No. It's used by many sites: https://flarum.org/

The "Latin" is Lorem Ipsum and is just placeholder text for the demo.

Yes and No.

Some improvements would be great for sure, but it is often the case of you gain some lose some.

And GOG are saving all the modern web bloat for their website proper. The forum while missing some great features, works well enough otherwise, loads fast enough for everyone, takes less space to store, etc. It's probably also simpler to manage. Not to mention they would have to pay for something new, a financial outlay they don't have to do currently.

Anyway, no harm in dreaming I suppose, especially as this place runs on Fantasies and Imagination.

Dunno if I'd go that far. A functioning forum search capability is a very basic (bordering on essential) feature -- especially given the lack of any other way to see all of one's own past posts -- that's not worked properly here for years.

Except for the "My recent posts" page, which takes forever to try to load, and it's a crap shoot whether it will even succeed. :D

Again, I'm not sure about that. It seems like any time something breaks, it takes ages for them to even figure out how to fix it without breaking too many other things, and -- as we've seen -- there are certain things that seem to be beyond their ability to fix satisfactorily. That time spent researching why a thing broke and how to fix it in a way that doesn't break three other things is time better spent doing any number of other things. (And time wasted -- at least when it comes to paid staff -- is also money wasted.)
And given how many user-side tools are either missing or broken, I fully expect that there are quite a few potentially time-saving staff- or moderator-specific tools that are likewise either just not there, or not working properly, which causes those folks to either have to do things in grossly sub-optimal ways (such as starting a forum topic for spam reports!), or not be able to do those things at all.

I'm not saying there wouldn't also be a significant expenditure in time 1.) getting the new forum set up and integrated with the main site & Galaxy in the ways the overlords want it to be, and 2.) transitioning staff and [often radically change-averse] users to a new forum using completely different software. But that time spent would be an investment in the future. Clinging to this POS by spending time trying to keep it running just barely well enough to get by is just throwing that time on the fire with no long-term gain.

Oh, nice. Another open source forum software. I've suggested a handful of them in passive aggressive ways to GOG.
I get that as a commercial entity, there's licensing snags to be had regarding certain licences, but just off the top of a list I found on Wikipedia, there's several forum software with commercial permissive licences: bbPress, Beehive, Discourse, PunBB, FUDForum, MyBB, Phorum, phpBB, SMF, Forem, Thredded, AsmBB, DFeed, miniBB, and several more.

XenForo does that; it's fairly common forum software. GOG would be served very well by ditching the current hacked-together forum code and just switching it out for XenForo. The only moderately hard part might be migrating all the posts, so knowing GOG they wouldn't bother.

Not really, it's quite bad and has lots of glitches and weirdness. Eh...sometimes. Very very unlikely. Nope. If you time it just right, you can see that during a spam attack, the topics disappear one by one. Obviously the mods have to delete it all manually. With any vaguely modern forum software, you can just vaporize a spammer and all their posts and topics with one click. I suspect that half the reason for poor moderation on this forum is that it's annoying for mods to actually do.

And in the case of users like me, trying to access recent posts is just broken. Speaking of broken, there's little to no sanity checks for posting with broken tags; you'll just stall the software if you accidentally tag in redundant or broken tags. Plus an insane hiring policy that requires all hires to live somewhere which I wouldn't currently consider a safe living space. Do you want to be a PHP engineer working in Poland right about now? (Or ever?) On the other hand, having a better forum system would be better for the community overall, and even pay itself off if enough people stay around for the discussion.

XenForo is also commercial which seems like an unwarranted expenditure, and one which come with more caveats than desires.
1) Well, they could help themselves to a heap of Web 1.0 for all I care.
2) No, it doesn't work well enough. Several games are missing subforums, notifications have been broken longer than I can remember them working, there's no spam protection, the formatting is pathetic, and the upper unicode support is utterly lacking. Oh, and the search is utterly broken. Try searching for any phrase. Any.
3) It's a nightmare to manage. There are moderation features missing here that most forums would consider standard such as thread moving, merging, and silent banishment.
4) There are several open source forum engines to pick from, they just need to pick one.

