And we know well what gdnet was like before the ratings system. Do you seriously believe introducing only the positive ratings would've improved the quality of posting? We could have the moderators issue more suspensions and bans at the expense of their time, but how is that an improvement?

Except that in general the number WASNT ignored and the introduction of the rating system was a POSITIVE step for the overall post content of this site.

As said before, the number isn't really about YOU, it's about letting everyone else encode their opinion of you into some easily viewable format. If you didn't use them or even look at them, that's fine! But if someone else wants to, why stop them? In fact, if you completely ignored them, why are you even arguing about this at all? You shouldn't care one way or the other.

Obviously, you did care about the number, but since the community held you in little regard, you aren't happy with the system. Since you guys are so keen on having everything out in the open instead of the supposedly "cowardly" use of ratings, here we go: I would rate you down for this thread alone due to your increasingly sarcastic comments, posts with little content other than mild attacks on other people, and no thought or rational arguments to back up your ideas. Apparently saying this out loud in its own post is far less disruptive than doing it quickly off to the side, so I'll try to call it out more often when I see it.

@MaulingMonkey - As I stated in a previous post, I do remember what GD was like before the rating system. Like many other sites of the day, it had a ranking based on post count. NES8Bit, Landfish, etc., would spam the site with multiple threads which contained one word, and to read the full sentence, you had to go through 8+ threads. But I think people misattribute the rating system fixing a portion of the community with another broken system (ranked by postcount) which was causing the problem.

Maybe the old rating system was positive. I personally didn't feel it was, and I know I'm not the only person who does. I'm willing to give the rest of the site a chance, after a major overhaul, and I think it's only fair to see if GDNet collapses back into the days of the old west, or stays as civil as it was during it's previous incarnation.

@Mike.Popoloski - I personally don't care about the ratings, despite what it may seem like in my previous posts (heck, half my posts are in political or religious discussions, which are guaranteed ratings killers). Unlike yourself, and other people, I don't contribute enough to the site to feel that I should be respected in one way or another. I can live with that. But I still never liked the system, as it caused a little too much bickering (as seen in this thread. Yes, I realize I'm part of the problem). Outside of a moderator issue, which has been resolved, my next clearest memory of why I don't like the system happens to deal with another user, and not myself. I respected this person, and they had a fairly decent rating before one post (It was in the mid 1300's). A post came up about World of Warcraft, and the general concensus in the thread was that WoW was for losers. This one person came on defending the game, and claimed it had some benefits. He didn't use vulgar language, he wasn't offensive in my opinion, and he tried to back up his opinion. He took over a 200 point reputation point hit.

The problem is, if you feel another person is being unjustly treated, you can either defend them, at which point, you'll take a similar ratings hit, or you can sit back and do nothing (outside of rating the person up in secret feeling they were treated wrongly). It lead to a system where one person who may have gotten rated down for one reason or another decided to take retribution and voted everyone else down who they thought voted them down. Now, you can say that maybe it wasn't them, but that's part of the problem. Several times the people admitted it with something similar to "I see you guys voted me down, so I'm going to vote X, Y, Z down because you're all *****). Other times, maybe they didn't admit it, but their vengeance in downvoting led to the same result. They may have voted down in spite people who didn't down vote them in the first place.

You stated in a previous thread that you typically would down vote people who started language debate threads. I know other people were voted down because they didn't use the search function. While this is your choice, often times you would see multiple people in the For Beginners section with sub 1000 ratings. Yes, they don't understand the general concensus of the community. But they're new! A person can't join a community with perfect knowledge of all the unspoken rules. Sure, there are FAQ's for some of them, but often times, they're not exactly in the most accessible location for people who are here for the first time. We all at one point or another made ignorant mistakes, be it in this forum, or elsewhere. There's a difference between ignorance and stupidity, and I personally don't feel it's fair to judge a person who is unaware.

While I would agree that there needs to be the ability to retract an upvote, but I don't think downvoting is helpful.

As said before, the number isn't really about YOU, it's about letting everyone else encode their opinion of you into some easily viewable format. If you didn't use them or even look at them, that's fine! But if someone else wants to, why stop them? In fact, if you completely ignored them, why are you even arguing about this at all? You shouldn't care one way or the other.

I am arguing about it because I think a useless feature is being replaced with a somewhat useful one and I don't want the more useful one to get cut before it's even been used. Though having my java advice's credibility questioned because I disagreed with passing the healthcare bill as it was does seem suspect to me.

There are so many different opinions of what the rating system was in this thread alone. So far it's a way to tell people how the community feels about them, but it's not about/for them(?), about telling other people, who should be able to form an opinion on your character by reading your posts, how the community feels about you, whether the community might agree or disagree with your political or religious opinions if you share them, about how helpful you are, and about how popular you are.

How am I the only person that sees a problem in defining all of those attributes by a single value? At least the new system serves as a maximal representation of those attributes rather than a sum total of each of them.

edit: I have also reached my up vote quota as far as bugtracking goes. I'll estimate similarly that I was around 10 but no more than 15.

@MaulingMonkey - As I stated in a previous post, I do remember what GD was like before the rating system. Like many other sites of the day, it had a ranking based on post count. NES8Bit, Landfish, etc., would spam the site with multiple threads which contained one word, and to read the full sentence, you had to go through 8+ threads. But I think people misattribute the rating system fixing a portion of the community with another broken system (ranked by postcount) which was causing the problem.

I don't think your memory is all that good. The post count ranking was removed years before last rating system was installed. For a good long stretch there was nothing available that was usable as a user ranking unless you count join date.

I'm not saying every post you make obviously - if you notice a smiley that you didn't mean to make, you can edit the post to disable them.

Unless you do something silly - like preview the post to see if the smiley is actually removed, which resets the post options checkbox so that when you actually do submit the post the damned smiley is still there.

I'm not really interested in deciding what's useful to other people or not in regards to the social buttons. I know the fact that I see them everywhere else I go doesn't mean we have to have them too, but the fact is I see them everywhere else I go and I barely notice them anymore. But that's just me.

Speaking of buttons, if find the button at the bottom of a thread a curious one. Apparently you can use it to download the raw HTML of the page?

So is this a real issue in some other browser?

It's happening to me in Chrome. But, it's not for new posts, it's specifically for editing an existing post.

Test:

Edit: yup, still happening.