I see the phrase "amp;" in some reviews, usually replacing another word. For example, one of the first reviews of Revenant reads "Great, but rushed & unfinished". And the first review of Mount & Blade's title is "First m&b i got and i loved". I also see the phrase "M&B" appear in other Mount & Blade reviews.

I'm just curious whether they are written like that or if it's something to do with my browser (I use Windows 10 Edge so I won't be surprised if it's the browser). And if it's purposely written like that, what does it mean?

I attached a screenshot of two of the mentioned reviews.

EDIT: So it's HTML code for an ampersand (&), which my browser doesn't understand for some reason.

it's an html code for space or something..
now u know.. be happy.. :-/

It's HTML code for the "and" sign called an ampersand.
Edit: First post edited while I was posting! It's probably a mistake on the website's end rather than your browser.

I get it under the latest Firefox on Windows 10 also. I'd say its an issue GOG's end rather than yours for that reason. As I can display & fine on the forums and other sites, its just on GOG and in the reviews it displays weird.

It's not your browser, it's the janky website. The forums are probably worse (mostly with regards to hyperlink tags interacting with...anything), and the community wishlist...well, it's best not to dwell on the technical problems with that. =D

It's a bug in the website code. The reviewer typed & and it got changed to &

When people write reviews GOG saves what they wrote to their database, and it seems that they convert every & to &amp; < to &lt; and > to &gt; to ensure that when that review is added to the web page it will come out as regular text and not special HTML symbols (which would be bad).

The problem is that the website got remade to Angular, which does that conversion when the text is added to the website, the old code that does that conversion when saving is still there, so it gets double-converted.

- User types "M&B"
- It gets saved as "M&amp;B"
- When the review gets loaded, it automatically converts the & to &amp; again, so "M&amp;amp;B" gets added to the page's HTML
- The web browser sees the "&amp; and displays it as a simple &, so we end up with "M&amp;B" again

edit: the forum also has some bugs with special HTML characters, apparently

Was brought up again just a few days ago.

Barefoot_Monkey gave a good technical explanation here. Ancient-Red-Dragon is also making a point in that other thread.