I like the idea of deactivating the up and down voting function for accounts that have not yet spent any money

Perhaps a good balance could be to preserve the upvote button, remove the downvote one, and implement a new feature for each user to ignore others so that theirs posts are displayed as collapsed. It would be similar to the current system with the difference that the scope of the downvoting would be moved from a community wide level to a user one, the users I want to ignore will only be ignored by me.

Signed. For me the solotion might be to hardcode that anyone who did not spent some minimal amount on purchases, should be able to use the forums in read-only mode only.

The big downside of this might be for new buyers to not be able to post in game specific forums for support, which might be counter-productive as well.

Naive vocal minority who thinks a useless name petition will change things...

Okay so the thing with the forum is that:
a) The forum software is so outdated that no one currently at GOG knows how to fix it without rehauling it completly

b) Rehauling the forum takes time and costs money + man power and the knowledge on how to do so

c) If the forum were to be rehauled, they would need to find a way to also remake the way they post newsposts (part of issue above)

d) And last but not least, they would need to find a way to import/archive the current forum in some way; which might even be impossible due to the outdated software that no one currently at GOG really know how to work with


A lot of that are probably things that GOG are not particulary keen on focusing on right now, especially due to development with Galaxy and let's be honest; a majority of all GOG users probably doesn't even use the forums at all. My guess is that if GOG were to do anything in relation to the forums it would be to remove it completly and find another way to post newsposts. Maybe keep the game-specific discussion boards in some manner.

Okay.... I have to pay $3 or share to sign a petition...WTF?

With schemes like this I'm really starting to question the OP's motives.

No you don't have to pay to use change.org.
BUT you can support change.org for running the website.

See also here
https://help.change.org/s/article/Membership-Program-FAQs?language=en_US

Pfft. Online petitions are as always totally useless.

Frankly, I'd prefer they'd just nuke the old completely and start from scratch. There's no real other way to fix this janky mess.

Signed. Personally, I believe that the best mechanism to adopt is as Park_84 described. This would still allow users to "reward" positive posts, and still ignore undesired content while at the same time removing the ability to abuse the downvotes. Actual spam, however, should be handled with a report function, as the ToS should be enforced by moderators and not end-users.

Signed. Thanks for doing this, finkleroy!

I'd be surprised if anything comes from this as there's been countless attempts to get them to address this in the past.

For what its worth, signed.

That's a bad idea. Often people come asking here about games, about the GOG version or even about what that DRM-free is all about. And since Galaxy 2.0 GOG isn't only for GOG buyers anymore.

You could write it and give it to someone who will post it ?

signed it, yet the number of signatures didn't increase. Is there a step I missed out on?

Same, maybe it updates every few hours ?

The problem isn't all that easy to fix, but i don't think rep should be there to start with.