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Activity Feed • Gameplay Stats • Personalization


UPDATE: We've added a new option to the Privacy settings in GOG Profiles - from now on you can turn off your profile on GOG entirely, so no one can see any kind of information that is shown on the profile page. This also means that when you turn off your profile, you won’t be visible on your friends’ friends lists, even if they decide to keep their profiles visible.
The option to enable/disable your GOG Profile can be found in your account „Privacy & Settings” options, under „Privacy” tab.



We just introduced a new feature on GOG.COM: User Profiles – a social way to share what you and your friends are up to. See what your friends on GOG are playing, achieving, and sharing across four sections – Feed, Profile, Games and Friends.

Your Feed is the centerpiece of your Profile. Here, you’ll see which games your friends have been playing, all sorts of achievements and milestones, as well as general thoughts, screenshots, and forum activity. You can dispense your approval at whim and share your own stuff as well!

Your Profile is all about you and your gaming accomplishments. It's a summary of your activity, like the time you've spent in your games , your latest achievements (and just how rare they are among other users), as well as a glimpse at what your most active friends have been up to.

If you want to know more about your Games, you need to hit the the third tab. It contains a list of all the games you own on GOG, together with stats like time spent in-game and your progress towards unlocking the achievements. Sort the list, compare stats with your friends, and get some healthy competition going.

Finally – your Friends: get a general summary of their achievements and hours played. Here you'll also see which games are the most popular among your friends right now, so you can join them in multiplayer or find something you might enjoy yourself.

Of course, your profile comes with some sweet personalization options, choose a wallpaper from your game collection and share a few words with the world.

User Profiles are available for all GOG.COM users. Your personal gameplay stats like achievements, time played and milestones depend on GOG Galaxy, but if you’re not using the optional client you can still use the feed, post in it and interact with your friends.

Launching profiles also means adding new privacy settings on our end. You'll find three new Privacy options in your account's „Privacy & settings” area. These settings allow you to set the visibility for your profile summary, your games, your friends, etc.
So what are you waiting for? There's so much room for activities!
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Cresset: Account > Settings > Privacy > Visibility: hidden (nobody can find me [by email or username])

Should do it?
Nope, even with that check-box unticked, and all the other social settings set to "only me", one will show up on friends public profiles in that "Friends" section sooner than later. And this is a separate violation of people's privacy, and probably an even more severe one.

I'm still reading through here, just wanted to point his bit again as it's pretty serious.
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Yep. Pretty big failure. Should've been Opt In not Opt Out.

I guess it makes sense why they'd do this. They are, after all, a company that needs to make money. And if big data will enable them to do so, be it tailoring sales or selling said data (heaven forbid), then I guess it makes sense. Although you'd think that would eventually drive away their loyal users.
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Socratatus: Old man mode:

Why do they always have to change things for stuff nobody asked for? I mean...

Why? We just have to change stuff for sake of change?

Old man mode over.
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BKGaming: Just because you never asked for it doesn't mean people didn't ask for it. It was a pretty high requested feature on the wishlist.
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Socratatus: Old man mode:

Why do they always have to change things for stuff nobody asked for? I mean...
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Jeysie: I've always wanted this, and someone in the preview thread posted a wishlist item for this that had a large number of upvotes on it, so I'm far from the only one.

Which is part of why the hysteria irritates me so much, since people are basically castigating GOG for the crime of listening to their users and adding something a lot of people actively asked to have implemented.
At around 1280 votes, it doesn't strike me as a "pretty high requested feature on the wishlist" comparing it with all the requests above it. I would say moderate, at best.

What about the request for A setting to disable all "social" features (like facebook)? That has almost the double amount of votes, 2484 at the moment. Why wasn't that feature implemented first?
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Post edited April 24, 2018 by ariaspi
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ariaspi: At around 1280 votes, it doesn't strike me as a "pretty high requested feature on the wishlist" comparing it with all the requests above it. I would say moderate, at best.
That wasn't the only one. Galaxy wishlist also had a request for one that was closer to 2k. So even with some overlap you are probably looking at 2K to 3K requesting said feature.
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Before we start, who would this feature be for, assuming you even got it right? The answer I can come up with is the overlap between "hates DRM with the fire of a thousand suns, so not already on Steam" and "likes to be social." How many people is that? Probably not many. Probably a good part of this group are in this thread already, or will be soon.

As for implementation:

There should be a setting that says "show nothing to anybody." Some of your customers are HIGHLY reclusive for various reasons, and joined because this site let them buy and play games and be reclusive and not care about anything social. These reasons might include "game communities are literally cancer." That player doesn't want to talk to you or even know you exist. Making that player's profile public does nobody any favors.
The default privacy setting should have been "show nothing to anybody." That's the best default setting of anything online. That way you don't accidentally dump any info your customers didn't want to share.

"Show to nobody/show to friends/show to everybody" isn't very good. If you want to be serious about social features, you need to accept that people can have more than one "circle" of friends.


Before we go crazy about "making ourselves targets with our game library", let's look at what anyone who pwned your account could possibly gain from it or do with it:
Games. More specifically, copies of DRM-free games. A "thief" wouldn't be stealing anything, just making unauthorized copies of installers that are likely already on torrent sites. GOG isn't an MMO or one of those "games as a service" where there's a centrally tracked scarcity-based economy.
Someone who plays Gwent can tell us Gwent has scarcity and trading as part of its game economy, which might be worth stealing your account over.
"Look at all my achievements" screenshots. Maybe?

