I know there are a lot of veterans of the site who won't be with me this time, but someone should say that: the GOG forums are complete garbage nowadays.

Nothing to do with you guys, you're all awesome, but this week, you may have noticed the horde of bots in the general forum, not that it wasn't an issue before, but at least there weren't more than 120 topics created in only one hour, by several fake accounts.

And that's one issue with this old forum. The other one, you get it, is the fact that the infrastructure behind it is really showing its age: we're talking about a 15 years old forum, which isn't comparable to any other one available in other storefronts or gaming related sites.

No way to ping people (and no, quotes don't count), to see user's post history, no text formatting, bot detection, working search system, and the list is still long...
But everyone knows that building an entirely new forum, from scratch, would be really tedious, and I don't think GOG has so many developers to allocate to this abandoned part of the site; but there is a solution: the CDPR forums.

Since you are part of the same group, couldn't you just ask for the source code of their forum?

We can already sign up with our GOG account there, so that's already done, and it has all the different features I mentioned above.

And please, don't throw away years of community posts, you can try to find a way to merge them into the new infrastructure or just make the old forum locked, like you did with the different archives still available, so we can at least visit it, from time to time.

There are also a lot of different open source sites to use, but you already know that (I believe).

Usually I'm not one who uses all these words, but this time it was necessary.

Vote the wishlist entry

Absolutely agree, the 15th anniversary is approaching and it would be nice to have a real functioning forum and not this rotting carcass lying around.

Using the CDPR forums would be the perfect solution as it is already possible to log in with the same GOG account, but I'd accept pretty much any solution, as long as the old forum is archived and left accessible for reading.

Still won't change a thing. The forums are more-than likely here to stay, in their current form, BlueTak and sticky-back plastic included. The day we actually see any major change/improvements to this forum, would be the day they are finally removed...

Hard not to agree. You can download the whole forum to your had, best way to find anything ; )

The extra (amount of) time moderators need to take to scan the forums and manually remove all the spam bot threads is by this point unnecessary. It shouldn't be this easy for bots to bombard the forum all the time. Sure, making a better/new forum is an investment, but by putting in security measures to prevent bot threads, you save time and thus money in short and long term. This frees up time for community managers to work on other venues. A win-win situation.

On the CDPR forums you have to post at least 10 time before being able to create a new topic, for example, or you can directly ask a moderator to open a new one for you.

Maybe it's just me being masochistic in this way as well and/or having gotten used to it, but I consider the forums in its current, out-dated and sometimes barely functional state an integral part of the true GoG experience.
It simply wouldn't be the same if they switched to something else.

Just don't go Ubisoft way...

For your consideration,

I hear you. But not sure about fully supporting your idea pippo-san

Granted, using their own forum infraestructure seems easy to do
and with a lot of improvements as a bonus

But as Swedrami said, this forum software has its own charm

Because of that, before thinking on the daunting duty of a migration
I would like to see the lazy inept ones making a real effort
to make the current infraestructure work as is supposed to be
Witness its glory... at least for 3 months!
...Of both! :)

Otherwise, I can easily imagine giving them
the latest & greatest forum technology
and they converting it to junk in a split second. No kidding
And what would happen then? Another fresh set of 15 years of us
claiming the forums are sh*t...
And who knows: The lazy inept ones taking those "new" complains
as their final excuse to kaput the forums

In short: My bet is, the problem is not fully the forum technology per se

If you would give my bet a chance, some improvements areas:
-Fix the purple dot! (notifications)
-Moderation duty. Yes, humans -really- onboard
-Fix the search feature (BTW, they did some progress on this already
during the last month or so!)

Where 2 of those 3 were already fixed unofficially
by our talented enthusiast fellows with their scripts...
Then the request is not THAT huge... IMO


Anyway, You got my vote. And my concerns about it already expressed too :)
Thanks for the initiative!

I remember having dug in GitHub for forum engines once, and there seemed to be quite a few well rated ones with rather permissive licenses. Maybe GOG could use one of those?

Truth be told, I like the aesthetic of this forum: its pages are very clean, devoid of signatures (that repeat as many times as the user posts in the same page) and large images and embedded youtube videos. The only images to contrast the background are the avatars, which are somewhat small and can't be animated GIFs.

The way it is now I can even browse the forums at work. No way I could do that using most forums out there. Some of them look like they were designed by the the same people who created Geocities back in the 90s. It's like a competition of page elements each trying to be more flashy than the rest.

With that said, these are all the good things I can say about the current forum. As far as functionalities go the OP is extremely right. This forum needs a complete overhaul except when it comes to graphics.

One thing I would add to OP's very reasonable feature list is the need for spoiler tags. And strikethru while they are (not) at it.

I don't think the OP's suggestion is a good idea.

I've seen many "modern" forums and they are full to overflowing with incredibly unnecessary and annoying images all over the place, and even worse, flashing images which are the Internet equivalent of nails on a chalk board.

So if "changing" the forum is going to lead to crap like that, then it's better to leave the GOG forum exactly as it is right now (even though I agree many things are not ideal about the current GOG forum...but it's still way better than "modern" forums like the ones I've just described).

And just look at Galaxy 2.0, which is an abomination compared to the Galaxy 1.2, even though Galaxy 2.0 was supposedly going to be new and improved, but it turmed out to the be the exact opposite of improved. Most likely that same pattern would also reoccur with any "forum change."

As for the bot spam issue: a great idea to fix that problem instantly was recently posted in another thread: GOG could simply change the current forums' parameters so that only accounts which have purchased games on GOG may post on the forums. That would eliminate all bot spam posts and would not require any overhaul of the forums.

I absolutely agree that the forum needs a modern engine under the hood with appropriate, working tools both for moderators and for users.

At the same time I hope the new forum would remain simplistic and archaic like it's now, without fancy emoji, embedded gifs and all kinds of flashy, distracting stuff.

What do we know about the spam?

Was it a brand new user?

I am guessing there are limitations in place, and they must be effective, because spam like we just had is fairly rare. I am here almost every day, and I could count on one hand, how much spam we have had this year so far.

We'd definitely have a lot more spam, if reasonable protections weren't in place.

Spam can be tricky to deal with sometimes, especially if MODs are not always present.
If the bad folk are prepared to make accounts and take enough care to overcome current limits, and then do their attacks in a timely fashion, that can be hard to deal with, especially if not every thread has the exact same title, which from what I saw with this latest attack was indeed the case.

As for the current forum software, yes it has many flaws, but it also for the most part works well enough.

I'd recommend being careful what you wish for.

Many of us still don't like the bloat and organisation of the current store pages, and wish we still had the old ones, as flawed as they were.