iofhua: This is absurd. Really? Is this really necessary? If someone wants to automate logging into GOG with a bot, why not just let them? What harm does it do?
timppu: I am unsure if it effective against them, but if it prevents those who apparently use some kind of scripts to e.g. mass-downvote posts, I'm all for this new change, even if it makes setting up gogrepo.py a bit harder (you have to export valid login cookies from e.g. Firefox to gogrepo, once).
Like some social networks, GOG
could have users create a sort of access token that third-party applications could authenticate with, while perhaps not offering some functions (voting, for example, perhaps also accessing gift codes and make purchases) to sessions authenticated in that way.
Say that somewhere on our settings page, we have a button to "create authentication token", with a list below it of currently active tokens (of course, for the current user), with options to view details of active and closed sessions (timestamp, IP adress, and what name the application used). And clicking it would add an entry to the list, a "random" string of lower-case letters, upper-case letters, digits, and other characters. Each token would also have a button to "revoke token", kicking out everything currently using said token, and making it invalid for log in.
If I download an application built to use GOG, say the gogrepo script, I would enter this string into it somewhere, and it would be able to access (parts of) my account (in order to download the games).