Sometimes doing what everybody else does makes sense. If all your friends are jumping off a bridge, it's probably a good idea to jump without asking too many questions. I mean, what's more likely, that all your friends went nuts at once or that there's a greater danger from not jumping?

perhaps .... however not everything has to be the same everywhere. It doesn't make it better necessarily, and you would then get people wanting to subdivide for a different reason. I still think my point about people not willing to go past page 1 is valid - at the end of the day if you are trully interested in various topics, no matter which site, you may have to go to page 2 or beyond :)

Huh?
What if all of your friends are members of The People's Temple?

I made a wishlist entry very similar to your suggestion many months (almost a year?) ago:

http://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/a_betterstructured_forum

Sadly it didn't get much attention so far. My general idea was to split the General Discussion area into three or four major divisions.

I have the impression that since then giveaways have multiplied in numbers. They seem to be more popular than ever and are flooding the forum. It's almost annoying by now. I still hope for a concept like the one I came up with in my wishlist entry, but at least give us a seperate division for giveaways.

The only thing flooding the forums are threads you have no interest in. That they are giveaways are incidental.

I think there was a disconnect. I never intended to suggest any form of censoring. Organization is not censoring. Anyone wanting to discuss off-topic content should be able to. I merely HIGHLY disagree that the place for such a thing is in the sole forum of a gaming site.

Yeah, I have very little interest in games/contests/giveaways that I don't create myself, should I ask for a separate place for "everyone else's giveaways" so that my place of interest isn't cluttered by them?

Organization often results in marginalization, intended or not, and I think it would be a poor move, from both social and business perspectives.

I think that rules are a clumsy, inaccurate and belated way to correct a error or an abuse.
I can't see many abuses, nor too many mistakes, so the community GOG works well "as is".
That said, I don't think there is the need of subsections.

Who said I have no interest in giveaways? I certainly didn't, because I have.

For the problem of shifting topic listings: The listing order only changes when you refresh the page, so I don't see it as much of a problem.

For the problem of stuff getting pushed to the 2nd page: Click the page 2 button. It IS there for a reason, after all.
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I said earlier that dividing GD into a general gaming discussion forum and a general misc(giveaways, offtopic threads, etc) forum would probably be a good idea.

(Also imo the individual game subforums should be consolidated into genres.....RPG/FPS/etc.[With an option to choose a tag symbol for a new topic that pertains to which game the thread is about.] That way it'd be more manageable. Of course it'd work even better this way if they fixed the search system.)
*missing the point*

Only if you see it, which is the problem. If you're on during the evening when everybody is on, then you can easily miss things. I know there are topics here that I don't see until they're 3 or 4 days old. At which point they would be buried under a ton of crap if nobody else noticed them

I think that is the same even if the forums were subdivided. People will always make threads that other people are not interested in / believe are rubbish, so you would still need to work a little to make sure nothing was missed.

I like the forums as they are. I don't have a major view on this topic either way, but I do have some thoughts. One of the best thinks about this forum for me is the discussion, on many topics.

I respect your view, and have been thinking about what you have been saying - my conclusion is that the only way to acheive the desired result without subdividing, would be to have an exclusion filter, so you could say show all threads except "xxxxx". I don't know how difficult that would be as I have no experience in the field.

EDIT - If you consider other websites such as reddit or youtube, I am sure there are some people that only look at 1 topic, ie load 1 page and only ever view that topic. I would be concerned if GOG was like that incase I missed something interesting to read. Instead of having 2 tabs for GOG, I would have 5 or 6, not that that bothers me greatly, my biggest fear is over possible fragmentation of the community.

We are, of course, discussing a hypothetical, as if GOG decides to change the site, none of us will be having much input. Like I said, it is these sort of conversations that make the forum good. When I can learn other people's point of view, and at times learn quite a bit as well :)