I recently had the pleasure of finding out that according to the forum regulations:
"All decisions with regards to thread/post moderation are final and not up for discussion.".

So I wondered,

if there is no way to dispute moderator decisions,
no obligation to offer transparency on how decisions are made,
no prodecure of evaluating relevant qualifications known to be followed,
and no hashed reporting system, to avoid moderator/user conflict/allingment of interests,
as well as no known supervising authority on how moderators go on with their tasks

how could the users be allowed to participate in free discourse according to a private company's "Forum Code of Conduct"
without being underhandedly hinded to the manner and object they should orate, within the boundaries of logical reasoning and debate, by indiscriminate punitive action?

The queastion is there to purely encourage you to express an opinion, without expecting an answer.
I am already aware of the answer, which I have preemptively censored, in order to comply with the Forum Code of Conduct as mentioned below,
"Taking any other actions that are deemed inappropriate by GOG at our sole discretion."
&
"Abusive and/or aggressive attitude towards GOG Staff may constitute grounds for further penalties."

Bestest of Regards.

I've been a moderator in the Telltale forums for a good long while starting in 2010. That was a nice, voluntary position for about two years, the community was great and the 11 heads of the mod team were basically just deleting spam bots and making joint decisions of stuff like "do we ban this nice guy for a week for telling everybody, with minors present, how his friends spiked him with cocaine last night even though one of the mods clearly has the hots for him?".

Then in 2012, they released their Walking Dead game and it was horrific. They made their first adult game and their forum was suddenly flooded with 12-year olds and middle aged men who never played a computer game in their lives. They also didn't know Telltale, so when we said "Telltale doesn't fuck up their episode release schedule, rest assured", we were setting ourselves up for the pain of our lives, because Telltale had massive problems dealing with their unexpected success and started fucking up.

There were community members who actively invaded the subforums of other games to shit on them in order to keep Telltale making The Walking Dead games. There were streamers aggressively trying to advertise themselves and community members who tried to "prove" come what may that those streamers were spammy lying assholes. There were bona fide piracy threads which of course got the pirates permabanned. There were people making six threads a day demanding a release day for the next episode, and they were worse than bots. People were dismembering each other in "shipping threads". When a community member popped a vein, they made porn picture threads with assorted alt accounts, that was a hoot. There were threads with sole purpose to insult other community members. And of course ban decisions were questioned by community members who incorrectly guessed the reason for the ban. There was this dude with OCD who made 150 accounts and 300 threads a day. There was this guy who made threatening Telltale his game (as he was in the US, Telltale sent the cops over). It was just toxic as fuck. One of the voice actors wrote on ask.fm that he'd never hang around this forum because "it's not a happy place". A handful of members made a "boycott forum" that was active for more than a year. For the second Walking Dead game, some kids got the idea in their sugar brains that "being banned" was actually an edgy status symbol, so they started asking or demanding temp bans from mods.

Release days were crazy. You have no idea how crazy people were. And because there were so damn many people who loved screaming "it's out" when it wasn't, thus riling up the rest of the community, we actually started dispensing those handy 24 hour bans.

Once a fellow moderator made a ban decision that, by her own admission, was wrong. The banned folks actually had their own forum, they were indie game developers themselves. They started discussing how they looked up the moderator and her supposed fatness and uglyness in their own forum, visible to everybody. And of course Telltale kept out of it. The mod had to practically beg these developer assholes to delete the abuse from their own forum. I've thankfully forgotten the name of their stupid game, but sometimes I stumble on it in GOG's catalog and that always ruins the day.

Once some dude wrote to me flatly telling me that I couldn't ban him just for grossly insulting other community members, he said "I know what's up, I've been a moderator on 4chan". He then went on to send me abusive pictures when I refused to discuss the matter further. And that dude didn't even end up being exhibit A when it comes to my solidified opinion that in an international forum, the front runner assholes are usually my fellow countrymen.

If I had to deal with actual appeals and shit in addition to dealing with the abuse, I would have flipped Telltale the bird immediately with TWD's release. And I stopped moderating some months before the culture war began in 2014, which of course makes moderation absurdly difficult.

I don't ever want to do this again, not even for good money, and I'm convinced that what the present GOG mods are seeing is not exactly "good" money.

This is the only way moderation works right now. Believe me, I know how difficult that is to accept when you're sure you've done nothing wrong.

The alternative is to shut down the forum.

This reminds me of a horror story back in the G4 days. When some D-List celeb from Judgement Day was able to walk all over the forums with a fucking posse. Problem is, the lamebrain never learned, so decades later, the narcissist invades AtariAge, and fundamentally ruins the reputation of the forum.

