http://www.gamesbrief.com/2009/12/whats-the-best-way-to-build-community-delete-your-forums/

When the average forum seems to have a community primarly made up of thousands upon thousands illiterate 13-18 year old morons, I could see why that might seem to be the best course of action. But then it wouldn't really be a community; just a customer communication device.

Yep GOG should start hazing new members.
I suggest a course of light spanking before covering oneself in jam and then taking a picture of yourself and showing the community. If your buttocks are suitably rosy and jam covered, your in.

Soooo... Having random people following you on facebook and reading tweets is a community? And I don't see a difference with the blogging and youtube stuff, it's basically forum when no one can create new topics :D

Forums are the only community, blogs with comments are a poor substitute and twitter isn't even a valid contribution (how useful can it be when you have to split vitriol fuelled rants into 140 character chunks). Twitter and comment based systems are dumps, forums are dumps that have a bit of organisation to them
GOG doesn't need hazing, it already has a strong filter for forum membership, requiring that users are capable of looking beyond graphics and realising that games from an era where supercomputers were less powerful than an MP3 player MIGHT not be quite as pretty as crysis 2

This person is trying way too hard to prove their point, and yet, ends up not having one. They actually say very little about why a forum is a bad idea; the core complaint here seems to be that established members can be xenophobic, followed by some nitpicking that strains credibility in the "Is that all that’s wrong with forums?" section.
The article is pretty haphazard, but what I got out of it is that the author is conflating building a community with gathering direct customer feedback. These are two different things.

I think his point is summed up quite well at the end where the site encourages you to follow them on Twitter.
Twitter works well for things like emergency broadcasts like telling them when servers will be going down or telling people when a new Patch or DLC is now available to download. Twitter will however never replace good old fashioned Whine and Butthurt which is what forums are for.

"Forums are ugly. That may just be personal view, but I have yet to see a forum that is easy to navigate, easy to search or pretty to look at."
I'd have to say that the GoG forums are pretty aesthetically pleasing.

I think the main factor for a forum working without much of a hitch is maturity and civility. Using game forums as an example of forums not working to build communities is silly when the element your game attracts happens to be angsty, competitive teenagers shrouded in anonimity and allowed to do whatever they want.
GOG's forums has it's dose of kids and teens but it also has a large dose of adults. Newbies aren't treated as harsh as in other forums, and even when they make their first post be the classical "this game should be on GOG!" thread, apart from a few jokes and pointing them to the Wishlist, there's not much flaming going on.
Edit: I don't visit forums for their beauty.

Me neither, but I tend to avoid those that insult me for having sight.

I first started using the Internet in 1999, I've been a member of a number of forums some of which are still going, some of which have went under, some of which I have stopped going to for a number of reasons.
I'm a moderator at 2, in addition I also go to four other forums regularly and a few others semi regularly. The one rule that is universal. No two forums are the same, that article is painting a really broad picture of all forums. Sure, forums with no moderation can get heated, but it depends on the maturity of the members. GOG is unmoderated as far as I see but we're all fairly civil. One of the ones I'm a mod at has a number of rules that have evolved through the years (I've been a member there since 1999) largely through necessity, but even then, people don't get banned just 'because we don't like your face', you really have to do something pretty bad to get banned.
Really it all depends on the community, some can be elitist if you haven't got a certain postcount, or didn't join before a certain date, but thats the minority in my experience.

Maybe this guy has only been to places like the World of Warcraft forum. There are a good number of forums that are well organized and well moderated. Company announcements are also clearly visible if they are stickied, and important threads are usually still active.

Considering we don't have much in the way of visible moderation (GOG folks very relaxed about us doing our own thing on here), these forums are generally of very high quality.
It probably helps that it's a niche market, plus there aren't too many of us on here.
Certainly, the only forums I've seen that are as good as this one tend to be similarly small forums (the Abandonia forum, Grim Dawn forum etc.).

GOG forums are great! I dont consider them regular forums nonetheless. They are much nicer. : )

Let me remind you about a few of the many evil acts that have been done here.
Stealing candy form babys,killing paladins,poisoning new members,burning someone alive, light a building on fire,destroying someones hope and dreams,that evil cult,just pain killing someone.just to name a few.