-agent and the various plugins installed etc.) to give them a way of tracking a user between logins. I think this kind of behaviour would be too creepy for GOG to go for (not to mention expensive to write).

In short, I expect GOG's response when you report your villans to them will be something like "That's not sufficient proof he is also those alts. We do not have a way of preventing or identifying alts. Therefore we cannot do anything about that user.". The only way that might differ is if the user is also using his own account to do the downrepping, then the correlation of downreps between him and the alts would probably be considered sufficient. In which case I'd go back to my point that GOG can do this for everyone, without you reporting someone, using some simple SQL.

Please, no, they break something else in the forums like new thread creation or reply function, and we'll have to spend the rest of the days editing old posts and using old threads to discuss new releases while searching for relevant messages via google.

I would advise against using your real name on the internet.

:P

XD +1

I didn't say it would always catch everyone. Again, it is not "proof", it is supporting evidence. If GOG had sent me the post data and every single rep lost correlated with that users activity, that is a strong correlation and good evidence further investigation with their data is warranted (such as access IPs, timing, account creation times, if those accounts have ever posted, if they are never online at the same time as the suspect user). It doesn't have to be a perfect system to be effective.

I'd never, ever, expect anyone to do anything "on my word". I can't provide definitive proof (without access to GOGs database), but I could provide evidence that an investigation is warranted.

Look, I didn't level any kind of accusation because while the data I had at the time had a 100% to-the-hour correlation of both activity and non-activity, no-one else but GOG would have been able to verify it as the public timestamps lost accuracy. I didn't say anything because I don't regard my word as being enough!

This is exactly why I am annoyed at GOG for not doing anything. Identifying the abusers and targets with the data they have would be easy. It isn't any different, but we are talking about the same people who use the Raspberry Pi as a reason for not supporting Linux, made the post rating system remove rep every time a post goes low-rated (so people trying to help "fix" an unfair low-rating actually puts the low-rated poster in the position to lose *more* rep), created the only CD crack for Moto Racer 2 that doesn't work in Wine, allowed account registration with existing usernames and allowed unescaped, user-defined javascript to be sent out by their forum. I don't see why GOG not doing sensible things should prevent me from trying to get them to do sensible things...

Again, my word has nothing to do with it. There are ways to match alts up without going into specific tracking (useragent, plugins). They might miss some done by people like myself who would know how they may be matched up and thus could avoid it but again, why a requirement to be able to hit 100%? As long as no valid accounts are taken out, any hit rate is a reduction in abusers or their tools.

If you went with the above suggestion of "must earn X rep to start using the rating system", you could just revoke rating permissions from matches with only rudimentry checking for validity (number of posts on the forum, rep, has purchased games etc.). Even if you "took out" a genuine users account, they would only lose the ability to rate posts which would be little more than an tiny inconvience and easily resolved. It's not like the site going offline for several days while coming out of beta :P

I've mentioned this before. It isn't so much the "I lost rep" that is the problem, it is the feeling of being attacked, sometimes for no real (or apparent) reason, and having no means of defense or protection that feels horrible and makes you want to stop participating in the community.

For example, I've taken 2 big rep hits in the only 2 topics I've pariticipated in to any significant degree recently. Without your explicit comments, I'd now be left with the choice of continuing to advocate removing abusers and the proper use of the post rating system and losing rep for doing so.. or being quiet to "protect my rep" like other, great, people are doing already. After all, I got low-rated for explaining how the post rating system affects rep.

I wouldn't be asking for action to be taken against them, I'd be asking for action to be taken regarding the situation. "Investigating" it would be an action.

When I said earlier that I would leave if GOG "wouldn't do anything", I meant I would leave if they said what you gave as an example above. If they looked into it and then said "We can't get sufficient information to take action", I would be fine with that.
You're more than welcome to ask GOG to check, though they won't be able to definitively prove I don't have alts (I do, after all, have 3 internet connections in my house..), they will be able to confirm the RepTest accounts do exist and have only been used to rate Namur's old (pre-2011) posts, with his permission (which is what I used for the testing).

If anything, people probably think you are my alt! :)

Thank you very much :)

It would need to be confident of not resulting in false positives. Once again, here I'm interested to know what your hypothesis test would be. I understand that stats are never perfect and a z test will only deliver a degree of confidence in a result, but you could suggest the criteria (in a x > 5 etc. way) so I understand how you're planning on assessing this.

This was more a statement of fact that GOG won't do it, as a qualification of the later argument. I wasn't suggesting you were expecting them to go on your word, in fact I was implying that we both accepted they wouldn't.

This hasn't really addressed the point that I was making. The information you would provide them with is inconsequential to any action they might take. Either they decide to act or they don't, telling them a specific person is most likely doing this does not make a difference to that, or prompt them into any action. It's clear that it is happening, so that's all the information that might push them to do something.

Again, the "your word" bit was more an implicit statement that this wouldn't be done.

If GOG have an alt matching system, then sure they could use it, problem solved. If they don't it would be expensive to write. I suspect they don't have one given the furore with Anasto. However I'm not suggesting that this form of bullying isn't nasty, it is a bitter thing for people to be doing and I agree it should be stopped. I'm just questioning whether this course of action can actually have any effect.

I hope you won't leave over this, as I think the response (or lack of) from GOG is increasingly suggesting that they have bigger fish to fry.