Hi, I'm back. I want to state some observations I made during my "unscheduled sabbatical".

1) There is no public facing indication that a user is currently unavailable for posting, no avatar replacement nor even a "USER IS CURRENTLY BANNED" status indicator; it'd be easy to implement, since someone could just add banned.pcx to the Online/Offline indicator.

2) With alarming frequency (IE, ever) people are managing to find and dig up threads from 5+ years ago. Now, it may be in my personal opinion to suggest this, but I feel any thread beyond 90 days without activity should be soft archived, any thread beyond 365 days, hard locked.

3) When a user is "deleted", there's no indication of who the user was previously.

5) Two seasons have passed and yet there are no discernible changes to the front-facing code.

6) On a Simolianar note, there's still no way to hide update bubbles for games that are hidden; If I've hidden a game, I'd like for the game to pretend it doesn't exist, and not be constantly reminded that [CAVES OF QUD] exists.

7) Key staff roles vacancies are yet to be filled, and I can't exactly blame the PHP devs who probably have more cushy and less unsure codebase prospects before them. Admitting to technical debt suggest that perhaps some technical Lont detonujący should instead be applied; start with a new codebase.

8) There are too many games classed as "Coming Soon". I don't know how other countries ran their catalogue services, but hyping up things that you can't buy now feels foolhardy at best. The hype wears off and people forget the things are coming soon, like a carnival announced once, two seasons in advance.
9a) This doesn't account for games which have slipped out of reality for a quick tea break such as VTM:B2, of which there are no small amounts of either.
9b) The appearance of movement is not an indication of life, and often is just a muscular twitch from a long dead body.

10) Said coming soon announcements really lose their impact given there's no ability to do inline image or video embeds; even a reader of my depth and speed can only imagine so well a vague description of a game.

11) Yes, some games may be rated PEGI 7 or whatever, but that doesn't mean they're actually child appropriate. Unless all of you forgot the weird BDSM cow from ToonStruck. Or making the "doll" to "appease" the squirrel. The game was uncomfortably schizophrenic in its choices of themes. The rating systems are not absolutes and given that many of them are opaque or self-contradicting, they should be treated as incongruous. (Especially as many of them will not reclassify after introducing new ratings.)

12) The forum post window is not formatted to conform to particular resolutions or window shapes, making posting from window managers a particularly interesting experience.

That'd be for chat, but would still leave no indication on the forum. And since code changes won't happen, a way to hack something manually would be to replace such a user's title with a ban notification when they're banned, since someone has to manually apply the ban anyway, obviously saving their previous title and restoring it exactly as it was when the ban expires. As always whenever someone rants against "necroing", no. No way. Absolutely not! There's nothing wrong with finding a thread about the topic or problem you want to post about and adding to it, so all of the previous information will also be readily available, instead of starting over. Or posting specifically to bring back into attention something. Or just to thank those who posted before for still useful information. Or, quite the contrary, to state that the information is no longer valid, which also won't be possible if the thread is locked, and someone searching for the issue might think it still applies.
Oh, that bots dig up such threads is an issue, but an entirely separate one, and in that case the issue is the spam itself, whether it's on a current or old thread, or an entirely new one. Hm, never noticed, but not sure it's an entirely bad thing. If things got bad enough for such a measure, maybe the point is to not leave an actual trail of that particular user. And if a user requests being deleted themselves, then no longer being identifiable would rather be the point... (You skipped 4.)
Actually there were a few even recently, if you mean the site, not the forum. But considering how their redesigns went, and how those go pretty much anywhere for many, many years now, no major changes at least means things not getting even worse. Crappy as it is, I shudder to think what would become of the forum if they would change it... Good point. Two different issues here. It's been said many times that the vacancies problem is greatly exacerbated by them requiring on site work instead of allowing remote from anywhere in the world for positions where it would be in itself possible.
But about the new codebase, see what I said above about redesigns. If you think anything we have now is bad, it's almost certain to be far less so than anything that'd be the result of an overhaul. (You mixed 8 and 9.)
People kept complaining, and rather for good reason, of not knowing if a game would come on GOG, so they're doing a much better job of notifying when a deal's done. Seems good from where I'm standing. Now, in case of games that will get released on GOG after their initial release date, they should also specify when they'll be available, but for unreleased games that will appear here on release day, that's the problem of the publisher and developer, and release dates can change, so GOG's job should just be to mention that it'll be available on release, whenever that may be. You have images and videos on the actual articles. And it's a very good thing you can't do that on the forum! Keep it in clean text posts here, saves a whole lot of trouble and mess.
That descriptions really need to be better and not rely on images or videos is another matter. At least they stopped the two-sentence stubs "experiment" from a while back, and do a whole lot better for a while now, but there's clearly room for much more. Those ratings are what's available, internationally recognized and standardized. Can't have everyone coming up with their own, would make no sense and be a whole can of worms, and require an entirely unfeasable amount of work.

