B-b-b-but muh freedom of speech!!

Niche communities can self-regulate. We used to be one; classic video games is a niche interest and we came together over a love of those. GOG were good at interacting with us and maintaining that niche. Changes in the service propelled by its ascendency into the market mainstream is what has caused GOG to divert resources away from community management and that's why we're in this mess.

GOG haven't been very good at looking ahead, considering the consequences of things. Their approach has always been "do it and apologise later if necessary". The decay of the classy community is one aspect of this. If they were better at thinking about the future they might have been able to keep up and there never would have been a problem.

Ciris, first of all I'd like to thank you for at least taking the time to post in this thread and acknowledge this issue, I really do appreciate it.

But secondly, I must risk looking like a doubting Thomas for a moment: I won't believe it until I see it, judging by how you people have barely done anything about this issue, and have been slacking off as far as moderation in general is concerned. (The fact that the vulgar thread title has been left unedited for so long should prove that point)

What I'm saying is that this shit should have been dealt with long ago. But it wasn't, so until I actually see improvement, what you said pretty much translates to more "We are listening to your feedback!™" stuff.

Just trying to help here.

I could have sworn the thread title was different not long ago. It was loosely connected to flowers as well - something in conjunction with birds and bees I think. Whatever ;-P

Finally! After long last we have what we were demanding from the start! A new title for this thread!

Wait...

I'm disappointed they didn't change the title to "Fusk Fusk Fusk Proke Pimhole Shote Cloffprucker". :P

But this is part of the crux of the issue; you should have noted and dealt with this problem much, much, much earlier. You should have forseen back this when the current PM/chat system was implemented. Consider that it took people -- people who are long term, established members of this community -- to go to these lengths to get your attention.

Put yourself in our position -- we want to foster a community where we can discuss and celebrate gaming, and foster the generosity and gift-giving that's been among this forum's defining characteristics going back to when GOG itself was barely out of beta. We want to defend it from the people who want to take all of that away for no other reasons than selfish greed and vanity...and that's on top of all of the usability issues an website bugs. But all of our attempts to get GOG to address these issues have gone seemingly ignored. What would you do? Continue to wait and be content with the status quo? With being spammed or harassed online with threats, or get ripped off in a predatory trade that was done in good faith?

And again this shows a lack of understanding of what we've been asking for... We want a simple way to add friends on chat without having to deal with spam threads. We want the ability to block people on chat/PM. We want moderators who are attentive enough and understanding enough to deal with problems like scammers swiftly and decisively. That's what I can think of, off top of my head, on top of other features like capchas/reCaptcha to deter spambots, and two-factor authentication to help better protect accounts, as well as a drastic overhaul of the Rep system, if not its elimination altogether.

These are all standard features to protect against security breaches and harassment on many, many forums. I don't think it's at least reasonable to demand such features, or barring that, an explanation as to why it's taken so long to implement these features.

Oh, they've done *plenty* about the issue. Now that it's out in other threads, I don't mind pointing out - as some of us have noticed and mentioned for weeks now - how GOG support has helped the scammer change the names of at least three (so far) of his multi accounts to hide his history from search. And we've seen how they come down on the squeaky wheel.

No, they're doing quite a bit. But all of it so far has been dead wrong ^_^

So I just received a chat message from a certain user called: "Clemuria"

He wrote this to me: So what do I do? I can't report this person. I can't delete this atrocious message in my chat inbox... It's sitting there like some disgusting <insert word here>.

My solution has been to close off chat and take a bit less part in the forum community.

Excellent, seriously! This liberal approach is one of GOG's strengths! Please stick with it for the sake of the majority of this forum. There are always some individual cases, where intervention is necessary, but there's definitely no need for general moderation.

Just my two cents, re-establish individual blocking of Chat messages from certain users like it was possible in the old PM system. That won't stop harassments, but it'll make them more tiresome to produce as a user will have to create a new account for every message.

I agree. One of GOG's strengths is they respect their users enough to allow them the freedom of speech.. And people want GOG to stop respecting them and treat them like little bitches under the tyranny of moderators? Just to avoid some insults once in awhile? I'm one of the few users here that gets harassed and bullied very often and I would never cry to GOG for moderators. Because I know the horrors the community will suffer, once moderators start running the show. And on top of that, moderators will make it so people are too afraid to truly express themselves, so then the forum will become nothing more than a politically correct tea party with robots and sheeple instead of human beings.

Khmm . Only a small suggestion while you are working on the solution : Please also get rid of the rep system and replace it with a better one . ( like a voting system that shows who liked or didn't like the post )

Reading you trying to form cohesive thoughts is highly amusing.
It's like watching a two-legged dog try to run for a thrown tennis ball.
You almost feel bad for laughing, and the emotion is ultimately sadness at the sight, but you can't help yourself.

Does anyone else see the url to this post?

Some generous forum members can afford to buy multiply copies from the newly released games .