The context of my comment should have made clear I didn't mean "leave security vulnerabilities in place" but my apologies for not mentioning that exception. If GOG, or any site, was only fixing vulnerabilities and not changing features for the "better," I would approve.
"Different"? Modern web design isn't "different." It's been bloated garbage for over a decade now.

You are correct that, in theory, a forum upgrade need not follow the worst of modern design.

However, I think it is incorrect to assume GOG won't follow the worst of modern design. Isn't this the place that tried to institute auto-playing videos for our convenience, as well as opt-out mandatory profiles where people could search you by your email address? Hell, even the Galaxy apologists complain that the new version of the client here is inferior to the previous one. For years, one of the means to log in to this site and forums was to use Facebook. Facebook and Google are "trusted." God help any users who clear their history/cache/cookies because now they have to use Google Craptchas clicking on all images of a bodega just to access their account. I could go on. I mean seriously, what about this place makes you think a forum upgrade will be done in a manner that is user-friendly?

CDPR is already using XenForo for their game forums, and they're an order of magnitude more usable than the GOG forums. The only bit of "bling" is the background image which fades out from the top. Other than that they don't have any more graphical elements than the GOG forums, and without the obnoxious "hover over a forum post to show the controls" thing GOG does.

Do think that all of this is missing an important point: Forum spam is a very visible symptom, but the first problem is that bots are so easily activating accounts on the site, so wonder what else they may be trying, and how often they may manage it, in other areas.

As far as I could tell last time, it was like 2 accounts posting. It doesn't cost a lot of money to pay someone minimum wage in a low cost area to create 2 accounts and then botify them.

I think the immediate recourse, from what I observed so far, would be to restrict the ability of new accounts to post.

On Steam forums, I can't post at all (and I wanted to given that devs are often more responsive there), because (I think) I haven't bought any games on Steam. Not a bad way to nip the problem in the bud right there.

The foremost (for most) prominent function would be to keep employees as employees and clients as clients. Once employees or volunteers try to play players their behavior is contradicting the normal client behavior making the forum a zombie forum full of stress. Let people talk and workers work. Please.

That's correct.
Steam considers accounts that do not buy any games or only have free games redeemed/played to be limited.

To remove the limited status from a Steam account, user must buy at least 5,00$ (?) worth in games from the store If I remember correctly.

That would be a good filter mechanic to apply around here for sure to stop bots from posting.

Well, it's forum, platform for exchanging opinions. Clients' feedback is very important to explore the situation from other side. And we've seen "zombie forum full of stress" recently, BreOl72 even colorfully illustrated it.

Certainly a fair point. I hadn't considered those forums. I still wouldn't take the chance personally to trust GOG to make something I like better, but that is encouraging that it may be done in such a way of minimal bloat.

I mean, the choice is a semi-functional forum that's definitely broken and won't get fixed, or a much better forum that GOG might bloat up. I've seen XenForo themes even more minimal than what CDPR is using. What I expect GOG to actually do, though, is get rid of the forums and replace them with their chatbot.

LOL. If you are referring to what I said, I said Event, not wave.
An event can have several waves and be spread out over a few days.

An event would be by the same party, and be organized to occur in waves over a certain period and at certain times, using several bots. In this latest event, there was about 12 Bots, last I counted.

So this can still happen...

This forum is horrible. The search function is absolutely worthless..results can't be sorted for example. I've seen forums 20 years ago that were much better.

I'm sure this is the most boring thing to do, especially with the unfriendly tools they might have, but I'm someone should do it
And that's one of the things I hate the most. Any search engine can navigate the forum better than GOG itself