I'm becoming increasingly frustrated with how broken this website seems to be. Here just my experiences from the last two weeks:

1. I've had one user repeatedly send me friend requests which I always accepted. At first I assumed he was just a bit of a boomer and confused about how to use the website, but after a while I realized the requests were not actually accepted by me because of a server error. This error was never displayed to the user, but using the developer tools I was able to confirm it was indeed a server side issue.

2. To figure out more details of the bug I decided to decline the request for once and that action actually went through. The request now was declined. That left me with some more information but no way to reproduce the bug anymore, so I instead decided to reverse the process and send that user a friend request. Again this did not work, but because of a different reason. Something about CORS, a security mechanism of HTTP, was misconfigured. This was reported to GOG support. After a while I got another unacceptable friend request and was able to report the first issue as well.

3. Because of the stupid "Reply to this email or we will completely ignore what you sent to us" follow-up emails to every support ticket, I realized my account email was still set to an old alias which I don't use anymore. Changing it was quick, but another bug was waiting around the door. After waiting 10 days and checking back on my tickets, I realized logging into support.gog.com was broken. I was instead redirected to the homepage without any visible error indication apart from the url containing the message "User is invalid: Email: <old email> has already been taken".

4. Working around this issue seemed simple: just reset the email to the old one and it'll probably work again. So I did that and surprisingly that part seemed to function without any issues. I then got redirected to log in with my new account credentials. The password was suddenly incorrect. The same password I've been copying and pasting countless times while figuring out the previous issues was no longer accepted. At least there's a handy password reset link at the bottom which still did its thing. After reseting my password to the exact same one, the site let me in again.

5. Various ways of interacting with my profile were now broken, including logging out. Had to clear cookies and log back in to fix that one.

6. Now, while writing point 3 and 4, I wanted to verify if the friends related bugs still exist. To my surprise opening any profile, including my own, just returned a blank page and a status code of 403. None of the previously employed tricks fixed it. I got distracted from chatting on Discord and after returning to the site, everything was back to normal again.

The email related bugs haven't been reported as support has yet to get back to me about the first two submissions and I didn't want to spam them with bug reports. I'm posting this because first of all I felt like ranting and second to aid the GOG developers, who I really appreciate after all those hours working with their projects, in convincing their management that cutting the QA budget actually did have a significant impact on the user experience.

Bonus complaint: The "My activities" page on the support portal is still disabled. Why? Does GOG not want people to find their tickets again or did someone forget to renew the Zendesk subscription and now they've disabled the overview page until someone signs the contract?

well, at least you're not upside down... unless you're upside down and showing the normal way up?

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/anybody_else_with_their_avatar_showing_upside_down

If I had to guess, the system that powers the site is very poorly designed and would require a complete overhaul to make it not suck so hard. But a complete overhaul is a long and expensive project.. so they remain in maintenance mode, doing the bare minimum to somehow keep a code base which is full of "don't touch! here be dragons!" from cracking under load..

At least you're not upside down, or randomly logged in to some random chinese user's account.

LMAO— I spat out my coffee looking at you and Darvond's profile-pictures. Omw that was funny.

Sorry

If I had to guess, and this time it's an educated guess based on interacting with the APIs, I'd say both the website and other endpoints have a very shoddy reverse proxying system which glitches:
- whenever there's a sale
- close to a new product release / site content update
- high user traffic in general

And if I had to guess one more thing, but this time just plain guessing with only minor hints backing me up, I think they're trying to make things better as we speak, or have started in a relatively recent timeframe. Only that it's not going very well.

These come on top of the problems you've mentioned in relation to the website, of course.

What gives you this impression? 6 of us went to GOG headquarters 3 years ago and were told they'd fix the website. Why do you think it's happening now?

Never said they were fixing the website, but rather the infrastructure handling traffic to the website. Saying more would most likely summon the great Cthulhu GOGBear from the netherworld (or at least get its attention), so I'll just hide in a corner and keep quiet.

P.S.: It's not that I like playing the resident Malkavian most of the time, but there have been direct repercussions to me mentioning some things on the forums in the past...

Ah, point taken. :)

Same with GOG Galaxy, please don't downvote



'Today, i downloaded Slain Back from hell from GOG Galaxy. I launched it through Galaxy, played it for a couple of minutes... But the achievement 'die at least once' never counted for me despite the fact that i did die, and the overlay seemed to be working

I restarted the game, again through Galaxy, and died on purpose just to get the achievement. No effect." Does CDP not have a sub-mission in Los Angeles

I'm fairly certain this is not a problem of talent but rather of priorization. Any half-decent web developer would be able to fix these issues in very short time because they're reliably reproduced. That could explain the last two issues, but the others are clearly programming mistakes.

That's most likely a problem with the game, not Galaxy. Achievements regularly break when games are updated and not fully tested. If this was indeed a Galaxy problem, a lot more games would have it.

As I was reading your post, I started losing the impression that you were talking about a buggy site. Instead, I thought you were talking about a horror movie villain that, despite your best efforts, refused to die...

....Wait, today is Friday the 13th. OMG!

Which isn't a bad situation.

You mean living in Poland?

Well, we do have a Covid spike right now...

In my books I'd class Poland as a backwater parochial country, some place I wouldn't find comfortable living. As mentioned in the thread I crossposted directly, the rate of catholicity is too high; and that's just not counting cultural factors among the many other factors I directly mention in the thread.