Hello!
Since this year I’m using the GOG forums quite frequently. Where questions and topics related to a specific game offered on GOG have dedicated forums, there is only one other forum for everything else. But here most topics are discussed, and it feels quite overcrowded.

Since the “General discussion” forum is part of a “General Forums” category, I question why there are not more forums, like 2 or 3 additional ones? There are more than 30000 topics in this forum. It couldn’t hurt to distribute them a bit. That would lead to way more overview, and topics would not fall over the first page if no one writes anything in 3 hours. I already set my forum view to 50 topics per page, but mostly every day I need three pages to just display all topics with changes from one(!) day. That’s … ridiculous.

There is already a wishlist item which covers this problem and offers as solution, to split the general forum into 3 (or 4) distinct forums. These would be:

• Common gaming topics, like “New Tomb Raider” or “It appears Lord British will present...”
• Specific GOG related topics, news and problems, like “Unable to add games to GOG mixes” or “NEWS: Special Promo: Pick 5 games. Save 80%”
• Giveaways and trading topics
• Everything else with no relation to gaming (AKA offtopic), like “What are you reading” or “New Pope elected”

In my opinion this split is not too fine granulated. I could say for every topic where it should belong. To test my hypothesis I made a snapshot (on Saturday). There were 131 topics (except stickies) from the last 24h. Split onto the four categories I got:
• Common gaming topics: 53
• GOG-related topics: 30
• Giveaways / trading: 30
• Everything else: 18

Now that looks better. Only 40% all of topics are in the interesting first category, so this would indeed give more overview about everyting. The rest is quite equally distributed and in most cases we could find the active threads of the last 2–3 days already on the first (50-items) page.

So all in all: please write many postings in this thread, and of course upvote the wishlist item. The longer this topic stands on the first page, the more people will realize that this forum is too cramped. And then maybe GOG will finally extend the forums.
Here the wishlist item: http://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/a_betterstructured_forum

I have very little f--king idea. I'd much prefer to at least have the Giveaways in another forum, because they're great to have here for people to enter, but I don't enjoy wading through the variety of titles that don't make it obvious right away that they're giveaways.

This would be so nice...

Well colour me pickled I wonder if it isn't one of the reasons GOG is hiring a web-designer and other expert personnel. Before they have hired these individuals nothing will happen so you can scream about till you are blue in the face. On the other hand when they are hired I am sure that this forum is one of the major priorities and at that point I am sure we all get a say in what we want and how we want it to look.

This topic crops up once a week it seems. Even if you take all the giveaways out, there will still be threads that do not interest you (i mean in general not your good self).

It comes down to this - if you split the forums because people do not like this, that or the other and they are too lazy to go past page 1, those people will still miss items they would be interested in on page 2 etc.

In my opinion adopting this suggestion would improve the forums for everybody.

granulated?

And genre subforums. Make them collections of topics related to specific GOG products, and allow tagging newly created topics with a GOG product, for ease of filtering/sorting.

It would make everything a lot neater. The user base has been big enough for the past couple of years to more than warrant a bit of categorisation of topics.

I think you're missing the point.

It seems to me that OP is saying that it's hard to know which threads are giveaway threads unless this is stated in the title, and that having a separate section for giveaways would eliminate this problem (because the section placement would tell you that it is a giveaway even if the title doesn't).
Whether this is what OP thinks or not, it is certainly how I feel about it.

If I may act as a devil's advocate for a second, I've seen other forums that are very segmented and organized like the OP is suggesting which makes it look nice sure but it can also make it quite confusing if it goes too far. I can just imagine logging in here with a quick question about Tomb Raider and 1st having to find the game forum, then the game help forum, then the action game help forum, then the action game windows help forum, then the action games windows Tomb Raider help forum before I can finally ask...NO...Not yet! TR 1,2, 3, LR, or Chronicals forum? Go to this thread if you are using a game pad. Go to this thread if you are using the keyboard. Go to this...FORGET IT! I forgot my question!

I always put the word "giveaway" on mine now after a person complained - tbh my general feeling is that no matter which format the forum takes, someone will moan about it, and there will still be the odd person that cannot count past 1 :(

Like I said in the previous discussion, we are discussing a hypothetical, as I cannot see GOG canvassing our views on changes they may / may not make. The lazier peeps would miss more if the forum is split as many would camp in 1 are, eg giveaways if they only want to grab games etc.

I will not mind if they make changes, I will still continue to explore the whole site, but that's just me :)

You are wise as always. People tagging what the thread is about in [ ] or the like be easier i guess?. I know for myself i like scrolling through the first few pages and adding comments into threads that interest me.I can understand the categorisation some want, but for me, i like it as it is right now.

There was also a similar discussion in this thread last month. (Not posting this to disparage the OP for making this topic).

I think there were some good points on both sides, whether to keep it all in one place or to split up the forum into a couple sub forums. I think too much fragmentation would be unfavorable, but I wouldn't be opposed to a "Gaming" forum and an "Off-topic" forum.

Hell, if we just made a "Random Off-Topic Thoughts" thread here I think the number of new topics per day would go considerably down. :P

In fact, I think if we had a few sticky or official threads for certain discussions or help-topics, it might organize the forum better. But that's not to discourage people from creating new topics.

it definately at least need the option to browse by poster, views, replies, date etc. other than that it dies fine as i often find myself reading a discussion that would otherwise be missed or ignored by me due to my tastes in gaming / offtopic stuff.