In my case it never posts.

Usually when it never posts, it's because there is a formatting "error" in the post. If you try to quote, bold, make italic, underline, or add a link, the formatting works like this:

If you use formatting, you put the a beginning instruction between a "[" and "]". As an example "b" for bold. Then at the end of what you wanted bold, you end it with a "/b" between a "[" and "]". So, if anything is wrong in any of the formatting instructions the cursor will spin and spin and spin and never post (at least for me).

I've seen another issue also cause it to keep spinning, but I'm not sure exactly what it is. When I experience the constant spinning cursor and I check my formatting instructions and they're all correct, then I usually see it happen if I have put some profanity in capital letters. I'm not certain that's what does it, but whenever I've run into the never ending cursor and am sure all the formatting is correct, it's often when I've used profanity too much or in all caps.

And sometimes it just seems these old forums don't want to work.

Sorry I can't be of any more help. Perhaps someone else can help more.

Testing the fact that I'm now unable to post in forums for some reason...

edit: . . .
edit2: forgot everything from an emoji onward gets omitted from a post. -_-
So is the Coming soon: Oddventure discussion actually locked or what? I'm fated with the endless "Please wait. Processing... " message and have a helpful post to make. :|

You can get that for a number of reasons -
1) the post is too long;
2) the post has an erroneous link;
3) the post has too many or an erroneous special character; and
4) the post has a word that GOG has banned and won't tell you exactly which completely normal word it might be.

I just spent almost 40 minutes on #4 - the word was illu.min.ating. Go figure.

Ah, the old times when the number 91 was banned from the forums...

It was the plural form of "learning" -_-

Another funny one:

Fuck!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If you make the whole word capitalized, it won't post. I posted all of this (then copied it because once you get the spinning cursor I've never figured out how to just stop it and change something. You have to type the whole post over if you don't copy it, and I knew it be rejected with all caps). Got the spinning cursor. Then I hit new post again, only thing I changed was making the uck not capital.

Looks like making a topic is broken for Thea games subforum (Thea: The Awakening and Thea 2). Spent an hour trying to break in with all the rituals described here, but alas, it doesn't allow to create even a basic topic with plain text.
Never thought that my first post on GoG will be about the forum bug :D

1. Yes, in an ideal world the forum software would be robust enough to give you reasons why post failure occurred.
2. It won't be changed. The forum software is old and GOG doesn't have the expertise to dig into its code to make significant changes.
3. You trying to post links is likely the reason why your posting failed. It's a security feature of old to stop accounts new to the forum from spamming this place with scam links. Legit users get caught in the crossfire - it's not perfect.

This thread really helped! I was constantly getting the "infinite loop of not posting", trying from multiple browsers, multiple machines...

I understand that, if you are told what word is forbidden, then people will work around it. But if you are not told, then you are left cursing at the GOG infrastructure because it is erratic.

It's annoyingly rudimentary for a space that acknowledges itself as a place for mature people to exchange conflicting ideas; ("Remember that while using the forums, you will often find people passionately expressing their opinions, which may differ from yours".) Even the process of making an account name has the Scunthorpe problem!

.

Thanks for the tip! For me it just was: "occ.ult" ...

So may it help someone to avoid this problem.

Worse than that, usernames are not UUIDs or salted and hashed, so that means when I changed my username for a lark, someone picked it up, and it cannot be assigned back to me since clearly that'd cause a database collision.