I understand your points, the current politically charged climate is infiltrating every online community you sadly cannot really escape it and there is not really any magical solution against it.

There is also the issue of, not to sound too elitist, that usually online community tends to be a lot more "friendly" the more niche they are so of course you cannot really expect today's Gog to have the same "classy community" than it had when it was only about "Good old games" with a much more limited audience.

So I think that there is only limited things that Gog can really do about it; they tried initially, even before they invited us, they continued afterwards by hiring a community manager and IMHO things were improving, but sadly the stupid twitter controversies abruptly killed both Linko Gog's career and most of their efforts in that direction.

Since then, while as whole, the moderation is more present than before, their presence on the forum as been limited to a bare minimum and I wouldn't be surprised if they received instruction to avoid any unneeded interaction with the community in fear that one misinterpreted comment or joke would trigger the next Twitter shitstorm.

While it is sad I don't really blame them for that, like I said there is not a lot you can do, forbidding political discussion was a good thing but given how politics and agendas are forced into everything nowadays (thanks in good part to the gaming press itself) it becomes very hard to have a discussion about anything without it derailing into yet another name calling competition.

Honestly, while it's far from perfect, I don't mind the moderation too much, it's usually rather neutral (which IMHO is very important) and most of the time when a thread is closed you know why. If anything I prefer it like it is now rather than it becoming a totalitarian dystopian cesspool like ResetEra is for example.

Apart from that I am a little disappointed in the lack of improvement on the forum or even the site itself, I was expecting we would have to wait at least a year before noticing any significant change but, here we are, nearly three years later and the forum is still there with the same old bugs, the shop part changed a little but still has the same quirks, when the profiles were released I was hopping it would be the first of many major changes for the web site but sadly it apparently wasn't the case.

They did improve things for the offline installer, I have to give them that, I still don't understand why they didn't do it like that since the beginning as it would have avoided a lot of drama, but still, they listened and fixed most of the issues that peoples were having with them. Galaxy 2.0, while progressing rather slowly IMHO, is also a step in the right direction as far as optional client goes.

As I have said before I think that Gog mistake was to start selling newer games under the "gog" name, don't get me wrong I love to have a place where I can purchase newer games including some AAA DRM-free, but I think they should have kept the "old games" and the "new games" separated; keep Gog for old games, sold cheap, 100% complete with no issue of missing patched, DLCs, etc... and then create a sister site for newer games with all the negative attached to newer games like constant patches, DLC, regional pricing, etc...

It's was pretty obvious, at least IMHO, that you cannot have the same "principles" for newer games than you can enforce for older ones, maybe you can if you are called Steam, but not when you represent only a fraction of the market.

Personally I haven't really changed my habit as far a Gog is concerned, but then again I never was a huge forum poster to begin with, being more of a lurker, I do regret that the blues have become a nearly instinct species but I can understand why they have gotten overly cautious and want to avoid taking any risk. I still visit Gog daily but it's mostly to see what new games are released or unofficially announced.