   Finding out who and why rated you down and up
  The current system is flawed. It could be related to having a focus group on a product of yours, and the product generally failed. Problem is, you don't know who participated and why they thought badly of it.Don't see what's so bad about that? Try having a focus group of a product idea like that and get back to me, or read the following. If your product was made for a certain group of people, and a person not belonging to that group was in the focus group and voted negativly of your product, then that's bringing down the product. But the product shouldn't be brought down by someone it wasn't made for. Is it fair for someone to rate down a Rubiks Cube for being to challenging, when it was made for smarter people? The other problem, is why you don't know what the problem is. If you don't know what the problem is, then you can't fix the problem.Incase you couldn't connect two and two together, that's what the forums are like. You have no idea who rated you. Someone could have rated you down that didn't even belong to the conversation and didn't think you were helpful, when in reality you were helpful to the OP. You also do not know why you were rated down. Someone could have rated you down for personal reasons, maybe they saw you had a low reputation and decided to lower you even more out of fun, maybe they rated you down for no reason. Or maybe they rated you down because you weren't helpful, they were offended by one of your posts, but yet, you didn't realize it, or didn't realize it could have offended someone. But you don't know why you were rated down, so chances are, you'r going to make the same mistake again, and simply keep getting rated down.   
  1) You might want to read  this forum sticky. In a nutshell you don't get to see people who have rated you down because we don't want revenge ratings. Even mods don't get to see who's rated them negatively.2) A good chance you're getting rated down in general because you come off as arrogant, whiny, and more than a bit of an attention whore in your posts. That's not a winning combination. Basically you seem to go out of your way to call attention to yourself in your posts, and then develop some sort of persecution complex when that attention isn't positive. I suggest mellowing out some, or at least walking away from your computer for a few minutes before replying to people.3) Also judging from the time stamps of most of your negative ratings, a lot of your current bad rating stems from the fact that you suggested not running a personal firewall and saying that you don't care if your computer gets used as a bot by individuals with malicious intent. People in that thread told you that's a dumb idea and a dumb attitude respectively, so you are getting feedback, if you choose to listen to it.   ;Quote:Original post by SiCrane3) Also judging from the time stamps of most of your negative ratings, a lot of your current bad rating stems from the fact that you suggested not running a personal firewall and saying that you don't care if your computer gets used as a bot by individuals with malicious intent.That's certainly what I rated you down for. "I don't care if my machine is used to attack others" is a distinctly unfriendly and irresponsible attitude.   ;  The rating system was not instituted so much for any one rated user, but for all the other users around that person. These other users can quickly see, with some measure of reliability (given knowledge of how GD's system works), whether or not that person tends to be abusive/trolling/dumb or friendly/helpful/rational.If you're really concerned with your rating, or, better yet, the causes of your rating changes, you can always ask others or introspect. Between the two, you should be able to figure out what's going on. For example, when I make a post that doesn't say "I hate the police," I am more likely to be rated down than when I create a post asking about the 4E5 judging requirements.   