Your reputation/your life. Someone can use the social features to say you're committing suicide. Or they can admit to a really bad crime with your account. This would get much faster results on any dedicated social media platform, but if you never look at your profile, they could play a long game and just put a bad thing there to "discover" in a few years.
Your account also has your birthday.
Or they can use purchase history to (try to) map out relationships.
Stupid question. Why is there no profile link from the friends screen on the GOG werbsite, or the chat screen? If I want to check out someone's profile who has sent me afriend request, I have to go the totally backwards route of opening another profile, or my own and putting their name in the proper place in the address bar. Seriously, did GOG think this through beyond "hey cool, let's do profiles!!"?
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willyum: Yep. Pretty big failure. Should've been Opt In not Opt Out.

I guess it makes sense why they'd do this. They are, after all, a company that needs to make money. And if big data will enable them to do so, be it tailoring sales or selling said data (heaven forbid), then I guess it makes sense. Although you'd think that would eventually drive away their loyal users.
Yeah 100% should have been opt in. If that had been the case I wouldn't have had any objections, as it stands this is the first thing that's ever really made me consider not reccomending gog to my friends. The invasive big data thing is part of why I don't do steam (they also have poor customer service), am in the process of moving all my google use to other providers, and why I avoid being FaceZucked.

If people choose to opt in that's their decision, informed or not, but default on simply isn't cool.
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ALaggyGrunt: Before we start, who would this feature be for, assuming you even got it right? The answer I can come up with is the overlap between "hates DRM with the fire of a thousand suns, so not already on Steam" and "likes to be social." How many people is that? Probably not many. Probably a good part of this group are in this thread already, or will be soon.

As for implementation:

There should be a setting that says "show nothing to anybody." Some of your customers are HIGHLY reclusive for various reasons, and joined because this site let them buy and play games and be reclusive and not care about anything social. These reasons might include "game communities are literally cancer." That player doesn't want to talk to you or even know you exist. Making that player's profile public does nobody any favors.
The default privacy setting should have been "show nothing to anybody." That's the best default setting of anything online. That way you don't accidentally dump any info your customers didn't want to share.

"Show to nobody/show to friends/show to everybody" isn't very good. If you want to be serious about social features, you need to accept that people can have more than one "circle" of friends.

Before we go crazy about "making ourselves targets with our game library", let's look at what anyone who pwned your account could possibly gain from it or do with it:
Games. More specifically, copies of DRM-free games. A "thief" wouldn't be stealing anything, just making unauthorized copies of installers that are likely already on torrent sites. GOG isn't an MMO or one of those "games as a service" where there's a centrally tracked scarcity-based economy.
Someone who plays Gwent can tell us Gwent has scarcity and trading as part of its game economy, which might be worth stealing your account over.
"Look at all my achievements" screenshots. Maybe?

Your reputation/your life. Someone can use the social features to say you're committing suicide. Or they can admit to a really bad crime with your account. This would get much faster results on any dedicated social media platform, but if you never look at your profile, they could play a long game and just put a bad thing there to "discover" in a few years.
Your account also has your birthday.
Or they can use purchase history to (try to) map out relationships.
Depending on how careful you are they could also use the info there to gain access to other accounts you have elsewhere, say if you use similar username/password combinations for more than one site, or if you use bio details like age, location, etc. in your challange questions. Those aren't very secure pratices, but neither is sharing user data without them actively opting in.

In addition some users employ the wallet feature on GOG which would allow a third party (presuming they could use the profile as part of gaining access to the main account) to spend that money. Yes in that situation the account holder would still get access to the item(s) purchased but those games may not be in their taste/hold any value to them.
Post edited April 24, 2018 by RoseLegion
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This is awesome! Good work!
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timppu:
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Cavalary: Not touching Chrome, no way (nor Win 10, on the other hand - there's something similar between the two, forced updates... also more "calling home" and less (easily accessible and clearly explained) user settings). Firefox was secondary till they overhauled it. Very "secondary" once they made it require a plugin to even customize your new tab page. Now haven't updated it past 47, so hardly ever use it.
Otherwise, I keep saying go back to simpler sites, and incidentally sites that adhere to standards. Try to put sites now through the W3C validator, see what happens... (For gog.com it ends with "Fatal Error: Too many messages." after 1000 errors! ... pardon 6 of them are warnings, so 994 errors before it has enough of it)
You should try Pale Moon, it's very good. I'm using it as my main browser.
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I just removed the friends on GOG to preserve their privacy and I invite everyone else who cares about their friend's privacy to do the same.

@GOG: The amount of games I own and how long I play them games is private information that I never consented to make public.
I demand that you erase those records from your database(s) as long as they can be seen be anyone but me and your primary database administrator.
Post edited April 24, 2018 by jorlin
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Very disturbing and totally out of character for GOG. For years I've recommended them without any hesitation. Now they're just one more company I have to keep an eye on in an attempt to protect myself. A sad day.
People who like the change are being downvoted on, at least, the first few pages? Why?! For sharing a difference of opinion? ffs...

Ya know what? I don't mind the profiles. Hell, I think they're kinda neat! I think we should have more privacy options, sure, but it's not a huge deal for me. So downvote that you big babies (@those who downvoted the positive comments). :P
Post edited April 24, 2018 by tfishell
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How do I delete entries from the Activity Feed ?
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Melvinica: How do I delete entries from the Activity Feed ?
You can only remove your entries I believe. There is a little down arrow, click that and click remove from feed.
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Melvinica: How do I delete entries from the Activity Feed ?
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BKGaming: You can only remove your entries I believe. There is a little down arrow, click that and click remove from feed.
Yup, not mine. Can't delete the bloody thing. Very annoying.