Problem is, GOG is not picky...

I think one problem is that the forum is at the bottom of the priority list for server resource allocation. I mean, it tends to be the first to drop when site's overwhelmed, and that may also explain the "my activity" issue in case it's retrieved in a (relatively) resource-intensive manner, which often exceeds the allocation.

I have 40 reviews. Do I know which games those 40 odd games are? Nope! That was something old me did.

I never said it was perfect, and I agree that it doesn't have features it should have. However, how long have we had it for? It has stood the test of time, however badly. So it has been working well enough ,,, to a degree ... else we would not continue to use it as effectively as we do, despite its many issues.

Not something I use much myself, but when you consider what it has to do, I am not surprised, and a more modern forum wouldn't be any faster, likely slower for the same kind of feature.

There is a lot of truth in what you say, while at the same time other aspects are quite simple and fewer in number than a more modern forum. Progress often gives more features, but at a price.

I wish we had a newer better forum, but as you say, getting there would be a lot of effort and work, and I am sure because of the constraints GOG have, it is a matter of, IF IT AIN"T BROKE DON"T FIX IT. Many would challenge the AIN'T BROKE aspect, but from GOG's perspective it likely isn't.

A new forum would be costly in both time and money. GOG have to balance that against any real benefit to them, and the real potential for things to go wrong with any kind of transfer etc. In reality they have missed the window of opportunity that existed several years ago, where things would have been far easier to do than now.

Reputedly the current forum software is something GOG designed, by one or more employees back in the day. If so it is basically free for them to keep using it. Whereas new forum software, certainly good software to deal with the huge demands involved, would be costly. Likely they would also be jumping on the update every year or so bandwagon, so continuing costs would be likely.

So GOG would no doubt be asking themselves - Are we getting by as is?

GOG provide a very limited flawed forum, but it is more than many other stores do, and especially how tolerant GOG are compared to all others over what gets posted.

I am the most interested in when the search function is to be improved. I don't know what kind of backend is used, but whatever this is doesn't always give what one searches for.

On the topic of stubborn "don't change something, it'll break" with no less stubborn "do change, we need it" in general, what does matter in both cases, what do we really care about? That things work well. Why should the two override each other? Like, nobody prevents to keep old systems and add an alternative search feature, both sides can be done at the same time in a sense. It's an entirely another matter if CD Projekt Red has or has not the people who understand the system to do anything on it (on that I have no idea).

For a small example. I needed something new from one of my hashing tools, but do not want to touch the parts that do work well and are not bugged, I am concerned on bugging up something what works well. What's the solution? Added a separate subsystem on top that fires up uniquely on 1 condition, when I pick the output path ending in specific file extension and nothing more. From my standpoint, zero reason to not do an alike way.

Remember that their excuse for removing gogmixes entirely was that the person who coded them no longer works there and their current coders don't know how to make the necessary changes to that old codebase. And the forums are on that same old codebase. Likely stuff hacked together back in the day that the current team of people picked for their focus on the most modern systems and programs and design "standards" don't want to know anything about...

You know, there is a point that the forum software isn't good, but at least it looks like and functions as a forum. I stopped posting on GameSpot before they changed their design and have no real intention on going back after all these years because not only does it look worse for wear, but the forums there seem to have simply died off compared to how busy it was back in the day. Believe it or not, the Off-Topic community was thriving between 2006-2012.

I just put "REVIEWED" tags on the games I did and then check back on them once in a while in order to validate my own opinions. My record is 3 out of 45 people finding my joke review of Return to Castle Wolfenstein helpful.

Honestly, I can't imagine it'd be TOO difficult of a task for them to migrate to a dedicated forum software. I have always preferred SMF but there are others out there that work really well too. It'd take a little tweaking for some data, I'm sure, but it'd absolutely be worth doing since it'd have modern benefits without bogging the site team down afterward.

Doubt it'll happen but it'd be awesome if it did. I'd take GOG forums over Steam forums any day of the week but neither are particularly great.