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General discussionGOG forums have to change (134 posts)(134 posts)
(134 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted April 30, 2023
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rjbuffchix: A million times no to any sort of update, modernization, etc. For those of us who aren't webdesigners or insecure crowd-followers, and who look at things from a functionality perspective, no website has EVER improved by updating to a "modern" design. Unless you count more data collection and targeted ads to you as an "improvement."
I agree wholeheartedly with your comments on changing the design.

At the moment, it's clean with minimal pictures (just the small ones next to the names) and no stupid fonts, gifs, flashing text, embedded pictures, animations etc.
Posted April 30, 2023
New messageboard software would cost money. Want new stuff? Spend money. They need enough to cover the labor, as well as the software. After that, you need to cover all of the aspirin they'll need for the huge headache. :)

What could they do besides use Captcha? I don't want to mess with that every time I want to post.
Post edited April 30, 2023 by DoomSooth
Posted April 30, 2023
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rjbuffchix: A million times no to any sort of update, modernization, etc. For those of us who aren't webdesigners or insecure crowd-followers, and who look at things from a functionality perspective, no website has EVER improved by updating to a "modern" design. Unless you count more data collection and targeted ads to you as an "improvement."

When GOG "improved" the front page of the site, it took years for me to even have it functioning halfway correct.

The spambots are mainly bad from an "optics" perspective, which is more nonsense that people should stop weighing so heavily in their assessments. I don't think anyone is actually clicking on the damn things, calling their whatsapp numbers, etc. In a few hours a mod is usually around to nuke the posts. It's really not that big a deal.

I would be in favor of solutions that do not change the forum itself but put restrictions on new accounts such as limiting topic creation/comment posts per hour/day. That said, that is probably not that viable, as a dedicated spammer could make accounts, wait a month or however long, then spam.

But, if there is no viable solution, I would still keep the forums as they are. Love potions, spells, educational opportunities and all.
You're so right. All those security upgrades that protect users data and prevent spam and the like are so unnecessary. They've never fixed anything by upgrading software. It's all a scam. /s
Post edited April 30, 2023 by paladin181
Posted April 30, 2023
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DoomSooth: New messageboard software would cost money. Want new stuff? Spend money.
But there are plenty of free & open source solutions.

What could they do besides use Captcha? I don't want to mess with that every time I want to post.
Throttle posting from new accounts, throttle new accounts from same IP or subnet (with more aggressive throttling when spammers have actually been detected from said net), filter out topics matching known spam patterns, use filters similar to email to assign a spam score and stick messages above a threshold in the moderation queue.. again with lower threshold for new accounts from typical spam regions. There are plenty of criteria you can use.

There are plenty of approaches, spam is nothing new. Also there is no silver bullet or free meal. Dealing with it is a part of the job for anyone who operates a forum/mailing list/any other place where random people can post. Not rocket science. It's always a balancing act between inconveniencing users and letting some spam through (as well as moderation effort). Imo the best solution for a serious commercial entity that wants to maintain a healthy community is to make sure there are active moderators who have effective tools to react to and deal with problems as they come up.

Captchas are among the laziest of solutions, and again not a silver bullet.
Posted April 30, 2023
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eric5h5: I was exaggerating a bit; not hundreds, but definitely far more than you can count with one hand. We're in the middle of yet another one right now, by the way. I only saw this topic because it happened to be right at the top. Not gonna wade through all that spam.
Yep, and from what I have seen it was a bit more not a lot more (event wise), so I still defend myself on that.

Further to that the following applied for me.

(1) I wasn't realistically expecting you to provide dates.
(2) I'd forgotten about the Spam Report thread, which I have never used let alone looked at, that I can recall.
(3) If I had remembered about it, I very much doubt I would have considered it worth looking at to get dates. When I have ever momentarily considered that thread, I just imagined it would be full of endless reports about spam from members when spam occurs, and that trying to dig anything meaningful out of it would have been a hopeless case. I certainly wouldn't have wasted my time like someone else did, digging a few dates up, though he helped cement what I claimed anyway, for the most part ... though I was clearly a bit low in my guessing. In any case I wouldn't have felt the need to go looking for dates, because I was only reporting what I had recalled seeing, as someone who is here very regularly.

Anyway, I guess we are just going to have to beg to differ. :)
Posted April 30, 2023
The only things I think the forum needs is an alert system beyond the limited "This is my favorite topic" and a way to make it so the text isn't so tiny and scrunched up in the center of the screen, but instead uses the full width of the window.
If I wanted the text narrowed, I'd use Windowed Mode and shrink the window to the width I wanted and the text is supposed to reflow to fit my window.
That is how HTML was intended to be used.
Also the font size used should be what is chosen in my browser preferences, not the tiny unreadable one correctly selected for me based on pixels instead of point size. 13px looks a LOT smaller on a 1600x900 screen than on an 800x600 screen.

