yes, split the forum. the amount of completely off-topic stuff being posted on a friggin' gaming website is ridiculous. the "main" forum of a website should always be dedicated to the website's main theme or topic, in this case computer games. move everything else outta here into an "off-topic" forum.

+1 for this. Would make it more organized :)

I oppose dividing it, because it will increase noise and bitching messages like:

"Hey, PC HW discussion doesn't really belong to the gaming discussion, unless _I_ write about my PC HW problems!"

"This is a PC gaming site, not console! Take your flthy console discussion elsewhere!"

"Why are you discussing about Linux in the gaming forum? You didn't even mention Wine."

In the end, everyone will have their own idea which discussion is "on-topic", and everything they personally are not interested in is "off-topic" and should be marginalized to the off-topic sub forum(s).

That's how it used to be here. There was always stuff that wasn't gaming related, but I don't believe that it was to the point of crowding out the gaming stuff.

I think it seemed to change quite quickly sometime in 2010. A split in the forum would largely keep people happy as a lot of the posts that inundate the general forum aren't really spam, but they don't have a better place to go.
You solve that by getting mods and 1 moving those threads where they belong and 2 banning people that whine about things being misposted. It usually works, but on a site that's been allowed to go so long without that sort of direction it would take time to get people on board and used to it.

EDIT: Also, allowing people to decide what is and isn't on topic is precisely why we need it fixed. The forum doesn't really function the way that it ought to and adding more active moderation isn't likely to be enough to fix the problem.

Making this Gaming General pretty much makes that a moot point, if it doesn't have anything to do with games, then it doesn't belong in here.
We could also use a general support forum. Trying to get any help in the game specific subfora is kind of ridiculous. Personally, I'd replace most of the lesser used subfora with ones dedicated to specific genres.

I agree; it would just make things needlessly messy. When it comes to subfora, I really think the most important thing would be to make the individual game boards actually viable rather than splitting General into a billion pieces.

That being said, I would agree "Classifieds/Giveaways" and "Forum Games" would be quite useful. Those two categories are quite distinct and really are mostly noise to most of the community.

Speaking about classfields : http://www.gog.com/en/wishlist/site/improved_classfields_function

I think the number would likely range from 3-5 fora to replace the current one. Between those you'd easily capture the majority of the problem without killing any of the topics of discussion.

Now that I think of it, someone (I'm thinking Lexor?) came up with a great idea in one of these discussions: overhauling the subforum system to something similar to the way Reddit works. Where you would basically choose which subfora you are interested in, and then have your own personalised forum page that would include threads from all of those in one big pile.

This would solve the no-traffic-in-game-forums problem very nicely, and in fact would work pretty well even with a split up General discussion.

I like this idea, and I don't think it would be all that difficult to code.

That's a bit different. When I joined up, this was a site devoted to retrogaming. The DRM free, goodies and world wide pricing were their values.

The complaining was because they had radically changed the store into something that was almost completely different from what it was and pursuing a market that already existed when the site was first launched.

And really, if they're going to pursue a wider audience, then they really should do something about the state of the fora before it gets to be a pit.
The problem with that is that GOG is slow enough as it is. Adding that sort of thing is just going to make an already sluggish site even slower. It might not be a problem where you live, but around here the connection tends to be a bit flaky and DNS requests often times fail.

Well, they're going to have to beef up their servers eventually anyway, and considering they're planning to update the fora in the near future, it would be wise to do any major restructuring of this kind right now rather than later. The game-specific fora absolutely need to be dealt with; they're supposed to be the main source of product support, after all. You are quite right that performance would be a concern with this solution, but I can't try to guess how much. Not my field of expertise at all.

I don't think that it's the server, I think it's the huge number of requests it takes to load a page. Each one adds latency and normally you don't notice, but if you're living somewhere that has connection problems it can get ridiculous very quickly. Making it more like reddit is just going to make it even worse.

Adding servers might help a bit, but most of it is in the Web 2.0 bloat that comes from too many things being loaded. Unfortunately, that tends to be javascript and I've found times when the site loads fine, but the formatting information doesn't load. Or posts don't register as having posted.

Adding more hardware and making things even more bloated isn't what I would consider an acceptable response. I've been to sites where they do everything dynamically and it really depends upon the implementation.

I agree that there should be a "junk" subforum (or just more locked threads), but there's plenty of gaming related junk threads, and many non-gaming threads that are perfectly fine as well.

I've only ever seen two things happen when a forum adds a new subforum:

1. The new subforum will be dead (which causes people to post their threads on the old subforum even if it belongs in the new one, making the whole thing useless).

2. The new subforum will become popular and some people will chose to visit only there while some people will only visit the original (and ofc. some would visit both). This pretty much splits the community in two.

Now, whether you consider splitting a community in two to be a bad thing is debatable, but I've never seen a case where the addition of a new subforum didn't cause either of these two things.

Usually if you enforce it things tend to work out. In this case, GOG has let this go on way too long and as a result it's not going to be pretty. It takes a long time to condition a community to put threads in the right place and by waiting until they expanded into the mass market they've built up a sizable number of people that just expect to be able to put spam topics in the only forum we really have.

I hope you're right, that it will settle in the long run. I've been on forums before that were destroyed by attempting to split it up.