I kinda don't understand the "hide post" option as I have to read the darn thing first to hide it! lol If it is a valuable addition for some, then by all means I hope GOG implement it. I'd sorely love a proper block feature, as I suggested back in May 2014 on the forum experiences thread that Judas started. To me, a proper block feature means that once one person initiates it, all contact is prevented and all posts are hidden from each other, i.e. if I blocked you, I couldn't see your posts and you couldn't see mine. That would prevent a lot of conflict.

And also add a time delay between creating new topics as I've suggested before to prevent spamming the forums.

They don't have that? Well yeah, that's a must.

Nope, hence there is a thread with over 2000 posts dating back almost 2 years that gets added to everytime someone spams the forums. Crazy huh?

I think there's a certain amount of benefit from being the devil's advocate, but this isn't really the time for that.

Walt Disney had a system where the first room was for generating ideas and no idea was too stupid, racist or otherwise problematic, that's really what we're doing here. We don't be involved in actually making the decisions, so it makes little sense for us to consider the consequences too much.

After the list was generated there were two more rooms where they'd be progressively more critical of the ideas until all but the strongest ideas were discarded. Those would really have to happen at GOG because we just don't have access to any of the information necessary to make those kinds of calls.

As far as buying versus gifts, I'm not sure that would make much difference over all. Buying on one account and gifting to other accounts is trackable, and if you're doing the work to get them as gifts, that's also going to greatly reduce the amount of alts being created.
That kind of reminds me of my short conversation with a spambot in the past. A lot of the spamming has been done by Chinese people actually manually creating the accounts and doing the posts.

Spammers seem to hit this site during American daylight hours so I don't really see much of this.

The difference between buying versus gifts is that it is very easy to "encourage" or trade bundle keys for 1 GOG game to be added to an account, especially during sale times. That way all of the purchases and accounts cannot be linked to the payment method of the main account. If one actually to had to purchase it with one's own means of payment, it would make things more difficult.

I've only just returned to posting and reading forums other than the gaming deals thread after a bit of an extended absence, so I guess you could say that my emotional link and understanding of the context is a bit difference from those who are regularly on. Since I first posted in Gunsynd's thread, I've been reading how much conflict and drama has been going on here and I was surprised to see that it was worse than when I left.

I just hope that the rep manipulators(who appear to use scripts) don't improve their skills to the extent where they use top of the line systems as shown in this video and learn how to hack time!

I'm not so sure it is that easy anymore. In the old days, before scamming became a problem, yes. But anybody with any sense now doesn't deal with people that have created an account in the current month and haven't already been hanging around for a while.

It's like I've said in the past, if you don't know the person you're doing business with, you're dealing with an unknown risk factor. The few times I've done trades and whatnot, it's been with people that I know, or at least have seen around the forum, and with them, the risk of something going wrong is relatively low.

Still, just obtaining that gift is an additional barrier to entry that we don't have now.

Some improvement is definitely better than the current situation, but won't fix the current damage done. I guess doing nothing will fix the damage done less :D

And my longer experience says it's right. That's the whole thing about experience, it's personal and relative.

What I am saying is that I am not aware of any "global conspiracy" style of group here on GOG which act as the unified high-rep overlords of the place. There are small groups with agendas, of course, but every community has those. That's a very different thing though than an endemic and systemic cabal.

Besides, the solution I'm suggesting addresses abuses from ALL quarters. I would think everyone could get behind that, except for the people who enjoy exercising anonymous abuse.