The thing is, profiles are not visible if you are not logged to Gog, so I don't really see how Google crawler could have managed to cache it.

That probably means that drmike visited my profile prior to it being switched off and now it's in his local cache. Could that be, drmike?

Good. Thanks for checking.

Honestly, I no longer use Google for searching, so I am not certain as to whether or not this is still the case:
Previously, when attempting to visit a few 'members-only' website fora, the typical redirect to login page was displayed. On a fair number of occasions, a Google web crawler had cached the forum post that I was attempting to read; so, I visited the cached page instead, and voila, it displayed the full contents without me having to create an account on that particular website.

I may be mistaken, but it seems as though robots/crawlers live by a different set of rules. These crawlers send user agents that identify themselves, and in the case of a Google web crawler, the client IP address can be used to verify the information provided within the HTTP request header. So, in essence, they are able to bypass some hurdles that would otherwise block access to privileged information.

Maybe you're also thinking of some negative publicity the development arm, CDPR, got last year? There were some articles and videos about the employee turnover that intensified after the launch of The Witcher III, and lots of anonymous complaints came to light about various aspects of the company's day-to-day operations. I've never heard of any such well-publicized employee criticisms of GOG itself, though it certainly wouldn't surprise me if some (if not many) of the same problems were present in the GOG offices.

Not sure whether you saw PaterAlf's original reply to you on this, but he's right: that was just an "on paper" move, involving no real movement or change in personnel. Johny.'s edit to his reply to you also confirmed that this was purely a legal status change, rather than a significant operational one. (AFAIK, it was something to do with a tax loophole -- the sole reason they were officially headquartered in Cyprus in the first place -- being closed, thereby making it suddenly less efficient to keep the Cypriot GOG entity in existence.)

The only real effect that change should have for customers is that banks and payment processors will now have to block transactions with GOG because they're routed to Poland, instead of blocking them because they're routed to Cyprus. ;P

The URL is still listed but with Google's "No information is available for this page." and with no cache.

Looking at the headers, it;s still not a proper 404. A 302 error tells google the URL may come back. That actually makes sense if the user decides to turn their profile back on.

At least they're redirecting to the secure version of the website. That was the issue I found with the logins. During logins, it redirected back to the unsecure side of the website and that URL redirected back to the secure side.
It was the version we had previously with the "This profile has been set to Private" with the number of games along the top right.

I don;t know what they did previously but it would be fairly simple to detect the legit googlebot and allow the content to be seen and indexed without it being visible to folks. A number of websites do this. Experts Exchange used to do this and may still do so. edit: Not saying GoG did this. Just saying it;s possible and is done online.

You are mentioning Artifex Mundi i own lots of games ....good games but $ EU has almost doubled apparently
anyway that company and alawar are 2 of the best casualgames developers at Steam, ofcourse there are others but those are smaller companies or a single person and some of them made nice casualgames .

This will be quite some necroing, but was wondering how do the six feel about how things developed since then, now that it's six months after the redesign, forum still as it is, even FPP gone and so on...

I'd have been interested in this as well, but ironically, contrary to all the pointless necros going on, this one of all things was left unanswered.

Personally, I feel that nothing much has changed since then, that GOG is still as tone-deaf as before in the relations with the community and continuing to erode the trust they had built with their core audience. I know several good people from back in the days who have (mostly) turned their back on GOG due to this and even more serious issues, but so far I've still stuck around regardless. Admittedly, mainly due to all the forum activity, the shop has already become less and less special and attractive to me after all the "Good News"(tm). And two recent events - despite appearing quite particular and not getting much attention yet - make me wonder why I still keep defending GOG against those who've already abandoned it, as they seem to show how little GOG has actually taken to heart the complaints that lead to "6 community members going to GOG HQ". At the time I was ready to wait and see, give them the benefit of the doubt, before declaring it a simple PR stunt for appeasement, but now I'm not so sure anymore ...

The two (particular but somehow representative) events are:

1) The integration of cloud saves in Galaxy for old DOS games messing with save functionality if you run the games without the client. This happened with Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures (FRUA) from the Archives Vol. 2 (and it's possible that it affects some other Goldbox games, too). GOG's current version of FRUA gives out error messages when you try to save without the client, and the game crashes when you try to create a new design/module/campaign. This is due to a line in the dosbox config file concerning cloud saves. I brought this to the attention of Support and they said they would pass it on, but also said that currently the best option was to just comment the line out. It didn't sound like this issue was given priority; that was weeks ago and nothing has happened since then. The conclusion I draw from this is that people running games without the Galaxy client are seen as such a neglectible minority that GOG can afford to distribute offline installers that make the games not work right out of the box. Anyone not using Galaxy will run into the saving issues, will have to search for a solution and will have to modify the config files themselves.

2) GOG introduced a "new approach" for PayPal users that requires agreement to direct debit payments without the need to log into your PayPal account via password anymore (see here). What is possibly meant to provide more convenience to users is also a security risk, and so far they didnt think to provide the possibility to opt out of it. It's especially worrying since there have been reports that users were accidentally logged into the wrong GOG accounts, and GOG didn't manage to find out how that was possible. They didn't officially inform users about all of this, and they didn't provide options. Once again, they introduced something that's supposed to be more convenient for users, without actually considering that some users might want to opt out of it and why.

So, let me rephrase Cavalary's question: Do you feel like that visit to GOG HQ actually changed anything?

Thank you for bringing this to my attention - I missed that thread, and of course a user made thread is the only way to learn about htis new "improvement", and it's rather important since it basically means that I am no unable to buy games on GOG.

I'd say that the "6 community members" should go back to GOG HQ to leave a flaming turd on their doorstep, but then the people who work there would just think it's beautiful fan made model of the store.

Did you add this to the Forgotten Realms forum?

Actually, this is a general problem and ought to be in a sticky note on the front page … maybe as a reply on the Forum Rules, to indicate that there are responsibilities for Gog as well as the audience.

I play my games on an unconnected computer, so I will encounter this in every game that fails to find the cloud, hence my question about the game forum (because that where I would look first).

Thanks for the information, though. :)

Yes and no. There is a thread about it including the solution here,
but it's not a sticky and the thread title does not reveal what it is about, so it's expected for threads like this to keep popping up ...

IMO though they should find a permanent solution for it ASAP instead of referring their customers to instructions in a sticky. This is not an unforeseen issue with a game not running on certain setups, this is entirely home made and will be encountered by *every* paying customer who's not using the supposedly "optional" client.

Are you just afraid you will encounter it in other games, or did you already experience it yourself? If so, with what games? So far I've only seen it happen with FRUA, and I suspect it might affect some other Goldbox games since they should work similar, but I have not tried them. It might affect all games running on Dosbox or just a few or even just FRUA due to its specific inflexibility or so. I'd be very interested in hearing whether it affects other games or not. And also in hearing whether FRUA works fine in Galaxy or not.

Bookmarked, thankyou!
Just afright with the possibilities, no actual harm to be reported … yet.