Well, I don't really mean a lot of tags, just something like:

"[Betrayal at Krondor] [Technical color] Game-breaking bug?"

and

"[General] [no color] What's your favourite RPG?"

Without a way to efficiently filter threads, I can't see a larger genre-specific forum working. If it would be just like the GOG forums are now, only with several games bundled, I think it would be worse than it is now. The game-specific forums are already cluttered as it is, not discenring between technical issues, review, rants etc. and GOG's current search function is hardly helping.

No, it's breed HATE. Currently, there are about 5 politics/inflammatory threads in the first 10 pages of GD. The most recent one is a piracy thread (I take the blame for having kept it alive), on the third page. Then we have 9/11 and Berlusconi on page 4, Romney on page 5, and that's it. Point is, these threads die off.

In a separate forum, the HATE will multiply like E. coli does when [REDACTED] are in charge (heh). Furthermore, it will legitimize politics discussions. Imagine if we had a pony forum. As of now, there's one thread, 24 pages long, a month since buried, and a long-dead question. Open a forum and there'll be 100 threads within an hour.

I can't say I disagree with you. I try to stay out of them because they make me angry and cranky. But, GOG has decided to tolerate them. Since that's the case, I'd like them to be quarantined where they can't infect the rest of the subforum.

I don't agree with their decision to allow such talk on their commercial website, but I do understand and respect their reasoning.

FWIW, back in olden times here well before you signed up, we did have some remarkably civil threads on politics here. AFAICT, part of the problem is that the topics get very little in the way of moderation, even when they get into flamewars. And as a result they aren't as good as they used to be.

It might also have to do with the fact that GOG is now more popular, probably more people that join here because of the games and not to discuss politics. ;)

I agree though it's strange that they haven't even appointed a few upstanding members as moderators in case the blue ones are occupied.

Probably, but forum culture tends to follow precedence. I used to hang out on Fitocracy for a while and I was there when the whole place collapsed into a troll free for all. When I first got there people were generally pretty civil, but within literally 2 months of insufficient mod intervention the place became a festering sore on the buttocks of humanity. I don't even bother to check in there at all any more.

OTOH, sites that do enforce at least some level of decency tend to be able to have posts on pretty much everything. I know that GOG wants to have no moderating for moral reasons, but this is the internet and once inertia starts to take hold, it's very hard to get the site cleaned up again.

My thoughts:

Lock this forum entirely Leave it visible for about six months or so. But ultimately ditch it.

Replace with several more focussed forums, such as Non-GOG Games, Current Events, Forum Games & Competitions, Music, TV and Film and maybe a new General Chat one for everything else. That way, without one forum having 95% of the traffic the it should see a slightly more even spread of traffic as people are forced to switch forums as a matter of course anyway.

A giveaway-specific section would go a long way towards neatening everything up, as well.

It would be nice to have all those in one place. I like that they're there, sure. But they do have a tendency to drown out every other kind of topic (the kind I'm likely to be interested in).

From my experience even outstanding community members can err sometimes and as long as the discussions here stay civil there is not much need to moderate. The obvious limits are the limits of good taste. But for the time being I would say that the moderation system we have is sufficient.

If the moderators edit post because of personal issues it's the supervising moderators to do something about it but yes, I agree it's still sufficient.

I'm actually against splitting any forums up in any way as long as GOG doesn't provide a good (better) way of monitoring several forums at once, on one user page.

I'm happy with the General forums as they are. All threads are in one place, easy to monitor. If any thread needs special attention, I can favorite it. Splitting this forum up would make it less usable for me.