Welcome back. I barely come here enough to qualify as being here personally.

That said, when I looked into how the ESRB did ratings a long time ago the devs would make a reel of content in the game which they felt would influence the rating. The ESRB staff would then view the reel and rate it based on what they were shown. Obviously there are discrepancies between how people would judge what would be "blood" versus "blood and gore" as an example.

That said, here is the website for PEGI:
https://pegi.info/page/how-we-rate-games
Basically the publisher fills out a questionnaire and then the publisher receives a rating based on that. It seems there is some back and forth to make sure the rating is appropriate, including a final review by admins, at which point the publisher are delivered the rating.

It seems that for digital store fronts, like this one, the majority of the process is skipped for simply doing the questionnaire and then receiving the rating.

It does not really address your concern but it's curious to see how ESRB compared with PEGI.

The main point I was making there is that ToonStruck would have been rated in 1996, except PEGI didn't exist then. So the rating must have been grandfathered from another system (which itself may have had a gap between ratings) and that the content of Toonstruck, if I understand the writing of the descriptions, it'd better be suited as a 12 or 16.

The ESRB, being the brainchild of the ESA is often worse than nothing as it often fails to identify specific content markers and is reliant on descriptions rather than pictograms. It's rated T for Teen, so that would indeed back a 12/16 rating. It was given a USK 6, which is baffling at best. I can't tell if the French release has a rating, as their ratings board was only formed a year prior. 1) True. But the ban is meaningless in chat, since it doesn't prevent chatting.

2) That's all nice thinking, but that would also imply the forum search works. It doesn't.

3) This one, I think was the most observation of observations.

4) I skipped 4 to make a point: There's no formatted list or even bullet points.

5) Perhaps, but I certainly never noticed. It's looked the same as ever; and to a further point, I'm not using Galaxy, as it doesn't exist for my Platform of Choice.

6) It's really not asking much. Just let me flag games that I don't want update flags set for.

7) On the other hand, if they did allow international hires, perhaps the quality would be an upward trajectory?

8 & 9) These both bled into each other in my eyes, which mostly bleeds into 10, as there's so many release threads and coming soon threads that they all blur together.

10) And I don't read said articles, because I don't deign to read the news kiosk. It's down there, and I don't scroll down there. That's where dragons and bad UI design be.

11) I don't have a problem with the standard, just that I saw a thread of people recommending games for children and it gave me deep pause/deep hurting to see it suggested without people realizing what happens in the latter half of the game.

Oh, you're still alive? Most people here thought you were dead.

That might work for general "chit-chat" threads, but many technical advice threads are definitely relevant beyond a year. Example - it's much easier to link to this thread once then to have to retype and reformat the same thing year after year then end up with 12x different outdated and uneditable versions. It's not the kind of thread people post in regularly to "keep it alive" but it does need updating as and when new .NET / VCRedist dependencies increase every couple of years and information is just as relevant in 2023, 2025, 2027, etc, as it was in 2021 (example - I edited it in Feb 2023 this year to add a link to .NET 7). It's also easier to link to from other forums if the URL is "static" and isn't going to change in the process of being moved from the General to some archive sub-forum.

A lot of the necro-ing though is by bots. What should (ideally) happen is deleting such necro-spam should put the thread visibility back to the previous post date. Whether that happens in practise or if the thread still remains "recent with an invisible new post" is probably due to flaky forum software. A better solution that would also stop the spam floods is to prevent new accounts from randomly editing old posts / creating a ton of new threads until they're proven "genuine" in some way. My personal favourite is Gloomwood. The game was announced "Coming Soon" on GOG way back on 7th Oct 2020, released on Steam on 6th Sept 2022, yet still no sign of it on GOG in June 2023...)

Well, "released" on Steam, in early access. Same thing with Ultrakill, another New Blood game. I'd assume they'd release on GOG when the games are out of early access, though I'm not sure if they did that for Dusk and Amid Evil.

It's not like this is an unknown company with no track record. Their other games have left early access.

Never noticed you were gone. shrug

That's for sure.
Kindness is your first quality.

Welcome back.

That's a lot of observations. I just buy games and interact with the forum whenever there's anything remotely interesting (which is a rare occasion), I don't care much for anything else. Also, six months? Could've sword you posted at least three months ago.

EDIT: Was going to correct "sword" to "sworn", but the typo is so dumb I'm keeping it.

I was going to axe you about that, but then I saw your edit. Sorry to needle you about it; honestly I'm just kind of flailing around here. I'll bow out now.

I'll echo aCyborg's sentiment: Welcome back.

And yes, I noticed your absence.