JakobFel: Dude, I LIVE here. [...]
amok: And the funny part is that omeone who doesn't even live in your country has to explain your own laws to you.
You didn't explain anything, you presented your personal interpretation of the laws of a country that broke away from yours. You're free to have an opinion on things but neither you, nor any other foreign power, get to dictate how we operate in my country.
JakobFel: This is the ethos of the internet itself!
PookaMustard: I don't know where you're getting that from because the internet is not The United States. Any typical forum will have rules and stuff saying what you can and can't do. If you break these rules, it's very normal to get kicked out of the forums. Nothing political about that. It's only recently some internet trolls have decided to brand it "censorship" cause "they banned me for saying vile shit!!" isn't something that garners sympathy, is it?
On a very milquetoast forum, linking to a mod that removes "unhistorical characters", renames the spelling of a city to one that an aggressor nation is forcing on it, and removing gay dating options, etc... well, sorry to say it but YOU BROKE RULES banning among other things: racism, inciting genocide, homophobia - not to mention the classic "Don't Be A Dick".
Just stop bringing The First Amendment to the internet. Its jurisdiction starts at the US border with Canada and ends at the US border with Mexico, and it only means that the US government (specifically the US government) can't stop you from speaking out your mind *with exceptions*. It does not protect you from breaking forum rules and codes of conduct online and being shown the door by the moderators and community (see, they're not the US government) as a consequence.
Sure, it's not the United States in and of itself, but we were a huge part of laying down the infrastructure, the standards, the customs for the internet. The internet has always been about freedom: free expression, freedom of information, freedom to 'travel' (in the digital sense).
I'm not at all against forums and internet communities having rules. The problem is that the heavier-handed your moderation becomes, the less pleasant of an experience that community becomes for all but the select few who happen to align 100% perfectly with those ideologies. I speak from decades of experience on this matter, having been an admin or moderator to many different forums and internet communities over the years. Moderation and rules should be there to guide and facilitate healthy, civil discussion. They shouldn't be there to police every action of everyone so that overly-sensitive folks don't get triggered.
Moreover, the point I'm making is that people need to grow up, grow thicker skin, and stop getting offended by literally everything. You like to claim that those mods are "racist" or "inciting genocide"; I haven't looked at the mods myself but if the mod removes a character that's historically inaccurate, that's not racist. Likewise, having an opinion on geopolitics that doesn't go along with the narrative doesn't equal "incitement of genocide". And as for the "homophobic" mod, guess what: people have a right to play games without DEI and current-day ideologies injected into
everything.
Ultimately, that's the beauty of modding a game: if you don't like what a game says/does, if the game has mod tools, you can edit that game to suit your preferences. For a community like GOG, which promotes DRM-free (which, in GOG's founder's own words, is
freedom), one would think most of y'all would agree that players should have that right even if you personally disagree with their mod idea. I've seen literal anti-Christian mods added to video games without a single bit of backlash, and do I get offended? No. I block it/ignore it and move on like an adult, and my life is significantly more peaceful because I don't let opposing opinions throw me into a tantrum.