Blocking a specific number sequence, in this case 9 followed by 1 (India's international phone prefix), without as much as a little bit of thought regarding the implications, most certainly qualifies as a unique way to combat spam - Going by the dates of reports in the "WE ARE UNDER ATTACK again", it's pretty safe to assume it was an antispam measure; a very lazy and careless one.

That you think it's no big deal and even seem to justify it as an acceptable solution because we don't have user moderators on their forum, as if their forum is not part of their site and business, is eyebrow raising, to say the least.

Maintaining the forum is very much part of their work; the forum is not just a platform for GOG to hype things up, and not give a rat's arse about anything else.

And I won't even comment on the can of worms that assigning users as moderators is.

When did I say that? I was mostly joking in my first post.. as evidence by my orgiinal post ending in "xD :P". What I meant didn't seem clear enough so I expanded on it in the second post... I think you may need relax a bit. I never agreed it was an acceptable solution at all, it's actually a pretty shitty solution from a developer stand point. but GOG's developers have always made questionable choices.

As I said, I haven't been following the issue... don't take my lack of outrage as saying it's "no big deal" or justifying it.

There is a diference between maintaining this forum and enforcing the rules... and on most forums (especially popular ones with a lot of traffic) this is handled by volunteer moderators. I do think it's a question of when rather than if GOG will adopt that proven model. Its also pretty common practice even with forums owned by big business, they are not going to hire people to monitor a forum and taking the time do so takes time away from what people are actually suppose to be doing.

A forum is meant to be a place for the community and that means it's usually policed by the community.

Everything has avantages and disavantages as evident by this post. But as someone who has run a few sucesseful forums and who has run other successful projects involving user mods I do tend to feel those advantages outwieght the disadvantages. But that's just me personally.

If I'm not mistaken, CDPR's forums have user moderators in addition to some CDPR staff, so there is precedent existing under the CDP S.A. umbrella already I believe. Perhaps GOG could cross the hallway and talk to the CDPR folk themselves, and come back from their visit with a USB stick containing the superior forum software and management procedures that seem to work so successfully across the hallway.

Just, you know... an idea. :)

GOG's priorities are always going to be trying to grow their business and directing resources to the biggest things they can do towards that goal, which basically means things like forum software, anti-spam and whatnot are always going to be small potatoes. They need to either realize sooner or later that the current setup will degrade to complete uselessness, or need to be replaced with something more effective at some point in time, and that it is not the best use of their resources to become a forum software development company, and that instead they should just use pre-existing software out there that is already good at being forum software, developed by people who are already established at making a solution that works because its their primary focus.

The best we can hope for if GOG continues to do this in house, is a solution that gets almost no attention whatsoever except in security emergencies and similar, and is then abandoned once again as low priority. It's time for GOG to wake up and realize they are not the best experts at forum software and they're the least likely to produce the best solution for their customers. Time to man up and contract that out to developers of actual solid forum software that exists already.

Makes me wonder if GOG also created their own custom but ineffective microwave oven in their lunch room, because they just had to have something created in house to have full control of it? If so, I wonder how many people have to heat their lunch with a cigarette lighter there while the person in charge of the lunch room continues to say "our microwave might not be the best but it's good enough for now with the limited resources we have, we can't afford to build a better microwave"?

The elevators in their office building might be people standing in a shaft on each others shoulders... or a human sized dumbwaiter perhaps. :)

If it wasn't for Barefoot Essentials and Adalia Fundamentals, I'm not sure if I could even bear to use the forums these days with all the problems we've had over the years here. It's pretty brutal.

I've been told the Gwent forums they are using is vBulletin 5 which means they would have had to pay for it if true. Didn't really look into it it but if so they should totally pay for a license for here. It's really not that expensive from what I can tell. Cost less than paying developers to make a new one at any rate.

Personally they can blow this entire forum away and start fresh in my opinion... a fresh start might be nice actually on software that is both functional and has better features.