That only works if they're actively watching the boards for such things, though. Last time the site sustained a spam attack, they had no idea what was happening until a bunch of people messaged them about it. Even then, it wasn't until people insisted that they looked at it themselves before Ciris saw just how bad it was firsthand and finally pushed for better spam prevention measures. That barrage was 100 times worse than what the site's experiencing now, so I doubt just leaving it would accomplish anything more than annoying a bunch of users.

Unfortunately this would be exactly the best way to go about it. As long as, like NoNewTale says, the users do the job and hunt down the bots, there is no need to change anything. So the quickest way to force some change would be to let the forum drown for a week. As soon as the forum has turned into a porn advertisement board, GOG will be forced to do something about it. ... And yes, there are lots of ways to do something against bots.


But this: is one of my personal gripes too. Whoever thought that hiding the Downloader links was a good idea, should be fired!

Exactly. As long as there are people willing to do GOG's work for free they have no incentive to improve things. Let the forum drown in a torrent of spam, maybe then they will be forced to do something.

I know what happened the last time. That's why I said what I said. GOG didn't see how bad it was, because dozens of GOGlodytes deleted the spam threads (via mass spam reporting with user made scripts). Stop deleting the threads and GOG will see the spam. And when GOG sees two or three sites of spam in every subforum and the general discussion forums, they'll have to react.

I suppose my disagreement here is based on a belief that GOG employees only check things like the subforums when they have something to add (patch notes, that kind of thing). Otherwise, they seem to be entirely hands-off.

Last time, there were multiple periods where subforums had 10-20 pages of nothing but spam for hours on end, and they somehow not only didn't see it, but apparently didn't bother checking it out even after several users messaged them about it. That's not even mentioning the wishlist, which has been a spam wasteland for how long now without a fix?

Not anymore. Ever since the introduction of changelogs, the GOG staff no longer puts the update information on the respective subforum.

Gee golly willikers! Hmm...maybe hire competent web developers? Proper support team for weekends? Maybe read and fix the myriad of problems that were reported years ago sometime this year?

They've become very weird lately though like everyone disappeared. So we're out of luck even if we did find every solution to every problem ourselves. But they're already paying some slackers to not do that.

Now that you're saying this... What the hell happened to update notifications? Not that I miss annoying Geralt, but... I haven't seen an update notification in a very long time. And I know of at least two games that got updated recently (Tales from the Borderlands and Dreamfall Chapters) :/

...You may have also noticed that on their hiring page, there are several web developer positions open.

That's... really sad, actually. The last thing they needed was to be less engaged with their customers/fans. On the bright side, it gives me the perfect opportunity to share this picture I've been saving for a special occasion.

And I haven't received any update notifications lately, either.

EDIT: It helps to actually attach the picture.

I have received notifications for all my games that were updated (like Risk of Rain), but there seem to be two possibilities:

1) The one responsible for the update notifications has forgotten to do so.
2) There are some games (like Wasteland 2) that don't show update notifications at all. Maybe Dreamfall Chapters and Tales from the Borderlands belong to this category.

I think this kind of thread is exactly what GOG needs to act. It's simple; the community continues to battle through in spite of the forums shortfalls. My list of recent posts misses half of what I've contributed to and that's a pain as I like to see fellow members thoughts and opinions.

NoNewTaleToTell, you're right. It's not for us to workaround or fix and goodness knows there have been plenty of specific suggestions which have fallen on deaf ears. GOG is one of the few social forums I visit (I don't do Facebook, Twitter etc..) so it'd be nice to see it much more polished.

You would certainly think that they would but apparently the forum is so far down GOG's priority list that they just don't have the resources to bother with it, especially since their focus is on expansion (breaking things on the website) and Galaxy (alpha disguised as Beta).

The forum is extremely archaic in functionality and features especially if one doesn't use Barefoot Essentials which was created by a single community member. One person was able to improve the forum with a script while GOG hasn't even managed to fix the forum search after all this time. Its really unfortunate but clear that GOG simply doesn't care about the issues that forum regulars have to contend with on a daily basis.

Um, he just did. :) The 2nd last paragraph has 3 suggestions in it all of which are good suggestions. Sure the tone of the message is a rant but the underlying message is totally valid if one ignores the emotion it is presented with. Sometimes it takes a squeaky wheel or squeaky wheels to get someone to bring out the oil too. :)

Well, i'm still hopping that Ciris arranges that meeting with someone from gog so that we can discuss this and the other problems.