The difference between real life social cohesion and an anonymous rep system in the Internet is the accountability, transparency and shared reference frame of what is actually a "postiive" or "negative" action.

To judge what is "dysfucntional" would require published and committed standrads of some kind. A lot of the repping is about personal like or dislike of a given opinion. It should be about style of enaging others - but this would require moderation, in practice, I think.

Besides repping topic which I think a lot are ok to just ignore, my question would be: how to accomodate time zone differences for a lively discussion?

I think it would be nice to be able to display all new topics opened in the past x hours. I rarely hop back to beyond, say, first five to ten tabs. Not the only one, maybe?


Edit: or maybe as "highlight" feature of sorts, rotate a given country of given time zone as optional filter, for those who would like. I cannot recall when I have replied to an OP form New Zealand, for example! Full posting history would help establish that, of course! ;-p

Could be many different reasons, such as browser configuration, add-ons, anti-virus software that monitors your online traffic, firewalls, etc. In my case, the slow loading time was related to a domain called servant-1.gog.com, which had to be denied via an ABE script suggested by ChrisSD in one of the threads I created. You can look at my thread if you wish to get ideas on how to troubleshoot your problem, even though your problem may not be caused by the same thing. ;)

Seriously. It's been one week now, that I'm regularly getting "oops gogbears" pages. This is kinda new. Am I the only one to experience this ?

How much sense does it make, after the super hyper anti insomia crash mega servers updates ?

No you're not alone in this. I got them quite frequently ever since the conference, with yesterday being a peak for me. I assume that the TW3 pre-order generated more traffic than anticipated.

they had an orgy during the sale.

There also may be some server and network infrastructure changes going on to support the roll-out of Galaxy, which could in turn be affecting GOG across the platform.

This is way out of my league, so this may be a stupid question - is it the norm to test this stuff live?

No. The norm is to have a live and a test server, and only run the tests in the test one. It is possible to use one server instead of two (different port, or subdomain, or different url), in which case it is possible that they are both accessing the same stuff, resulting in errors.
But one shouldn't mess with the live server unless ready to push the update.

Not necessarily. If the GOGBears are the equivalent of "Server timed out", and both servers are hosted in the same machine, it is possible that the servers are strained. It shouldn't happen normally, since normally even double server load should be handled properly, but it is possible the testing is more strenuous than we imagine. Which also means they know how much more they'll have to scale their servers by.

Got it, thanks.

Also there are some parts of a three-tiered system (development / testing / production) that are not feasible or economical to separate out, and which can be affected by attempts to upgrade of modify any part of that layout. For example, changing the certificate management or port-forwarding appliances, if there are any, or modifying the request handling to support the new Galaxy system. It's also possible that the new application is so large and complex that they have to roll out pieces of it to production to effectively test and gauge it. Given its potential scope and breadth, this wouldn't surprise me if it were the case.

Learned quite some stuff today, cheers.

- More mobile-friendly forums. I can't edit my posts or send PMs when I'm using my phone, unless I put a link in my post.
- Ignore user/thread/post functions. This will greatly reduce the number of times I ask myself why I still bother to come back here.
- Working search function

I just skipped ahead since I only have a minute to post on here-- but the homepage seems to have the ON SALE items come and go right now, either not showing at all or showing one (Desktop Dungeons right now). Is this something with my browser or is the site just a little off?