The rest of the UI is good, and I like it over the pages and pages of sigs and pics of other forums.
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DoomSooth: New messageboard software would cost money. Want new stuff? Spend money. They need enough to cover the labor, as well as the software. After that, you need to cover all of the aspirin they'll need for the huge headache. :)

What could they do besides use Captcha? I don't want to mess with that every time I want to post.
Well, they could force people to use Captcha for the first couple weeks or the first couple dozen on-topic posts, then once they are proven to be an actual user and not a spammer/shill they can be removed from the captcha list.
Again, it needs to be a decent number of posts before removal.
Post edited April 30, 2023 by slickrcbd
Posted April 30, 2023
It's insane! Don't think I've ever seen a forum getting drowned like this in about 42 pages (logged off), at least not a game store like this!

Gotta wonder if GOG allows this to slowly and steadily push out as many as possible from the forum, and then just turn the forum off one night and hope no one notices it too much.

"Sorry, but you see there were so many spambots around us and so few real users, and we don't have the peoplepower to handle this".
Post edited April 30, 2023 by sanscript
Posted April 30, 2023
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Alexim: Absolutely agree, the 15th anniversary is approaching and it would be nice to have a real functioning forum and not this rotting carcass lying around.

Using the CDPR forums would be the perfect solution as it is already possible to log in with the same GOG account, but I'd accept pretty much any solution, as long as the old forum is archived and left accessible for reading.
That would be a great 15th anniversary gift to the GOG community! ;) I visited the CDPR forums not too long ago and it's good. As a bonus, it's also more mobile phone friendly than GOG's current forum (I sometimes like to take a peek at my peeps while at work).

I will admit though, I actually prefer GOG's non-intrusive aesthetic and grown very attached to its "clean" look/feel, but at the same time, I'm also quite bothered by many of it's broken usibility issues (such as dealing with a bot invasion). In the end, I guess usibility is more important than esthetic. Transfering to CDPR's forums could be a plausible solution. But a big stubborn part of me wants to dream in color and hope GOG would just patch up this old clunker and enforce some diehard implementations.
Posted April 30, 2023
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sanscript: Gotta wonder if GOG allows this to slowly and steadily push out as many as possible from the forum, and then just turn the forum off one night and hope no one notices it too much.

"Sorry, but you see there were so many spambots around us and so few real users, and we don't have the peoplepower to handle this".
Well, being Sunday in Poland, it wouldn't be too far fetched to assume that there's no employee with half a reason and a sliver of motivation to care about all this mess on a day off. I wouldn't say it's a premeditated tactic more than it's the result of piss-poor management, years of repeated exercises in negligence, and a skeleton crew who just can't be bothered because they probably have complained about it more than any of us ever could.
Post edited April 30, 2023 by Wirvington
Posted May 01, 2023
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arrua: An exception can be made with developer accounts. At the end of the day it is gog staff who give developer accounts their special "colors".
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foad01: I saw developers who had a fresh account to post in threads about their games and it looked like they just registered here.

From all the solutions I've read I think GOG should limit the number of threads for new accounts to one thread per day during the first week or month.
If Gog gave them one or two accounts from the get go (when they go through the process of hiring gog to sell their games), they would not even need to go through the nuissance of having to create them themselves.
Posted May 01, 2023
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ListyG: Personally I think requiring at least one paid game or limit posts would be good. Many other places do it. And concerns over how it may impact the store are overblown. Eg, this "Valve battles spamming and phishing by needing accounts to have spent $5" stuff has clearly had no negative impact on sales at all for Steam:-
https://www.eurogamer.net/you-now-have-to-spend-at-least-usd5-to-access-some-steam-features
Requiring purchases for forum participation is a clear cut away from building a community, such as it is, and to just using the forum to pass off support on the "community" to slash the need for paid and trained staff.

And I for one wouldn't have been able to post for 2.5 years after making the account.
Posted May 01, 2023
Having to buy a game without asking for a refund would be fine with me. Have to have some way to keep out the bots and riff-raff. Those people can FOAD.
Posted May 01, 2023
Looks like the current spam wave is over now.
Posted May 01, 2023
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rjbuffchix: A million times no to any sort of update, modernization, etc. For those of us who aren't webdesigners or insecure crowd-followers, and who look at things from a functionality perspective, no website has EVER improved by updating to a "modern" design.
For those of us who aren't worshippers of stone-age tech who are afraid of anything that's even slightly different, a million times yes to updating to a real forum. If you actually want to look at things from a functionality perspective, the GOG forums are a joke. Replying is garbage, quoting is garbage, formatting is garbage, notifications are broken, attachments are a joke, etc. I don't know 100% for sure what tools the moderators have, but looking at circumstantial evidence, the mod tools are also garbage. It's a bizarre and frankly ignorant reaction to assume that a modern forum somehow must have ads, blinking lights, animations, and so on. I'm on several that are pretty much just text and avatars. You don't seem to realize that proper forum software can be customized; it's not all hard-coded like the GOG forums. If the forum admins don't want extraneous bling, then there won't be any.
Posted May 01, 2023
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foad01: Looks like the current spam wave is over now.
If it starts up sometime in the next 24 hours apparently it's part of the same wave.
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussionGOG forums have to change (134 posts)(134 posts)
(134 posts)