Yeah, not a fb/tw/wa user here either but there are more others and the investment to use is zero. Thanks for the info

This is why the rule is absolutely unreasonable. When i asked Watvin, this was my response. If need be, I'm sure it would be OK to post the rest of our conversation, but I doubt people want that: I think your average customer here would agree that's a bit restrictive, but simultaneously if it wasn't so people could just turn everything into an analogy to skirt the rule. Though, right now all one has to do is drop-and-replace character names when wanting to discuss certain topics, anyway. Did you hear Ulfric was in the news, again? He said that after the last civil war he was done trying to run for Skyrim. People have been banned for mentioning that Hamas is classified as a terrorist organization (yeah, i figure this post'll get modded). And i was told (though i haven't seen it myself 'cause I was away) that they allow discussion on Hamas, however, so long as you don't call them terrorists. I don't care about getting banned, so I have no qualms about pointing out the obvious, that they're genocidal terrorists.

EDIT: My first GOG ban was for publicly mentioning someone who got banned for pointing this out. He requested that i let people know he got a temporary ban for it. Apparently that and my questioning of the karens' policies is exactly what got me banned. Ah, that Karen. We'll see. I don't imagine it'd be too hard to manage, though. GOG could also take one of the open source solutions out there and integrate it with their code, too, and it would be the most stable part of this damn website. But, no, the Karens don't get to make decisions like that. CDP wants those clowns monitoring and purging dissent, I assure you. There's just certain forms of dissent that they can't do anything about, like the Devotion stuff, or the complaints about moving in the direction of DRM.

Not a bad idea. There's a few sort of known splinter groups, but there's a natural tendency towards GOG still being the central community. There seems to be an effort to use them to do various things like managing tools, organize rep attacks, etc. In this climate, it's hard to start anything of your own and expect it to last long. That said, there's some hope in element.io if you like that route.

[Moderated by SmollestLight: Refrain from spreading misinformation]

r/GOG
Discord: GOG Cafe, Wing of GOG
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/gogcom

There are probably others. And these guys aren't as hostile as the forums here if you don't mind a different UI. But they're probably more casual than some of the power users here (e.g., Linux, IT, etc.).

IRC while easy enough for anyone to start up, would not be the way to go, as those not present are not privy to what is said at that time, so chunks of any conversation would be missing for each and every participant, unless they stayed permanently logged in. Also a pain to browse the discussion.

What is probably needed is another proper forum. And unless you are going to try and get away with piggy backing on an existing one, then you need to start from scratch, with a host server and forum software. My experience with free hosts and free forum software like MyBB, is not that satisfying, so a paid host would be preferred ... and of course someone has to pay for that, and unlikely any donations would suffice to cover the ongoing costs.

A new forum engine would be a nice thing, but I don't think that GOG would want to invest a bigger amount of money to please a group of enthusiasts that are sitting here. The forum doesn't bring any income. It's more of a prestige thing. Instead we need some renovation of existing engine. The renovation is something that's closer to reality than a new forum engine. There's a lot of bugs floating here and there for quite some time unfortunately.

Thank you kohlrak & MeowCanuck for the info. I'll take a look

While the general gist of what you say is correct, I wouldn't say that aspect is true, for I have certainly bought games at GOG based on posts in the forum, and I wouldn't be alone.

The forum is also a service, and services can lead to encouragement buying, just like any promotional act.

But the forum, while old software, isn't broke, and migrating to newer forum software would be likely a pain.

GOG have had enough trouble migrating their store to newer software.

There are broken things. The search doesn’t work, at least the results it returns are in no particular order, and often make no sense. Can’t have spaces or special characters. Reply/edit buttons only appear if you press on the title area, and not always. The +/- vote button has long been contentious, and can be thought of as a broken system. Posting sometimes hangs, often when unclosed tags. Links sometimes do not work. The report as spam doesn’t seem to actually do anything. There are probably other things I missed.

Special characters work, but with stupid side effects.

First, they must be input as XML code entries. 🯅 Always a good sign.

Second, they'll vanish the instant they're attempted to be used in editing, reply, or other circumstances. 󠀨 Even including "nonexistant" or nonprinting characters.󠀩

If you post a special character normally, everything will vanish as if you invoked the name of Candlejack whi

Well I guess it is a matter of interpretation.

There any many things missing on the forum, but overall it isn't broken, unless you consider the forum software itself is broken by being incomplete or poorly done in some aspects. It is rather old software though.

Sometimes it is better to tolerate the devil you know. Migrating to new forum software can be a huge endeavor.

In a way, stores are somewhat imperfect and adhoc and deal with things piecemeal. It can be a bit like a business that is so busy they can never find time to do maintenance ... and then one day the bubble bursts.