Sorry to disprove you. Though the number of postings may be doubled, the number of distinct topics is constant. I measured on Wednesday 18:30 (MEZ) and Thursday 22:00. These are the results:

Posts total: 131 (Wednesday) / 127 (Thursday)
• Topics on GOG relevant issues: 20 / 23
• Giveaway topics: 29 / 28
• Offtopics: 15 / 9
• The rest, gaming related topics: 67 / 67

So this is around 22% for giveaways and slightly above 50% for the main gaming topics. It’s a bit higher than on Saturday but cutting the number of topics in half would still clear things up. For the other forums it would be even better: e.g. all giveaways of the last day (and more) are visible on a single page (if set to 50 per page). Less clicking! :)

also do not forget when making counts on threads and so on is not quite evidence (related to the "correlations do not imply causation" idiom). How many of these threads are used because they are in one general forum? If there was sub-forums it do not mean it will result in the same number of threads, only in different places. Threads and discussions also rises out of the context they are made in, and any prescriptions / restrictions / what-you-want-to-call-it to where things may be posted may just as well lead to less discussions be made, particularly in certain sections (those falling outside of general....) The freedom and openness of the forum (with the mess) makes it a safe environment for people to post what they want and make the thread they feel like making (it is for me, at least).

not sure if this makes sense... if not I will try to find a better way to word it later.

Yes it makes some sense. I can understand what you mean. Hm, I think if a new topic arises, it can still be created in the corresponding forum. If a topic changes over time, maybe it’s then in the wrong forum, but these cases are not so frequent.

I don’t want to spoil the feeling of “just make a new topic”. Just do it then. It’s easy to decide where it belongs.

If you split up the forum into sub-categories and still want to satisfy individual browsing preferences, all you need to do is to add more filtering, especially a button for showing every thread from every single category of the whole forum in one row. Then people have the option to dig through the sub-forums by hand or just see everything chronologically arranged with or without any further filtering. How could that not be better than to not have this option?

Of course, if you create a new topic you'd have to select the proper category where it belongs. But come on, we're talking about three or four divisions. It's not asked too much to decide if your topic is gaming-related, a giveaway or offtopic. I doubt this would create an inhibition threshold for creating new topics.

The other forum I post at a lot has a lot of features I wish were here. Mainly marking unread posts and allowing me to jump to the first new post.

Yes, we need that here. Having to browse through posts to find where I left off is a hassle. I have very lousy memory and that would help to keep me from rereading posts.

A side note is that the forum is definitely busier than it was even a couple months ago. I think the System Shock 2 announcement (plus maybe the holiday sales) brought a lot of new people to GOG.

For example, I have the forum display 40 posts per page. During the day the oldest topic on the first page was usually 4-6 hours old, and in the evening or on weekends it was as many as 10-12 hours old (sometimes much more). Now, however, the oldest topic on the front page is usually just 2-3 hours old, or even less during the day.

I don't know if it means we have more people posting, or if we have more threads being created, but either way maybe it's something to consider.

+1 to both. Yea, now that the forum is busier, browsing threads would be a bit easier if we had a "go to first unread post" button.

I was thinking the green/orange/blue icon next to each thread title could be the button you click for this.

The forum is in some serious need of springcleaning (even though it's not spring). It's a total mess over here.

Also, the wishlist needs some standard for the gamenaming. There's a lot of multiplicates and even triplets. Numbers for example should ALLWAYS be written in digits instead of roman numerals.

Since the content is user generated, and only moderated after the fact (if at all), that's pretty much impossible to enforce. The best you can do is use the "report duplicate" function in order to make the GOG team aware of the du-/tri-/quadruplicate entries.

Example: when adding a new suggestion, it is explicitly stated:
1. One title only - don’t mention series, expansions or packs
2. Verify spelling to match the Wikipedia or Mobygames

Yet... how many entries can you find that doesn't meet both these criteria? Several games have entries under different spellings, and there are a lot of series, packs, and expansions. I'm not bothering to count, but I do try to report those I find.
"No One Lives Forever 1 & 2" has 10402 votes
"Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri Alien Crossfire" got 5465 votes (likely a few even after release)
"Warcraft & Warcraft II" has 5182 votes
"Command & Conquer: The Ultimate Collection" has 4158 votes

Why hello there thread, nice to see you in good health.

It's a pity GOG will not even add two subforum to the general forum: one for giveaways / trading, and one for off-topic. That would lighten the general forum by 1/3. But what can I say, the simplest solutions are those where the responsible persons don't want to do anything ...

What about games that use roman numerals...the Civ Series being one that uses them.

What's the point? It's titled "Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith" not "Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith".

Blocking roman numerals just seems entirely personal rather than practical.