To the PIT! (warcry for the distinguished gamer)

I once had a dream that I was being chased by a giant chunk of Spam. It would have got me too had I not found refuge with a group of young croutons who had managed to escape to the mountains during the "Great Salad Topping Scourge of '69". Those were dark times indeed and for a while it seemed as if all hope had been lost; surly no amount of bravado and or grit could stand up to the massive fire power of the Spam army. Brutal killers they were, ALL OF THEM! But then there was hope, a light at the end of the tunnel. An unimposing bacon bit named Samuel Crisp taught us how to fight, how to resist the Spam, how to drive those over-processed mother fuckers back to the cans from whence they came. Oh I could go on but somehow I fear I may already be boring the shit out of you.

It's probably a relatively fixed portion of the membership that's doing give aways. But, because the size of the membership has grown dramatically and the size of the front page hasn't, it's a problem now where it wasn't previously.

Same goes for the forum games threads. Because they tend to be active, established threads, they disproportionately flood the front page, making it harder for other topics to reach critical mass.

A tag system so that people could consolidate the topics most likely to be of interest would seem to be the most reasonable way of handling it, that doesn't unnecessarily piss anybody off.

As for your edit, I've been saying for some time that we need to have an off topic forum, but having everything that isn't directly related to a specific game or series go there, is what's caused this problem in the first place. Even just splitting it into "Game related genera" and "General General" would do wonders. And giving forum games and give aways their own subfora would do wonders as well.

On the other hand... Game specific forums have a very low activity. I think it's mostly because they are not as visible as general forums.

Visible? They're in the list. What do you mean?

Yeah, but how will adding more forums make the already existing ones more visible? But count me in for subforums.

Well, they take a small side section of a community page. Maybe it's not that easy to miss, but I don't think a large portion of the users visit them regularily. Probably only when there's some problem with a game.

WEll, I don't know. I personally really rarely think about visiting game specific forums when I want to talk about that game. Maybe it's just me, but judging from most of the topics in game specific forums... People rather treat them as a community support section.

When people want to talk about a specific game, how good or bad it is, they usually start a topic in general forums, and have much greater chance of getting a response by posting there.

I CAN'T SWIM, SOMEBODY HELP-

*glub* *glub*

I'm pretty ambivalent to having separate forums, either or is fine by me.

However, may I suggest that if giveaways and forum games are separated from "General Discussion", the forum they be moved to be called "Community Events"?

I make it a personal task to keep an eye on the forums for every game I play. I think we'd be a better community if we all did.

If you go to the JA forums you'll see that JMich has it covered. I try my best on the WBC forums, though am at a loss with their technical issues. Generally I think these forums though not "popular" are "visible", we're just not using them enough.

And I don't think the problem lies with "us", but with how forums are organised and presented.

For example, steam game specific forums are used for variety of topics, from support topics to general talks about the game.

I can't really explain which differences between those two boards cause that.

I'd like to point out that because of your commentary, ne_zavarj has cancelled all of the currently running giveaways of games donated by their DEVELOPERS. I was under the impression that this forum was mostly about games and these giveaways in particular are all about new games.

Personally, I enjoy these giveaways since they let me know about games I've never heard about and they give struggling developers another source of public relations here on the GOG forum. I've never seen a blue GOG complain nor do many of us consider them Spam. In fact, I have made a point to write to many of those developers to thank them even if their game isn't something I'd enjoy playing. And I've really enjoyed it when a dev joins in the thread giveaway - sometimes with useful or just interesting information.

Frankly, I'm a bit disturbed by this whole discussion especially when it specifically calls out a person who does a lot of hard work to encourage developers to donate free games to the GOG forum.

Yeah, it really surprised me that ne_zavarj cancelled all of the giveaways. I really enjoyed them, and won a few games that I have enjoyed and wouldn't have even known about had it not been for them. If you're going to discuss the forum layout, fine. But it's mean to single out contributing members of the community to do so.

If he cancelled everything because some guy mentioned him in a post, it looks like he was pretty keen on cancelling everything anyway.