Can we please get comment downvoting restored? The comment section was a lot better when these low quality, cringy and creepy comments were downvoted until hidden.

Lately it feels like all the comments can be divided in two categories:

The Fire Emblem Fates psychotic fan
- On any character not from Fates
"Bland pathetic trash"

- On Corin
"Much better than all the bland pathetic trash"

The shameless pedo (aka "Cruisinginthe80s is my hero")
"Little girls should know their place as pets"
"I wish it were me"
"Hmmmmmm hmmmmm delicious loli"
"That's me and my daughter she's impaled on my MASSIVE COCK"
"That slut she asked for it"
"Hideki" <---- followed by a gigantic wall of text, though it's rarer than it used to be

I frankly don't know if it's much worse than before or if we're suffering from confirmation bias because we don't have to click on "show hidden" anymore.

Don't forget "Bitching about needing certain tag followed immediately by bitching that anons can't add tags"

At least we're somewhat free of Naruto wars since Psajdak got banned. There's still some bitching on Raikage NTR pics but nowhere near that bad.

It was a lot worse before the removal (imo). I think a few mods can attest to that as well.

The exact same problem existed before. The only difference is that the few good comments were proxy-downvoted down to oblivion, so they were the ones hidden, not the bad ones.

It'd be so much worse if they were restored.

such a shame. it's so obnoxious seeing cruisinthe80s, phrike, omislayer, catboystar, etc. on every decent loli pic barfing their fetish drivel. I used to report the really nasty stuff but that grew tiresome and half the stuff I reported just stayed anyway. and the "so don't read the comments" argument is invalid, occasionally there are comments with useful information and/or witty commentary, so I do and will continue to check them.

I don't mean to insult by suggesting you haven't thought of every possible solution, but would restricting voting to those logged in with an account do anything to balance it?

For the record there is an option to disable comments in your options page, however that will disable the Comments page up top.

Restricting voting to users logged in with an account wouldn't do much to slow them down. There is no email address required to register an account. You could register like 30 accounts in just 5 minutes by hand. Given that a bunch of them appear to have been using bots to do it, you only need to add a few lines of code to register a brand new user account for every individual vote. It might slow down a few of the ones doing it by hand that weren't as determined, but in turn we'd have thousands if not tens of thousands of garbage user accounts clogging up our database that we can't do anything about even if we find them. I'm not exaggerating, there were some comments that were being botted to scores of +/-500. We cannot delete user accounts due to foreign key constraints, so those accounts would stuck there. We can ban them, but if neither the IP nor the account itself is being used anymore, that doesn't really do anything. Even if they're reusing IP addresses, they're already using proxies. If we ban a proxy, they'll just get another proxy. If we ban all the proxies, that means we're also permanently banning all the users who use VPN's for privacy or to get around filters, since all bans are permanent and will not be removed even if the IP cycles to a new user.