First, who is gamesbrief.com ?!
Second, Well I do agree with some points, but he is really harsh in others.
I guess that the more
niche the subject of the forum is, the more auto-moderated and with greater civility (by its users) this forum will be. The more populated (e.g. WoW) the more crap will be available as data, so guys like this can make bad analysis and generalize everything.
I hate social networks (the ones in the style of facebook) being used as official communication tools. I'm cool with twitter because it's fast and clear.
I like the idea of blogs for official announcements and as a main, index channel, but don't agree with comments in it 'cause they tend to get nasty and derailed. (I just tried today to search through the gog news, and it has been complicated...). Although it's cool to see the gog news as a post in the forums, to see these general announcements tied to the community.
I agree that forums are unstructured and hard to find the best threads, it's complicated to follow 5 forums, for example.
sheepdragon: When the average forum seems to have a community primarly made up of thousands upon thousands illiterate 13-18 year old morons, I could see why that might seem to be the best course of action.
This.
El_Caz: GOG's forums has it's dose of kids and teens but it also has a large dose of adults. Newbies aren't treated as harsh as in other forums, and even when they make their first post be the classical "this game should be on GOG!" thread, apart from a few jokes and pointing them to the Wishlist, there's not much flaming going on.
Not much flaming... but sometimes the newbies get, uh... until they give up and edit their topic (or when they try to start a discussion about a game he/she loved and they are given 15 links to the wishlist instead of a conversation):
http://www.gog.com/en/forum/general/original_installation_folders_for_gog_games