This might have been asked many times, I haven't really followed it.

What's the story with GOG forum having such archaic engine? Can you please upgrade it to something more modern.

These popups for making and editing posts are atrocious.

Thanks!

... ha! That's funny. If it hasn't happened by now, it probably won't happen in the near future (or ever).

The forums just aren't a priority. I believe it took about 2 years or so to fix the "purple dot of doom", so imagine replacing an entire forum stack.

I can tolerate the popup windows. What I really hate about the forums is how barely anything is done to keep bots under control.

I'd just like "my recent posts" page back. But at this point I'm pretty sure no major overhaul of the forum is a believeable scenario. If any major action is taken, it will probably be to just get rid of the forum altogether. It's a wretched hive of anti-DRM, non-Galaxy users who whine about things like GOGmixes and forgotten principles and ruin perfectly good Hitman releases.

If it didn't happen during 15th aniv, I have no idea why it would happen now.

The loose understanding that I have of the situation is that since PHP is a language that saw a massive bleed off in use, they haven't found anyone to replace whoever made these forums in the first place which if I had to assume [checks notes] the PHP 5.4 code that I assume to be lurking inside the walls.

(It would appear that PHP underwent some major development hell)

As for why GOG hasn't switched to a new forum engine, in spite of there being several open source fourm engines? I have a few likely guesses:
A) They don't want to lose all the data archived here, even though it'd be trivial to archive it.
B) They have an allergy to open source code. I'm not sure GOG has ever deigned in their lives to contribute to any of the projects they make use of, be it monetary sponsorship or giving code back to the various communities. Imagine if GOG had even just sent their notes over to the Vogons/Dosbox team.

B1) If I had to take a [very] wildly unfounded guess, this stems from being formerly of the Soviet Bloc, where code ownership was a matter of the state nearly exclusively, and there were no secrets. The code was forced open.

GOG should give everyone 3-6 months to archive their favourite posts to let people move all their lists and knowledge over to Google docs/sheets if they haven't already and then start fresh with a new forum software like phpBB, vBulletin, MyBB, etc. And definitely 2-tier it so paid members are not exposed to spam accounts with 0 games.

All subforum topics regarding troubleshooting can be collected into a single FAQ thread too.

This is a bad idea, because there may be great posts that we haven't discovered yet. They should either migrate all existing posts to a new forum, or turn this old forum into read-only mode for archival purposes.

I'm not sure ownership of what code you mean as the supposed matter of the state nearly exclusively, because the way it worked was that in fact... there basically was no code ownership. Piracy was perfectly legal. People were legally selling pirated copies of games and programs. It was very common, and lasted quite a few years beyond overthrowing communism before matters were regulated (I believe in 1994). It's how pretty much 99.9% of gamers got their games in the early 90s. It's why piracy was never really frowned upon even afterwards around here. Well that, and the fact originals were absurdly expensive most times, that is once they started to appear at all. CD Projekt in fact got big in the first place as one of the first publishers to actually get people around here to transition to buying original games, by offering them at affordable prices, with cool extras and fully translated and dubbed. Their Polish edition of Baldur's Gate was basically what truly put them on the map and I guess started them on the long way to eventually making RPGs of their own. It does... precisely nothing.

I like it as is. Very hipster vintage ;)

Considering how all of GOG's redesigns went, I'll just say once again please leave the forum as it is. I mean, definitely fix bugs and do something about spam, but don't change it to something almost certain to be worse just to be "modern".

You're right, archiving should be done if it's easy to do. I was assuming it'd be difficult as even lack of features/updates, settings, and modern spam tools are lacking.

You likely ask for contrary things. :/

Ok, preferably fix bugs and do something about spam, but first of all don't swap it for something else or "redesign" it.

But the thing with spam is that we're talking about spam accounts, the posts are a consequence, so it should be done at site level, not forum level, guarding against such accounts being created, or at least removing them swiftly.

HAH!

And now you come with this "the earth be round!" nonsense. What do you think this is - a functioning net experience? ;)
last time they did have a 99% forum breakdown for about 6hrs on xmas day but we also had a good few weeks warning.