I can verify it works by my posts and threads used to disappear faster than I posted. It takes a few hits and it's gone.Hell,I may even be conversing with a past reporter and I don't care if you deny or agree as it's is plain abuse.

I think his point is, it used to, but does it still now or did they change it?

Honestly it's just a matter of time till there's more limitations. As long as there are avenues open for abuse the bigger GOG gets the worse it'll get, that's just how it is. "This is why we can't have nice things"

Another round has started.

Our bot today will be "ruparani". Please everyone welcome him.

I wonder why doesn't he just name them "baba-ji[insert number here]". I mean why bother finding names for them.

And my point is it still works and why would Gog change it as it's part of the rep system (abuse).

Unless they fix the account creation & verification system first that won't do anything. Limiting the number of new threads will just result in the spammers creating even more new accounts to inflict the same amount of damage. If fixing the account/email verification removes the spammers, great.

And a fair question at that. Steam's done this for a long time now. I say why not? I won't advocate subscription (which is greedy), but even if it was "from now on any new account will require purchasing or activating a game (which is not a freebie) in order to post in the forum". This ones-up Steam in that you can still receive a gift from someone and earn forum access that way (Steam demands that you buy something of $10 USD value from their store directly, not purchases from resellers nor gifts from friends).

Not to anyone specifically:
I call bullshit that a paywall is "unfair to new members". I don't know about everyone else, but I don't have a problem with a coffee machine at a car dealership being for customers only, so why is the thought that new accounts can't post unless they buy a cheap game here so bloody distasteful? GOG is a business that sells games, so go ahead and buy games and you gain access to a community of fellow GOG customers. Got a question about the store before you purchase? Search the forum for an answer and/or contact GOG directly with your question. Strikes me that a paywall will also reduce some members here creating new alt accounts as well for trolling etc. Food for thought.

Okay, fine, I'll expand more on the "make users pay for forum posting privileges" idea.

First off, a spammer this dedicated wouldn't stop spamming because there is some sudden paywall showing up. He'll just pay the small membership free. Knowing GOG, it could be one of those $1 games we have, which could be paltry to him for all we know. Even if it was $5, that seems like a small fee he's willing to pay.

Secondly, if you notice what they're doing recently, GOG's goals seems consistent with "bringing over as many users as possible." Galaxy brought over both users and developers who want to enjoy and develop that Steam-like experience and want it to be as consistent as possible everywhere. The freebies have brought and will bring over new people who may stick to the site (I know I'm one of these people, I joined for the Torchlight freebie years ago and stayed for the DRM-free games), and GOG Connect is their answer to capture the people who don't like steam and would like to move away from it. Demanding a paywall to the forums on these people is like throwing a wrench into the works. Steam could get away with it because of the perceived notion that if you don't like that, where else are you going to? Sometimes I end up seeing people consistently use "Steam" in places where "PC" would have made more sense. They're a monopsony or monopoly or whatever you see is more fitting, even with GOG and Epic clawing for market share. You want that Call of Duty game, it's Steam or die.

Naturally to deal with the second point, there should be little barriers to entry for the end user. No payment to access X features, you get to use them right away. No need to even get Beneath a Steel Sky to use them all, they're all available from the get-go. This way, if a user liked what they saw, they stick with GOG.

Imagine a scenario where GOG gives away Fallout 3. Being a Bethesda game, Fallout 3 is obviously buggy to no ends. The user checks the forums here but finds nothing about the critical bug he's facing, so he makes a thread to ask other people and nope, he can't, he's not a paying user. I can tell you he'll probably go back storming to Steam, complaining about the issue and how GOG is thinking of itself too highly. We already get these kinds of users on this forum, where we are able to tell them "no, it isn't that way and here's why," but over on Steam, barely anybody will rise to the defense of GOG (where it is rightfully deserved of course). GOG already has to deal with the whole "they're a pirate site" thing, they certainly don't need another issue to tar their image on top of the other issues.

Steam can afford a paywall to keep spammers out because they have all the users, and especially that rabid fandom which will defend them even when they are clearly wrong. Their attitude of "either you use it or get the fuck out" means they don't need to worry about new users. Or competition from other stores. With that entails the ability to screw over everyone with stuff like gifting restrictions and obscene region-locking even if the captive audience is kicking and screaming. On GOG, you can't count on a staying captive audience, in fact the whole strategy of GOG is that their audience is not captive and can walk out the door without GOG waving DRM at them.

