I would usually attempt to be more eloquent but I'm busy downvoting posts and reporting them as spam.

The forum needs to be fixed. Period. It's needed to be fixed for a long long time. Your stopgap solution to the spam bots was just that, stopgap, and it's obviously failed.

Take a few days and stop fixing that which doesn't need to be fixed. The library didn't need to be reshuffled, switching PMs to Chat was nice but shouldn't have been a priority, doing your best to hide the Downloader shouldn't be at the top of the to do list. You're working on everything except what needs to be fixed (and what everybody wants you to fix).

Fix the forum, please. The members of GOG should NOT be the ones working to keep the forum readable. Us, your customers, the folks who make it possible for you to keep the lights on, should NOT have to be the ones doing YOUR job.

It's bad enough that the forum is more bare bones than a "baby's first forum" from 2004 but you can't even keep spammers from flooding the forum, and you're a business! Your image is on the line when this stuff happens!

Whatever you're looking to change that nobody wants changed can wait a day or two. Adding a captcha or a email verification link or a automatic muter based on repeating text is NOT that hard.

Please for the love of whatever you do or don't believe in, FIX THE FORUM!

Did I step into a portal from a few months ago?

Gripe all you want, but have you actually suggested any solutions that GOG could make use of?

Being more constructive and specific would probably be more helpful than idle bitching.

For one they could use commercial forum building software rather than relying on their own. I've yet to come across any forum building software that didn't include several (easily implemented) ways to combat spam.

and yes I'm griping, I'm annoyed that I (and other members of course) just spent a full ten minutes downvoting posts and reporting them as spam. Yes, I could've left them for somebody else to report but that's annoying for everybody involved.

I've yet to come across a forum building software that either didn't look like it was made back in 2000, cost a buttload of cash to licence, or was ill featured.

All the best forums are home built. Something Awful, Neogaf, Facepunch, XDA-Developers, MacRumors, all of those that I just listed use custom built software. Of course, one cost 10 dollars to get into, another is notoriously hard to get into, and I'm sure Facepunch isn't quite an open door either.

Sure, there's stuff like vBulliten and phpBB, but those things are pretty archaic in terms of forum development. As is deviantArt's forum, why I didn't list it.

Save the licensing, the other two statements fit GOG's forum. Anything would be a step up from what it is today.

Bottom line is GOG is a (apparently) very successful business that is owned by another very successful business, but the forum is A: outdated (lacking most features that forums had pre-2005 even) and B: unable to stop spammers.

If they wanted to improve the experience then I imagine they could eat the cost to either license forum building software or rewrite/rework the forum if they want to keep it in house. Yes, that will cost money but if they can afford to keep changing things that nobody asking to be changed, then I'm sure they can spare a few dollars to fix the forum.

As I write this a couple of new spam threads have popped up. Can you imagine weekly spam rushes on Steam or Amazon? GOG isn't a tiny business barely making ends meet.

may i suggest a combination of automated moderation...
http://app.canmoderate.com/Home/Documentation

... and meta-moderation?
http://slashdot.org/faq/metamod.shtml

does the forum admin even read our topics though?

and i don't really care about fancy features like richtext or whatever that increases down my loading time and makes my browser waste more memory.

https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/39wine/whats_up_with_all_these_yyr35com_posts/

and reddit seems to have found the source to more recent spamming?

also the spammed addresses are registered in Arizona USA ???
http://www.whoismind.com/whois/ews73.com.html
http://www.whoismind.com/whois/yyr35.com.html

You also have to realize that GOG is a small part of a somewhat small Polish company and Steam is a huge network of products whereas Amazon is a massive logistics network.

They both have massive staff to account for any matter, many of them specifically dedicated to curating and checking out that user input is sensible. And even then, do you really think they're able to hit everything?

GOG isn't some mom 'n pop corner shop, but it's still a lot smaller than Valve, which in itself is also a lot smaller than Amazon. Consider:

CD Projekt (GOG + CDPR) 2014 Sales Revenue: 0.025 billion USD

Valve 2014 Sales Revenue: estimated 1-2 billion* USD
* (they are not publicly traded, but I'm basing this figure on a 2010 Forbes article + growth since then)

Amazon 2014 Sales Revenue: 88.99 Billion USD

-----

Sure, I'd love to see improvements made to the forums as I find it a nice little nook of the internet to hang out in. However, from a cost-performance perspective I don't think pouring resources into the forums right now would be met with equivalent gains in membership and sales growth. There will come a time, I believe, when GOG focuses more attention towards the social and community aspect of Galaxy and their sales platform -- and at that time I think we will start seeing some changes and improvements to the forums. But I think that will only happen with continued growth of their sales and maybe at least a slightly larger slice of the PC distribution pie.

I got a wonderful solution to all of this. GOG, please enable forum access only to those who bought at least one game from you.

I mean, honestly, this is a business, no self help discussion group. People without any games really do not need to come here.

And, the best is, you'll make money out of the spambots (or solve the problem at all).

Don't have to be bought. Adding one of the free games to their account is sufficient enough, I think.

Time for a little rm -rf and apt-get install phpbb.

Wouldn't work. The current spam solution is to prevent one from creating new threads if they haven't purchased a single game. Yet, this doesn't seem to prevent the bots from doing exactly that.

You want a solution for this? Well... Stop downvoting and reporting spam! Seriously. Let GOG deal with thousands of spam threads for a couple of days and they'll start to think about functional anti spam measures. As long as they have users who "report for spam fighting duty", they won't do shit.