Lately we had a political discussion on the Polish forums. Of course this kind of topics are banned on GOG. Users that have met on GOG have basically two solutions: move the conversation to a private chat or use an exterior messenger. I think that a good idea would be to keep people on GOG. That's why an idea was born to expand social features that GOG has to offer.

Ordinary chat is ok, but the biggest downside is that there's no option to make a conversation between several people. This can be solved by a feature that offers the option to send copies of private conversations to other users (thx for the idea Lexor). I'd go even further and allow users to create private groups. You can find similar functions in other internet messengers and for example on Facebook. Alternatively users could just invite themselves to a private conversation without creating separate groups.

Another nice accent would be to implement a voice chat integrated with GOG Galaxy. This would allow GOG to compete with Discord for example. Personally I don't use voice chat too often on my PC (I rely on my mobile phone instead), so this function isn't as important for me, but I think that a lot of people could profit from its implementation. Why search for an exterior messenger when everything is on GOG?

These are my initial ideas. Of course we can go further and propose implementation of video chat for example, but let's not go too far. I think that group chats have the biggest priority. Feel free to add your ideas. Maybe we'll inspire someone. ;)

Edit: If you want to see a group chat or chat rooms on GOG, please vote on the wishlist:

https://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/chat_multichatconference_functionality
https://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/chat_room_feature_irc_or_something_else.

Yes, I fully agree group chats or rooms would be a great benedit for the community and GOG as a platform. Alhough I can understand why GOG did not implement those features right away, as they require a insane amount of work compared to the "oldschool" static forum we have right now.

Hopefully in the near future :)

Yes, the company who can’t even fix the purple dot on the website is going to implement all these features and compete with other software specifically designed for that purpose…mmmm? Anyways, if you want political discussions or what not, why would you come to a games forum, games discussion is not banned?

GOG is heading headfirst in a direction towards DRM. Rather than improving GOG at a technical front, i'd rather see it turn down, which it seems to be doing a good job on it's own without asisstance. Let's face it: the whole purpose of the forums is to tempt people to complain about GOG in a way the karens can get rid of the harshest criticism. If you criticize GOG on GOG, then GOG can control the criticism to a degree. Chat rooms are harder to control, and they're aware that private messages are not very practical for any reasonable discussion (which is why you can't discuss topics about moderation openly with the karens), so I would be very surprised if we were to go in that direction. Games discussion is banned. There's a troubling section of the rules where you can talk about the politics of a game, but no the real world, and one of the moderators (this one's been sane so i'll actually treat her with respect) made it clear to me that when the two overlap it's off limits. Unless, of course, it's GOG staff.

[Moderated by SmollestLight: Refrain from spreading misinformation]

Ah ok. If it came up on a thread I was on then I would think that’s a good time to jump off that thread. But each to their own.

Good idea, I would definitely vote for a wishlist entry asking for such a feature. Unfortunately I'm pretty skeptical that Gog will implement something like this, given the decrepit state of the website.

just allow politics here
how else would the lazies realize what is happening?

There are two wishlist entries which cover this proposition:

https://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/chat_multichatconference_functionality
https://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/chat_room_feature_irc_or_something_else.

Unfortunately they're not popular enough.

thx, I voted for both of them. I agree with you that expanding chat functions would be appropriate, given how strict moderation has become on "off-topic" discussions.

I am reasonably certain this old forum software does not support conversations, in what essentially amounts to a multi participant PM. Though I guess a plugin or addon might be out there somewhere that does work with this forum software.

Certainly having private conversations with a group of members would be excellent.

Thanks for the idea! Voted but I think a better and more realistic approach is to have a comunity elsewhere: a gaming forum, social network, instant messaging platform, you name it. That way, we could talk freely about anything keeping it moderated by ourselves. If one day GOG.com goes away (we hope never but we need a disaster recovery plan) the Free DRM Gaming comunity would keep alive and organized. Besides, being organized elsewhere could trigger more effectively the GOG's sense of urgency to offer a competitive platform here.
I am not a veteran on this forum so please apologize my ignorance if those comunities already exist out there. If so, please be so kind to share the info :)

first they should fix the forum

Someone else had this idea. SnowKat I think was the nickname, from many years back. She went off and did here own forum. No idea how it went.
There are apparently lots of places out there already, gog have a twitch channel, a fb page, and a Twitter, if any of that means anything to you or covers what’s needed, I have no idea as I would rather hammer nails up under my nails than go near any of it.

This seems completely redundant.

GOG staff already lurk in Discord, and I can't think of any organizations managing an IRC page these days. What next, a mailing list or USEnet?