And in the end, back to the first point, you can see that new users will be severely inconvenienced, but all the spammers have to do is pay a small fee for an account or two. Is this a trade-off GOG is willing to take?

TL;DR - the "Membership Fee" will ruin GOG's direction of attracting new people without doing much to solve the spammer problem.

Don't underestimate human laziness. If the spammer has to manually create 50 accounts to do the same amount of spam, he might just deem it no longer worth his time.

That would however require an account making process, that can't be automated. I don't remember how the process goes on GOG, but it should not be that hard to make it not "botable".

Spammers LOVEs free accounts. Get banned, make another free one. When it costs a bit of money, suddenly it's not really worth getting banned over and over. Captchas don't seem to work.

I really don't like it either. I think minimum purchase for unlimited postings should be the last resort.

Steam had to put a minimum purchase to cut down on forum spammers/chat bots. Only reason why steam bots are persistent are because of the marketplace/ player inventories there. Sheer number of accounts=make fake sites=sucker for a dollar; Never mind that the only legit site is the steam client/marketplace itself.

Gog move to reddit? No thanks.

I think account/email system could be more robust? Should reject verifying obviously fake made emails.

Forum spam should trip an alarm alerting a forum mod or something.

I like the minimum purchase idea spend x amount on the site, get posting privs. works for me.
and nothing I said earlier was "serious" hell there is even a "this is a rant" warning before. was blowing off steam and frustration. guess some people dont read.

Please no. That was the reason I stopped visiting IMDb. Having a specific subforum for each title in existence was something special. You could watch any movie or TV show, go to its forum and find a lot of opinions, questions and debates -recent or dating years back. Of course, there were trolls, but they I never had any problems to ignore them and focus on the good stuff.

The same thing happens to the GOG forums. Having a subforum for every game has given me the opportunity to be helped (and help others) several times, as well as taking part in interesting and fun discussions. And there is a lot of value in General Discussions too; sometimes things get derailed, but just like in any other Internet community, keep calm, don't feed the trolls and take your attention to good posts.

I suggested before that there should be a hide user function for each user to filter out users. It would help until staff could delete spam manually.

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This is to prevent abuse of that feature by those who dislike others to get rid of threads they dislike by hitting report enough times.

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I don't think nuke it from orbit" is the best idea possible.

Also imo IMDB had some good threads in it's forums, and it's sad they got rid of them.

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Yes, but would they pay more than what they make per account by spamming to be able to spam? If the return on investment ratio is skewed enough it would likely make this forum less of a choice target to spam for profit.

Also imo others are right......you can read forums or contact support for tech/etc questions if need be until you buy one game. To me this is fair and if people are here they should support the store anyways so this is almost a non-issue.

How is it a non-issue? You're inconveniencing newbies who are likely to use the forums and driving them back to the competition where they may have already paid the Membership Fee. If we put a $5 Membership Fee, so what, spammers now have to spend $5 to activate an account. If they're persistent about spamming, $5/account is peanuts to them. Just like how Steam Direct's $100 Membership Fee is peanuts to asset flippers, and that's a hundred bucks, not five.

And no, you shouldn't be looking at the forums but not being able to touch it, or only contact support. Reasons for this include:
- questions about modding; support isn't concerned with these
- technical questions; the community generally responds faster than support
- joining discussions; topics about how GOG is better than its DRM'd competition for example provides newbies with better insight into why this part of PC games is revered. A Membership Fee will just make it harder for newbies to understand what makes GOG users tick.
- offering tools; no faster way to increase visibility of your tool to GOG users other than to post on the GOG forums themselves. A Membership Fee not only means it's harder to make the GOG version of tools visible, it also make it harder for the people offering these tools to understand the GOG version of any game if they don't own it here.

If we accept the Membership Fee, we're simply losing to spammers, halting GOG's attract newbies strategy by scaring them off with it, the works. We've no better choice than to let the moderation team do its job. We can go months without spam, we just have to endure until they stop coming this round.

To me it's not a non-issue but close to one. People can send technical questions to support(there is a support option for games with regards to tech support), use the subforums to find solutions, etc. And if they spend on ONE games they get access to the forums for other stuff. To me this is fair.

As for spammers: I doubt they would spend so much per account to spam...they literally get paid pennies per post so it wouldn't be profitable for them if they had to keep paying to do so.

Maybe a compromise would work? Let people have access to a support forum for game support in general and/or the game subforums but not the main general forums until they buy one game?

To me that would be fair, and if people cannot handle that that's their problem...I mean why come here if you're not going to buy a game here?

I got a friend invite by a user called spamming_the_spam...