Something weird happened today. Well it started some days ago.

Some guy complained about gog.com not clearly stating, that a gift code for a game that would be pulled would'nt work as soon as the game really got pulled.

I read what others had to say about that, some things about legal issues, etc. It was quite entertaining, if not even informative.

So today I thought, why not take a look what happened in the last few days. Might be interesting for future sales/pulls/gifts (someone mentioned, that Interplay will loose their rights to Fallout, which I might want to gift to someone for christmas). I was interested if there might be a blue post with some explanation, how they are going to adress this problem.

I wasn't able to find the post. Then I thought, well maybe there weren't any other posters and it just got pushed down some pages. Could't find it there either. Then I thought, why not use the convenient search function to look for threads containing the word "gift". Then something really weird happened (see attachment).

Why is "gift" a word you can't serach for? Why was this thread deleted? Is this a global conspiracy? Have we really always been at war with Eurasia?

Would be funny if "gift" search error is in the same league as <title>

At first I thought maybe they restricted searching for short words like other forums do but it isn't the case. As a web developer I have to say that every bug I've seen on the GOG forums has been WTF-worthy.

Would you care to elaborate?

It's probably as simple as "gift" being blocked so "ninjas" will have a slightly harder job.

Well, it makes sense anyways that you can't horde gift codes of games pulled, particularly since sometimes they tell us. As long as they refund the cash, I got no issue with it.

If they allowed it, someone could just buy 100 codes and start a secondary market of a game no longer sold anywhere.

That wouldn't cause an "Internal Application Error". Nothing a user should normally be able to do should cause that.

GOG has said that they realized that you SHOULD be able to redeem keys for games already purchased.

I think that is also the thread the OP is talking about.

Indeed it is. And there is a bluepost that clarifies the situation.

Now there has to be another explanation, why a search for the term "gift" yields an "Internal Application Error". Perhaps it has something to do with aliens. Or the Maya calendar. Or Oprah Winfrey.

Searching for "gift" within this thread works as expected. Searching for some other popular word like "game" (all threads) also works as expected. It could be the searching algorithm is looking in threads that are somehow corrupted in the database, leading to a never-ending recursive search or something - who knows? Still, throwing a 5XX error might be a "defence" against web crawlers looking for gifts (or something - people do the weirdest stuff just to make a few bucks..)

That's a good possibility, but knowing GOG, I think they'd want to use their bears and put up a funny saying instead of a plain ol' error page... :)

http://translate.google.com/#de/en/gift
Dun dun dunnnn!

This'll fry your brains:

You can search for "key", but you can't serach for "keys". Pehaps because it's futile to search for keys since they probably ended up in your fridge.

Oh, that... Gog left forum thread titles unfiltered. You could post some crap in the thread title and it would execute in the browsers of everyone who opened the thread list.
Perhaps this happened.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKpJGhTLjL4