logged in today and found my score was down by -18 points.

someone had been through my old posts from ~2012 and voted them down.

I wonder how they knew you voted them down, seeing that the user doesn't have GDNet+ or Crossbones+ and isn't supposed to be able to view who downvoted them?

As far as I see, you didn't post in the thread they got downvoted in. Were you PMing him?

That's clearly a revenge-voting; six downvotes in two separate threads for innocuous posts (Lol, and then they went and played the Screenshot Saturday game to make up for the 6 times -1 points they lost during downvoting you).

Thankfully that's not a very common occurrence on these forums, but it does happen occasionally. Another forum member has already went and upvoted the posts that you were downvoted on, balancing it out.

But how did he know you downvoted him?

someone had been through my old posts from ~2012 and voted them down.

An easy way to prevent that from happening would be to disable voting for posts older-than-some-time (say, 6 months?). Or, one could only disable negative votes on old posts. You could have a per-day quota on old-post votes as well.

Wait what? Why disable negative votes, but not positive ones you ask? That's because positive votes retain a certain value while negative ones don't. This is related to something someone else suggested some months ago regarding capping massive downvotes: The reasoning was that if a post is already at -10, then nobody cares if you dislike it, too. The post's author already got the message, it is obvious at first sight what a majority of users voted, and nothing is improving if the score is at -20 or -50, it only possibly frustrates the person getting the votes.

It's a reasoning that one can follow (BTW, was that ever implemented? I didn't follow up... usually forget when reading about such things after 2 days). The purpose of votes should be to point out which posts in a discussion are the most valuable, not to frustrate people.

Keeping positive votes perpetually enabled, maybe with a quota, means that people who contributed something that was really helpful are able to receive recognition even after years. That may be a valid reason to keep them.

On the other hand, negative votes on old posts serve no purpose other than to purposely harrass people. If a post is a year old already, nobody really cares if you don't like it. It's been a long time, and nobody took offense. You'd think that if the post was genuinely bad then others would have downvoted it by that time already. They didn't, so it obviously wasn't so bad.

I'd like to propose a different approach. With the one exception of tying ratings to individual posts, the current system is simply a downgrade compared to the old system. My proposed changes would be:
- logging in each day no longer increases your rating.
- downvoting something no longer costs you rating.
- upvoting no longer increaes your rating.
- instead of the linear accumulation of rating, return to the old Elo-like rating system.

Not only do some people currently have some pointlessly high ratings (only bound to increase further as time progresses), there are also several people who have an completely undeserved high score.
An example for that would be that phil<somenumber> guy who gives Spiro heart attacks. He never had any sensible contribution to the forum at all and to the last never even managed to ask questions in a way that actually allowed people to help him. Nevertheless, he ended up with something like like 700 rating. Under these circumstances, the value is completely meaningless.
This would also solve the problem of the revenge voters. People who do that have a tendency to be unstable with low technical skill, so their rating will usually be rather low and combined with the Elo-rating the impact they can have on anyone's rating will be rather limited.

Here was the original explanation behind the current system:

http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/gdnethelp/reputation-system-design-rationale-r2926

One of the biggest things we wanted to award points to was the contributing of articles to the site. But yeah, the numbers to accumulate infinitely but nobody has gotten close to overflowing an integer yet. And to be honest, the people with insanely high reps do a ton for the community. Sure you can kind of cheat your way through it by doing the little things that earn rep, but ever since we made the switch we saw a huge increase in participation in things like post upvoting/downvoting and article authorship.

Rather than gut it I'd like to look for ways to build on it and improve it. I think those who dedicate a lot of time deserve more recognition than they get.

p.s.
In the EUROPEAN UNION negative / positive vote does not aggregate, simply displayed negative and positive individually, which in turn shows the distribution of differences in the opinion.

Thanks.

As an EU resident I have no clue what you are talking about.