Not to mention that should this spread generally and escalate -- look up bamwar.com on the net, it's everywhere -- the forums will die, and without the forums, GOG would die. They need to get a grip... fast.

I'm not sure how damaging it is actually is, in a general sense. There are only about 6 forums being hit, and if you don't look at any of those (and don't notice this thread), then you might not be aware of the problem at all.

Granted, their credibility amongst a number of people in this thread is taking a beating. Probably amongst visitors of the affected subforums, as well.

I'm also doubtful about how easy it would be to implement a long term solution that won't obstruct innocents (a number of the solutions I've seen suggested for this epidemic have several holes), and much of what I've seen about GoG's policy decisions revolves around making it as easy as possible for users to happily give them money.

That said, I'm in agreement that they should fix it, and soon.
This I genuinely don't understand: why would GoG die without the forums? They provide support and a user never needs to visit the forums at all to spend money (it took me a number of months before I started looking at them).

Oh, by the way, I`ve seen wishlist threads who are also spammed, but not by the Koreans and some of them a long time ago.

Because GOG is not a store. GOG is a community. The games it sells are not mainstream. Without the community, they are nothing.

O.O Holy crap, you're right. I just tried a google, and it is everywhere. Maybe North Korea is trying to bring down the internet?


Ah. That does make sense.

So long as the community does their job, they will take their sweet time, all the while sending out that canned reply to anyone contacting support.
I killed a good number of the spam threads yesterday, until my carpal tunnel syndrome started kicking in, and I thought to myself "why hurt myself physically over something GOG doesn't give a flying kite about?". So, no more cleaning from me today, I need my hand and arm for more productive activities.

It's quite likely that you're right, Bookwyrm627 - this is hurting us, after all it's us hanging out here, not them. But letting the spam drawn all other threads is perhaps the only way to make GOG' take some action. My worst fear is that they won't change their schedule, even when every game forum and the General Discussion (English and French) list nth but this shit for pages to no end.

Sorry for the rant, I'm just very disappointed by how much GOG has dropped the ball ever since they decided to play with the big boys.


They're doing everything they can to get rid of this dependency though.

So long as they are not mainstream, they never will get rid of it. And if they go mainstream, it won't matter, because it won't be GOG any longer.

Search engine rankings, maybe? I don't know offhand how much the search engines penalise sites that host spam.

They're off again:

BG
NWN
W2

Then google and the other search engines need to become aware of the spam, so they can filter it out as well.

Makes me wonder if this is a slow term DDOS attack, as those have gotten more prevalent since last year. Perhaps if there's enough spam on enough sites (regardless the reason) those sites will automatically get a lower rating, or maybe they are just trying to trick some of the algorithms to permanently add some type of search ranking to a site thinking it's suddenly popular, based on how often it's been searched for, or how often it's added to the database.


Although i have to give a thumbs down to google's algorithm, as it's fairly dumb especially on youtube. Be much better if you could up/down personal voting of channels or topics to help filter what you're interested in and not say 'oh you clicked on this video, you must be interested in these other 10,000 videos', making me clear cookies for google to make it shut up and just start over since i bookmarked the channels i'm mostly interested in vs what they think i might like.

But seriously... why are they doing this? It doesn't make sense.

Spam is one thing and is annoying, but these people seem dumber than the average. I don't know why they're spaming in Korean, it's pretty pointless since most people won't understand what the hell they're promoting. What a waste of time for everybody.

They probably wanted to spam only Korean market, but bot they used is much better in searching for security holes...

Assuming "they" refers to the spammers, I would guess it's for the possibility of raising the mentioned site's rankings in search engines. After all, how many people -- after the spam mentioning "bam war" started to become like a semi-regular tidal flood -- have gone to Google (or whatever) and, just out of curiosity, searched for that phrase or URL? Over time, enough such "idle curiosity" searches will probably raise the search ranking a fair bit. I can't imagine how it would directly profit the site much -- I doubt too many will actually visit the site itself based on seeing the name in a spam post in some forum thread -- but then, I don't pretend to know how a lot of this stuff regarding Internet search rankings really works. That's pretty much the only thing I can think of that they would hope to accomplish -- and if you're ambitious but poor, and aren't constrained by pesky ethics, I suppose it's a very cheap way to promote your shady website.

I said that in humor. Not that I actually believed you thought I was an idiot.

(Thats one problem when it comes to talking in text, people cannot understand meaning without that tonal sound of a voice)

I'm beginning to echo the feelings of frustration posted by others.

I guess it's up to GOG to sort out their little spam problem, since we obviously can't stem the flood by ourselves, having spent ages trying to clean it all up. :-(