Thanks everyone for your suggestions. I've decided to modify some aspects of my original proposed changes.

1. Nominations
While I still believe we should have no restrictions on them, the community believes otherwise. I'll compromise and do mrkgnao's suggestion of increasing the limit to one nomination per day per person.

2. Quoting posts with a Granted or Denied response.
Instead of quoting posts, I'll have a single post that rounds up all the requests that get accepted or denied into an organized report card similar to what Cavalary suggested.

And that's it. Not much else should change from how Lone_Scout is running it now. Hope to you see you all soon. :)

Good luck, Captain :)

It seems that the Giveaway's time zone (= a point in time to start a new month) is also going to be changed. :)

Lexor's comment reminded me...

I have raised it before, but Lone_Scout didn't go for it. Perhaps you would.

I don't think that having a fixed beginning of the month is fair. Regardless of the time zone selected, having a fixed time tends to regularly hurt the same people (e.g. assuming midnight UTC, then those that live at UTC+3 are at a disadvantage every first of the month). I believe that just like the addition of games, the beginning of the month should be flexible, with a new month beginning when the moderator writes a post indicating that it has just begun (and having these posts at different times during the first of the month). This will also solve the issue of people posting a few seconds early...

I like this idea. Yes, this new rule will be adopted. From now on the new month will begin when I make a post stating the new month has begun. Now there will be no more racing to midnight to snag a game. Thanks mrkgnao for another great suggestion. :)

I'd like to make one suggestion with nominations, and I'm happy to discuss it privately if you want more details as to why I am making this suggestion.

The person doing the nominating needs to be in good standing with the forum also - meaning if you don't qualify to ask for a game yourself then you don't qualify to nominate people either. Current rules only state that the person being nominated needs to qualify but doesn't say anything about the person doing the nominating.

Personally I'd think that would go without saying. But may need to be specified, sure.

Otherwise, latest version of the proposed changes sounds good :)

While I didn't specify about this specifically, I was going to only allow nominations from reputable members. I'll have to add this to the OP as well.

That will not work well, if maintainer is absent in the beginning of the month. Users should be able to start placing requests after a reasonable delay.

I suggest to declare a new month by maintainer's announcement only between midnight UTC of the first and second days of the month.

If maintainer has not made such announcement, the month starts automatically at midnight UTC of the second day of the month.

But of course this would continue the disadvantage of people being in UTC +3 or more (which mrgknao mentioned). It would just postpone it for the next day!

Only when maintainer has failed to make an announcement in time.

If the declared beginning of the month can be delayed for days or even weeks, then giveaway-periods become disproportionate. This will disadvantage people, who claimed a game in the previous month.

Without a guaranteed deadline for posting a month-starting announcement, rules are uncertain.

Just wanted to drop a quick note first thanking Lone Scout for his time and dedication to what is certainly, based on the volume of feedback in this thread, a passionate operation for the GOG community. And of course welcome to Benkii taking over to put in all that same time and effort to continue it!

If I could also make some general comments, I understand the need for rules to ensure a few scammers don't come in and sweep up all the gracious donations, but in life I've always found that the simpler rules can be, the easier they are to be effective. There has been a lot of suggestions and debate on the rules and changes, and I commend Benkii on starting off with just a few he feels most strongly about, while also recognizing the importance of reflecting the community at large's beliefs in tweaking his stance on nominations. I look forward to his successful iteration of a great way to grow and expand the one thing we all have in common which is a love of games.

I've been checking the GOG store and forum everyday now for the last 10 years. If I miss a day, someone send the police to find me. :D

But seriously, it is highly unlikely I would miss a day here on GOG let alone the first of the month. Rather than complicate things, I'll keep it a simple "The month of April has arrived! Begin requests." post for the first of the month.

Thanks for keeping up the tradition. I do have one question though regarding rule 5:

#5 ... You can only request one key per post (even when asking for daggered keys) and requesting several gifts in order of preference is not allowed.

Wasn't the general concensus in the discussion to do away with that limit in regard to daggered keys? I understand that you don't want to process long lists of requests to grant the top game that is still available. But pretty much everyone agreed that having to post multiple times when you additionally ask for daggered keys doesn't make much sense.

So did you just forget to remove that part or is there a reason why you left it in the rules?