Assuming this is a legitimate thread:

You can "participate in free discourse" in the context of the forum rules. The moderation is largely clear and understandable (e.g. in posting this, I know it's quite close to the line in terms of what is allowed), although I'd point out that moderation decisions are not an allowable topic for debate under the CoC.

If you have any questions on specific moderation decisions involving yourself, you are allowed to PM the mod in question, you're just not allowed to talk about it on the forum.

I wouldn't like that. As obvious as the answer is, the question is still valid. :(

Sure Vainamoinen, but life isn't a wishing concert.

I've had my own PM "run-ins" with the mods in the recent past.
And the responses I received on that occasions, weren't necessarily satisfactory to me.

But - I now know how the mods run this establishment, and I will act accordingly...and I can only encourage everyone to find out on their own.

This thread however, serves no other purpose than to get locked.

It's just another of these "I know already that I ask you something, of which you have already made it clear that you won't answer it, but I'll ask you anyway, and I invite anyone to join me in my endeavour...!" - threads, that only fuel anger.

Edit:
Here's an axample of such a thread and what it leads to: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/release_hitman_game_of_the_year_edition_11093/post2386

1. You can send PM to one of the moderators. In fact, if you are banned, you usually receive message from one of the moderators and reply to it with request for clarification.
2. No. There is no such obligation.
3. I'm not sure what you mean.
4. Again, you can send PM to one of the moderators. In fact, I did that during one very heated discussion, requesting to use certain arguments. My request was denied.
5. No known authority that can be reached if you think some moderators abuse their power exist on GOG forums. That's the whole point. You aren't allowed to participate in the free discourse. Moderators always can shut you down, if they don't like what you say. That's exactly why CoC is written the way it's written.

If rules are broken, you mean. You and I have both bent the rules a little these last two days. Should mods not be allowed to shut us down temporarily, as the bending and breaking of the rules is crystal clear?

Maybe they should, maybe they shouldn't. It all comes down to what is considered "political and unrelated to games". The problem is that *I* will be shut down, you will be not, because rules don't matter if you can interpret them however and whenever you want..

Sorry, I can't really go into the details here because I don't want this thread to be shut.

My point remains: When we both were overstepping the clear cut boundaries in that other thread, we knew that we were doing so.

QFT.
I was a moderator/admin on a few different games/forums. The most toxic stupid people come out in droves, and when you righteously dispense the banhammer on them, they then make new accounts and start incorrect rumors that you banned them because you're a piece of shit that disagrees with their political stance, or because you don't like how they post (to be fair, the second part was true; I very much disliked people who posted in a manner that violated the rules).

Banning most offensive users or those who post illegal links or those who dox others, or those who instigate shit for no good reason is usually easy. It's the cases where idiots don't realize (or WANT to realize) what they're doing is wrong after several warnings, both by mods and sometimes other community members. And the warnings are always friendly at first, and the users are usually helpful ("Hey, that's not cool man. You're going to pick up a ban") and people turn into shrieking fucktards with no regard for any other human being on the planet, and start spouting off their conspiracy theories, etc about how the illuminati is actually forcing me to ban them because of course a nobody loser from BumFuck, Idaho has all the information that will blow the lid off everything and they, rather than do something useful to limit the user, have decided to have me as a random forum moderator ban them on a site that has moderate traffic.

So yeah, I had people threatening my family, and threatening to dox me over forum bans. People in general are terrible.

For all the flaws that SomethingAwful may have as a community, they did have clever ideas about moderation, even if most people would find them ghastly.
1) There was a 10$ registration fee. Your account gets banned? Pay up if you wanna post again. Perma? Don't try again, bucko.
2) All moderation actions are public. The offending post while moderated, is left to lie as receipts.
3) There's a Sto-vo-kor and Gre'Tho for threads, and with it, a thread rating system. Threads are rated 1-5, with two extra ratings: Gassed, and Gold. I realize that former term isn't exactly going to be looked at fondly, but that's how internet humor in the 2000s went.
4) There's multiple levels of punishment, including but not limited to: Getting yelled at, getting DMs, getting probated, banned, and permabanned.
5) Moderators of each subforum were listed in big bold text.

Honestly I'm finding an increasing need for moderation these days. People who used to be decent are lashing out at anyone with a differing opinion or offering alternative information.

Now that people have gotten back to their normal lives, I find most people to be particularly more unpleasant than in years past.

These forums are no exception. There has to be clear rules and if you violate them, the thread should be locked or the post should be deleted. People who antagonize others should be receiving bans of increasing length.

This is standard internet forum procedure and has been since the 90's.

Like Clownski said, we all agreed to the CoC when we agreed to use the forums.