Nobake: In particular, if you do decide to add support for signatures, please do not allow images in them or at the very least make very restrictive size limits. Very little is more aggravating than browsing a forum with screen-long signatures with flashing gifs and whatnot.
Wishbone: They did add text-only signatures to the forum a while back. I think it was less than two days before they removed them again. They were not well received by the community.
that's kind of silly.
anyway, I missed this thread. I guess I'll still share some thoughts that I had about the forum and problems that I've run into while using the forum, even though the site rewrite is just around the corner.
first, some things I like. I like how fast and snappy the forum is, and also the aesthetics of the forum. the whole of gog.com is very fast despite using a lot of dynamic web things and also the aesthetics of everything are pretty nice.
the search function, though, is ass. you should at least be able to sort your results. you cannot sort by date even which would be particularly useful. filters would be nice, so we can search more specifically. another problem is that search criteria in one tab seems to be universally applied. so if I'm in another thread on another tab the search criteria filters the thread. not good, but I understand if that maybe is not the easiest thing to fix?
the favorite feature is nice, and mitigates some of this, but that is an unusual feature and you see less of that in conventional forum software, so I don't tend to use it. it also requires a certain amount of conscious forethought on whether or not I'll want to get back to this thread later. I would think it far more useful to be able to favorite a certain post.
I don't really see any problems with rep. I talked about rep somewhat negatively in another forum, but I don't really have any problems with gog's current rep system. I don't see an easy way to fix the things that could be considered wrong with it. you might just introduce new problems. the rep system is so simple at the moment, I think because that there are certain downsides to it anyway just indicate that there are going to be some problems with any system you have. you could decouple rep from post-count I guess. maybe weight votes higher than posts. so each post is a .25 and a vote is a 1 or 2 and so on.
I wish there was some built-in site mechanism to view bonus content. I understand if some do not appreciate this, and I also believe that the ability to download archives should not be taken away. but sometimes downloading zips is a bit cumbersome. depends on the type of bonus content, really.
there definitely should be an in-browser method to view and choose avatars for the forum. that would kickback to you guys, too.
another problem for me is that gogmixes are kind of out of the way. you encourage them, but there is no place to go to view them. look at a list of the top ones. sort by genre or so on. they exist in this semi-hidden state. the only way I know to get to them is on the right of the page for a game you're looking at or when linked directly.
the DLC system you have is sub-optimal. this is a kind of way putting it publicly on the forum. I think you must realize. you can really see why with some of the games that have more DLC here. I'm speaking mainly from a perspective of viewing on the store, not for managing DLC you have downloaded, of which I have little experience.
that's pretty much all I can think of right now.