I agree with all, except for the option of writing the names of the voters.
It would just cause massive rep wars or hold rightful downvotes.

The suggestion to (automatically) monitor downrep vs uprep for each user is also good.

I'd prefer votes showing, since personally if I'm going to downvote something I should be willing to stand behind it. Esp. since this is all pretty much anonymous anyway and people are free to have different opinions. It's not like the stakes for voting the wrong way are akin to doing so in (dictatorship of choice)

But I see your point. I think the only posts I've downvoted in this forum (a handful in a month) were either ad hominem attacks or clearly spam.

That said, because the votes are secret I can claim anything at all and no one would be the wiser. And that's actually a bit frustrating for me - community does rely on trust, but some level of verifiability doesn't hurt. And at a level of curiosity, I have really wondered why a handful of active, positive folks here are on a steep downward trend. Not sure that's healthy.

How do you people keep track of your rep, anyway? I can't even remember the first number of mine at any given point. If this is such an issue, though, maybe they should keep the system in place and hide the number from users. That way, the stars are around to help avoid scammers while trading (I remember they were creating accounts that looked like those of prominent users to trick people awhile back), but people can't fret about micromanaging their little number.

Seeing who up/downvotes isn't really an ideal system, either. They put that into place over on the Witcher forums, and it seems like a lot of the time people are just giving rep to suck up to mods and devs. It's a whole lot of clutter that doesn't really add anything outside of the possibility of a cliquey circlejerk.

If you were losing 6-12 points a day every day for three months you'd notice. Trust me. :P

1: how did you miss xyem's replog? - you were active at the time as I recall?! - and further to that, I'm damned sure others made it clear around the time ninja thread went toxic?!?!?!?!?!

2:Secondly how did you miss the whole orange coloured sea of "low rated" posts after you went "superman" (as some have since called it) last year? - and after so many members (myself included) had prior to that told you there was an issue?

- this is a genuine question, and a rare opportunity for you and I to have contact as (for the record) I blocked you in lieu of an "ignore function". I dont care if you post here or not, I DO care about the general state of the forum, however, and the state of things within.

This issue has been bothering good people on this forum for a long time - long before I signed up (at least late 2011). the official gog response is "our hands are tied" - and even then until galaxy is out - after that... they will (as a company) give less of a shit.

You're not quite as blunt as me then. My rep takes a hit everytime I tell someone to fuck off or something similar. It's amazing that it got this high. :D

I'll just write something about a forum on an entertainment resource I visit regularly. It also has a rep system, but it actually matters as:
- you can't up/downvote anyone if your rep is below 15;
- you can vote 20+(n-20)/20 times a day, where n is your current rep;
- posts that get to -10 or less are hidden similar to how GOG hides the posts you downvote;
- each time you downvote a post your rep goes down by 1/5, so downvote 5 posts - and you lose 1 rep point;
- there are a number of reasons for which a post can be reported, spam being one of them; others include insulting other forumites, posting stuff that breaks some laws etc. Have too many warnings from the mods and you get restricted to being able to post once per day for a certain time period (usually 3 or 10 days).

Rep has a number of uses there and can be spent for some little bonus stuff, but that is another question.

The bolded one is brilliant in its simplicity and how it incentivizes positivity.

True, though it assumes constant accounts - assuming it was the only change to the status quo it could be defeated by creating duplicate gog accounts to use for downvote trolling.

Though I think the counter design to that is to limit functionality to accounts that have under some rep limit, or more likely some account value, say $10 in games owned. If someone is serious about paying gog $10 just to be able to troll other forum-goers,well, then...ok I guess. You can't prevent every possibility of exploiting in a system like this, for example even in the above example a clever person could get around it by exploiting the refund policy or merging accounts, etc.

But still, only a small percent of users would be quite that dedicated to being @holes to go to the trouble.

Uhhhh, correct me if I'm wrong, but if we do this, every time someone shows up from, let's just say Korea, in the act of busting our asses to neg and report the spam we are also negging ourselves?

XD Sorry, I don't really jibe with that. :P

And that's just with bots; what if that "GOG isn't legit" troll asshead shows up again, which I'm sure he will. :D

Same old issues with rep, although sometimes I wonder if most of the abuse would be avoided if people would learn not to be drawn into prolonged public spats and not allow ill feelings to fester.

That said I'm still not sure what TinyE did to be downrepped constantly for so long!?

However, there are some here who really shouldn't be complaining, particularly the ones who take all the time and openly beg or ask for codes. If you don't like being downrepped for "no apparent reason" take a good look at your history on the forum and quit complaining.

probably not going to make any difference if there are people using multiple accounts to downrep

Weeeeell, I did say the posts can be reported as spam, insulting, law-breaking etc. right? You don't spend reputation points for those. As for trolls... well, you get -0.2, (s)he gets -1, all's well and good in my book. Though, to be fair, that forum probably has a much larger audience (in one of my topics I went from ~+400 to -200 in 20 minutes and to +1000 in another half an hour; that's how that site works: some people agree with you, some don't, they all have a chance to express their attitude and actively use it).
I don't say that all these rules will work for GOG, but I'd say they give some food for thought, don't you agree? :-)

One more thing: I was mistaken in the last point of the list. One usually gets a warning from the mods along with the "1 message per day" limit. 5 warnings in a row lead to an account ban. Warnings can be removed by starting highly interesting topics and/or paying with rep. Yeah, I know this is not applicable to GOG, just wanted to clarify.
Not by itself, no. On that forum it's balanced by other rules, some of which I mentioned above. Besides, creating multiple accounts there gets you banned without any warnings.
The rep system of this forum needs a new set of rules. Patches won't cut it, the whole system needs to be reviewed IMO.

All these suggestions are a bit too complicated. Like someone else said previously, the best thing would be to just get rid of the rep system altogether and replace it with post count like most other forums. I can't really see the merits of the current rep system. All it seems to be doing is creating a way for trolls to anonymously attack anyone they don't like.

like triock said:

rep me

rep me, my friend

rep me

rep me again

Then end goal of the derepping appears to be to prevent certain members from ever posting hyperlinks again. So instead of fixing the rep system, why not just change the requirement for posting links to having a certain amount of non-free games in one's library or something? Then the dereppers get nothing and the regulars can stop bringing it up. :P