Not for us.

GOG should be able to, but they won't. They won't provide any of us here with access to the rating data either (they wouldn't even provide me with post timestamps).

If they gave it to me, I'd have a list of abusers and targets in about.. 15 minutes. This stuff is ridiculously easy to detect with such data.

EDIT: I requested the post timestamps because it would have been a great indicator that a particular forum user was downrepping someone as the data that I had (at the time), showed that rep loss correlated to their activity (4 separate times rep was lost within an hour of them posting, no rep was lost while they weren't or offline).

Even if there was no legal barrier to releasing that information, I completely support GOG's position not to give it to you. If they provide a facility for anonymous feedback (as the neg rep is) then, even if it's being abused, it would be immoral to pull the rug from under someone and say "Suprise, all that data we implied was private is now published".

I accept the people on the other end aren't exactly holding the moral high ground there, but GOG have a duty to protect data, and they shouldn't give it out to solve disputes. Any resolution on that front has to be handled internally by GOG (in my opinion).

GOG can release ANYTHING it wants to regarding myself not counting my credit card, which really isn't mine but it's bad enough that I'm using a credit card I stole, to then give that information out in a public forum would simply be rude.

That's fairly optimistic of you to say; to claim that people aren't purely sadistic, merely narrow-minded. In some cases, I think, exceptions exist...
Regardless - as long as we're dealing with reasonable people who think they are doing "the right thing", I think most will avoid hurting the glaringly innocent and visibly humble and helpful posts/people. Regardless - the abuse loopholes should be fixed, so that only public paranoia, not merely one determined lunatic, can cause injustice...

Well, I'm going off topic, but then this is a fairly abused thread anyway. Do you think that even a sadist feels his actions are unjust? Even then I'd expect that they would justify them with a basic defensive statement such as "The strong should be in control" or "People crave pain, they just don't want to admit it".

In my time on this world, I've never met someone that is evil for the sake of it. Who doesn't have a justification for it. I've not met any sadists I'll accept, however I would actually be interested to meet a person that believed they were doing something wrong, and continued to do it (Edit, barring addiction or coersion of course).

This argument makes no sense. I didn't ask for feedback data, I asked for forum post timestamps which are already public but they become increasingly inaccurate as time passes (from minute precision to day precision).

I could have captured the post time within a minute accuracy had I thought ahead of time that someone might be attacked in that topic. I've gone and built that functionality into the module ready for RepLog v2, just in case.

All I wanted was the output of: None of the information returned by that is private. If GOG won't provide it, I will simply build my own system that constantly scans the forum logging everything it can see. I will be able to mirror the GOG forums. All public data, after all..

Either GOG helps me with this problem or I will do it myself.

Don't you remember when the rep system fell apart entirely and was abused like mad? GOG staff spent ages unravelling it all just so they could put it back the way it was before - adjusted with proper rep increases and everything.

So I don't think it's a matter of them ignoring the system.

You're bordering on being in violation of the computer misuse act. You aren't suppose to trawl people's servers, or harvest data. GOG are light touch on it, but if you start pushing things, they have room to really push back.

How do search engines work?

impartially, it's their defense.

The only search engine that I would regard as impartial is one that does no filtering at all. If you search for a term and don't get the most popular usage of it as the result, how is that impartial? Especially if they then provide statistics on that information to the public.. like Google Trends does.

I wouldn't hide the fact that I had deployed such a system. I'd be making a very public announcment well before I even deployed it to give them oppourtunity to revoke (override?) the implied consent so I would be very surprised if they went to legal action straight away.. especially after I've already shown that I will not do something that isn't forbidden if they say they'd prefer I didn't (even if they then go on to suggest it to other people..).

Search engines are not impartial, at least not for advertising. Every day I get calls from companies that for a price promise to get my place moved up on all major search engines. Granted they might be lying, I have no need to hire them and find out.

I'm not attacking you here, just pointing out that you're treading on some shaky ground. Search Engines get by through the acknowledgement of the robots file, and the generally acceptance that they are not targetting a site. It's not your place to demand denial of trawling their site, it's your responsibility to get acceptance of it. It's their site, their upload bandwidth that your scripts are using.

I don't think GOG would go legal on you, it's not their style, and they'd certainly first ask you to stop. However the law's there for a reason, it's not cool to harvest another person's site.

Cool, a search engine to find and expose downreppers.

So... when do we form the lynch mob and how far do we take their punishment?

I know you're not and be sure that I appreciate the warning very much.

I would be abiding by the robots file and it would, of course, be built to interact with their servers as little as possible. RepLog already makes more requests to their servers per hour than this hypothetical system would!

Would it be any different if I browsed the site as I normally do and I just saved every HTML file into a cache for later analysis? Not using any more of their bandwidth than usual and I would be scraping data from HTML files on my computer, rather than from their server. This seems to be going to the same argument of whether Google is guilty of aiding copyright infringment by linking to torrent sites which link to torrent files which link to chunks of data which can be reassembled into copyrighted material :)
Well if they are allowed to get away with downrating all of a users posts to remove their rep, seems like it would be fair game for the community to do the same to them.

After all, it would just be the communities "opinion" that they are abusing the post rating system, which is apparently what the post rating system is for!

EDIT #2 (for future readers): The above comment is laden with sarcasm. I argue against the usage of the rating system as a opinion-imposing tool. Post should be rated, individually (not by poster), on their (as much as possible) objective merit. I believe the only action the community should take against downreppers is reporting them to GOG to be dealt with.

EDIT (maybe?):
As a case in point. My rep has gone from 1263 to 1262 because post #151 went low-rated. Someone (or some people) have uprated it to remove the low-rating, but my rep hasn't gone back up. If someone would like to go and low-rate it again, we can see if my rep still goes to 1261.

By the way, I'm going to take it getted low-rated as meaning some people don't like the fact that I would be able to find out who the abusers are and who they are targetting in 15 minutes if I had that data.

Scared you'd come up on that first list, eh? :)

EDIT #3 (for future readers): Again, that interpretation is not serious. See here for (hopefully) clarification