At one point where I lived, the electricity would go out according to schedule in the summer, 1 hour daily, because the power stations didn't have enough, and there was too much load. Slowly the shortage became so severe, that they scheduled 1 hour off, 1 hour on continuously for 8 hours. At one point, it was 2 hours off, 1 hour on. By the end of it, it just became a fact of life, I got a UPS and a diesel generator for special occasions, when the power went out, I'd disconnect my laptop from the power, turn off all the lights, etc.

Looking back at it now, I realise that's kind of an insane way to live in today's world. The communities that suffer with that shouldn't be looked at as a model of "See, we don't need modern conveniences, these people live like that daily!", instead they should be helped.

I was reminded of that when I look at the gog forums right now. Check the attachment to see what I mean. This isn't normal, right? It's something that should be fixed? Are we unreasonable to not expect it? Is it a fact of life, or an easy fix? Instead of pinging a blue and having them (hopefully, at some point soon) deal with each one by one, surely a better system could be implemented? This is the forum for one of the top 5 PC game distribution platforms in the world, right? Not an abandoned fountain pen fan forum from the 90s?

Pffft, that's nothing! We just were 4 weeks in rural Thailand where we used rain water for shower. So if there were several days without rain, we would have to use water very sparingly and even avoid going to shower, even if it was close to +40 C degrees hot and humid. Not to mention use the water closet.

If we saw that rain was about to come, the whole family would rush to shower in order to empty the big water container that would gather rain water into it.

Somehow we survived it, luckily the rainy season was about to start in Thailand so we usually got rain every week, usually a couple days per week. Now we are back to Finland where we have abundance of pure water, wheeee! We can even drink tap water here, no need to constantly buy bottled water from the local store like in Thailand.

As for the forum spammers, pffft, I've seen worse.

until gog updates its forum software to something more modern, they can only manually remove spam. its stupid and it works so slowly and it is unbecoming as you stated but sadly gog has to make the change and they seem unable or worse if you ask me, unwilling to do so.

Time will only tell.

and as for the spam, you have missed some truly epic spam attacks then at one point the spam went on all long weekend leaving the gog forum staff quite a mess to clean up, you would thing that would have the motivation for change but alas no. it wasnt.


edit I misspelled "manually"

It'd probably help if GOG was more honest about their openings.

Because I doubt that we're only short a Community Management office and a Junior Product Specialist (whatever that means).

The simple gist I have is that it's quite clear that the forum code was junk when it was installed, has been unmaintainable for over a decade, and some higher up can't be arsed to pry it out with a crowbar and replace it with something better.

Go to the D programming forums. Look at how fast that is. It's absurdly fast and yet they have more features than this forum does.

Not sure what the thread title nor the random stuff in the OP has to do with the spam problem which is the point that the OP is actually complaining abpit.

The perfect bot spam solution is very simple and easy to implement and has been suggested many times before on this board: only let accounts post if they have purchased a game on GOG.

But doing that would have no effect on the "forum game" spam problem, so fixing the bot spam problem still wouldn't help at all, since the "forum game" spam is much worse than the bot spam is, and the forum game spam is always present 24/7, whereas the bot spam is much less prevalent and oftentimes not present.

GOG could easily fix the "forum game" spam problem too by changing the forum rules so that "forum games" a.k.a. spam are not allowed, which is something they should have done many years ago, and still need to do as of August 2023.

Forum games are harmless fun and don't crowd out more important threads. Now sure, GOG could divvy the main community forum into a few segments but there's barely enough of a draw to bother with that tactic. Do you use the Barefoot Essentials addon fork? Quite a nice thing; it sorts out the forum by news, forum games, appearance of spam, and more.

If some kid with time and a buttload of javascript can figure it out, this really embarrasses the entire GOG webdev team, ya know.

Same deal with the GOG store's lack of a proper data grid which just excises all the fluff in favor of the raw data. https://github.com/ghorint2t/scripts/

Again, nothing but time and javascript.

As for what the OP is on about: They're complaining that the forum feels like living out in the sticks during the 1990s, when the power grid sucked due to it being made of legacy components instead of the smarter grid that has automatic failure correction.

It's tough to be popular and not really have enough resources to cope with the impact of that.

That means old software and not enough staff.

Do you mean the spam issues, the general technical issues or everything worse at once?

To me it seems like GoG truly is lacking the required manpower of competent workers on way to many spots, as Poland is not exactly the most developed country, yet it may have access to Russians, which is still not easy to handle considering the current political circumstances. Most of the workers actually competent are working for CDPR in order to develop the current franchises... as this is by far the best "cash cow"... so they simply are focusing on it, while GoG is just some "less productive side buisness".

Guess we have to live with it... unless there might be improvements possible, which indeed can take long. Yet, GoG is still the best place for me, as it is providing me the games in the shape i enjoy. But indeed... they are cleary "underperforming" as one of the biggest (everyone is far behind Steam...) game distributions... but at least they got room for a lot of improvements, so it can only become better.

It is not really a money issue, as CDPR is sufficiently healthy, but you cant just buy everything and they surely are low on competent workers.

i just happenend upon this video yesterday aptly titled, why Poland is becoming the next European SuperPower

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-taT9JfSFAk

If you just want to hear a pretty Jazzed up version of Canon in D (done by that crazy asian girl)

click this one instead :D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpc1lEJ-SRc

I even do believe you, because most of the "other" Europe is now pretty much demolished, especially the "big" countrys from this pack. The smaller or weaker countrys on the other hand (inside Europe) are kinda in a renaissance, which can be a interesting time. So it seems, GoG is not in a bad spot... and at some point they may even be able to get more access to a currently locked down "market to the east".

To OP: as one user's signature stated: ''GOG decision makers are terrible at their job.''

Not only is this problem being brought to attention every weekend; so you'd think that if your users are bugging you about it constantly - maybe you should do something about it...

There have actual, multiple, fixes been suggested. None have been implemented.

Don't worry, GOG might finally spot the problem someday, probably in a few years.

The solution to limit posts for every 0 game account looks good on paper, but I'm not sure about the implementation though. If spam bots can create numerous accounts, they would be able to add some free games as well, breaking free of such limitations.

If you limit users who haven't paid anything, that might work on paper. However, I'm not sure exactly how GOG can make such a check; as far as I know, GOG can't solve the issue with numerous editions and bundles of the same game counting as one game ID like Steam does.

GOG staff had to process various things manually. They can't even purge all account history automatically, only manually and partially, among other things. They can't even fix the sticky forum notifications for years. They are understaffed, and some of the GOG staff had to help CD Project with something. Several notable GOG modders left for good, and I hardly see any new faces. Lastly, CD Project Red is going to fire about 9% of its staff by Q1 2024.

There are so many issues that need attention. Why focus on trivial spam bots?

What I would suggest is giving some GOG users limited moderator powers to hide/lock the spam bots' posts for further investigation by actual GOG staff. These Community Moderators with limited powers must be chosen according to their experience in communicating here. They would check the spammers on their free time and lock them for good. They would not receive anything in return because GOG is poor - maybe one free game at the end of the year if they are lucky.

Just in case I'm not interested in such activities personally, and in place of GOG, I'd rather not grant such powers to anyone who is very open about wanting it.

[EDIT - lots of grammar stuff]

I reject your reality and substitute my own: it's not spam, it's people other than you having fun.

From the thread title, I thought this was going to be about gamers' acquiescence to increasingly predatory monetisation strategies, and ever more invasive DRM methods.

(edited)