That's what the General Discussion forum is for: to keep all the tangents out of the other forums. It's doing perfectly fine doing that by its mere existence.

It's not named the "Discussion forum of Utopia". Though, I guess someone could start a thread for that…

You can't just say "that's what it's for" when it clearly isn't doing that. It's giving trolls and other noisemakers a *platform*.

Posting things in the Stargunner subforum, no matter how inciting they may be, won't do anything because exactly 2 people will see it. It's way easier to contain nonsense by having everything in subforums.

There's absolutely no need for a General Discussion forum on gog.com *at all*. It used to work, now it doesn't.

I enjoy having a place to talk about general game related stuff that doesn't apply to a single game and about totally unrelated stuff here (movies, comics whatever), thank you very much. And since the rules went into effect, while it was a bumpy process and surely we'll run into some difficulties in the future, things got way better, and I really don't have any major issues with the way things are now.

this

Agreed. I don't visit the game subforums ever, nor do I want to. I may do so in the future if I ever run into an issue with a game that I can't solve by myself, but until then, I like my general forums just the way they are atm.

Unfortunately, that is not always the case. I recently found a topic on the Fallout series subforum in which some of the replies were not so nice, to the point where at least one of them was bad enough to be moderated. Also, Baldur's Gate had some nastiness around the time of Siege of Dragonspear's release, and I believe Planescape: Torment's forum has had some not-so-nice posts around the release of the EE.

I enjoy it too, that's neither here nor there. The question is how to minimize or even eradicate nonsense on these forums. Extra rules don't solve anything, there will always be sock-puppet accounts, trolls, crazy people etc. etc. and a General Discussion forum gives them a platform.

Remove the platform and you remove the problem and yet you keep the core of these forums. The gog.com forums are for the games sold here, nothing else really. This isn't a community to socialize, that's been killed with the new rules and the trolls.

The General Discussion forum that existed 5-8 years ago is dead and will never return. Now it's just a troll-whack-a-mole and gog.com even spends money on a community manager. Money that could have been used for something else entirely.

It so happens that all subforums are friendly, helpful and of the non-troll variety. Just like always, and they didn't need any rules or community managers, and still don't. This entire venture is made for the ostensible benefit of the General Discussion forum.

So the most logical, most simple and most cost effective way to solve this permanently is to follow the example of Steam and simply have no General Discussion forum. Second best alternative is to further segment the General Discussion forum into "Political Discussions" and "General non-political discussions" and further still if needed, e.g. "General Game Related Discussion". Deplatform trolls.

Yeah, I stopped reading right there. There's only so much nonsense I can process, and this is way over my limit.

Unfortunately, as I posted earlier, this is sadly not the case.

How long have you been on this place?
The plan you have works in theory, but if you've been here as long as you sound like you have, you know just as well as I do that the closing of General Discussion would just have the same nonsense spill over into the subforums instead. Every forum will have its trolls, alts, etc. after it reaches a certain size, that's just a fact of life. Even the Steam forums are notoriously infested. The problem here isn't that they exist, the problem is GOG's inability to do anything about them. All this'll do is herd the same exact problem into a bunch of different little channels that now EACH need to be moderated, while simultaneously killing off what little of the community-type atmosphere there was left.

Nuking the forums entirely would be a better option than this.

I haven't ruled that out yet. :D

Mod, please, you guys need to tell someone to add the option to block certain forum users.

The user Hickory has literally been harassing new users, insulting them, derailing posts etc and it's really irritating. I posted an issue I was having, which I eventually found the answer for by myself. And now this Hickory guy is just repeatedly commenting on the post, stating false solutions, and insulting me and other users. He's a real menace.


EDIT: Thank you so much for locking my thread where the harasser had commented. I love you Fables!

Please.
Close GOG when GOG is closed

I mean GOG galaxy

What?