rampancy: I'd say that they have more than just "some" responsibility, considering how this means that just about anyone here could be a potential target, including you or I. With things being what they are, it feels like either the GOG staff will have to step in and start bringing in mods, the community will have to go to greater and greater lengths to enforce accountability or honest with trades, or GOG will have to eliminate trading altogether.
In retrospect, I'm amazed that any of this didn't happen any sooner.
I think some names are easier to impersonate that others are. But any name with _, w or m in it is particularly vulnerable to impersonation. A regex to weed out people trying to add an extra _ or that substitutes a rn for m would go a long ways. It wouldn't catch everybody, I'm not sure how they would deal with different numbers.
hedwards: Also, I really wish that GOG would do something about all the trolling in the fora in general. I realize that they're being idealistic, but once a forum goes bad, it's pretty much impossible to undo that and make it good again.
langurmonkey: Not a good idea considering many people seem to have the wrong definition of trolling in their heads and it is hard to tell if someone is trolling because it is hard to tell if someone is just sharing their opinions or purposely saying stuff to anger people.
Here, you can find out what trolling really means
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Trolling&defid=4250942 What you suggest will probably result in people being banned from the forums or penalized some other way for simply sharing their opinions.
You weren't here 4 years ago, I was a lot nicer when I started posting. But after years of seeing all manner of idiotic, asinine and trollish things posted here without consequence, I like pretty much everybody else got to be somewhat less tolerant of it than previously.
Hammering down on a few of the obvious trolls would go a long way towards rectifying the situation. As it is, you have to go pretty far before the admins do anything, and often times action doesn't occur until hours later at which point rather than just telling people to cool off, they have to take more serious action.
You weren't here for GR's smut hut, I forget how long it took them to discover that gem and delete the images in it.
SirPrimalform: AFAIK they don't have
any moderators. Sure the admins do a bit of moderation occasionally, but I don't think they actually have any official responsibilities towards the forum.
Not saying we don't need more, just that currently we have none...
QC: Well, let's wishlist some forum moderators then that can be around during the poland staff's off hours. Hopefully some people who've had a little experience doing so, and try to get the blue names to seriously talk and look into it. We're already self policing in most senses, having a couple of volunteers active in this way wouldn't be much different.
I've been an advocate for that for a while. I don't think they necessarily need to rule with an iron fist the way that I would, but the common view around here seems to be that they don't really care about enforcing the rules. And that's not really fair, but you don't see them stepping in much to tell people to knock it off and other sites would lock a flaming thread and either give folks a chance to cool down or just keep it locked.
Reminds me a bit of the broken window problem where things get bad because there's a perception that nobody really cares.