I support the idea.

As opposed to the current situation where it's a bloody mess and nobody can find anything unless they know exactly what it is that they're looking for? I've had to go back several pages sometimes because I couldn't remember the exact thread title of a thread I was looking for. Separating these out wouldn't solve that, but it would reduce the number of pages I would have to sort through to get to what I'm looking for.

Also, I know you're from the UK, but segragation, is really not the term you should be using here. Unless, of course people will be banned from posting in some of the subfora or otherwise restricted.

Would be nice if there was at least a little more organized, but I don't think Mr. Gog should go too crazy. A nice start would be at least fixing the forum search.

You can mark the threads manually, by selecting the favorite thread checkbox on the right. Not as nice as what you suggest, but it is how I have been managing threads I am interested in.

I support the new categories, but please do not go overboard. And no yelling at people for accidentally posting in the wrong forum. Just have the mod move the thread and email the posters of the move.

This isn't really a high traffic forum, even now. Seriously, fair enough if you have no time to read GOG forums, but putting all that shiz into 5 forums that you have to check won't help. Seriously, it takes moments to scan the first page or two. Heaven forbid you feel like reading a 10 page thread if you're interested in one of those! That will take longer.

The reason people complain about the idea is because it makes the forums less usable, seriously, the first thing people do on new forums in create a crapton of subforums, you can find countless dead forums due to this and awesome subforums with 5 posts, last one 14 months previously. GOG does have an established userbase but, again, the forum posters aren't that big of a group (lurkers are probably far bigger). Regardless of whether one is a poster or a lurker one can probably make their way through the page to page and a half of threads that get replies or get created in the average 24 hour period without spending a whole ton of time.

I wrote this in another post that I posted here, but since it was part of a larger post, I'll post it again because I'd really like to see what you guys think of my idea.

I'm thinking that a nice compromise would be to leave the forum the way it is, let's call it the "main page". We could add a drop-down menu on top of the main page where you could pick from several subcategories, and when you do, only threads in that subcategory show up.

The only thing we'd have to do is require the OP to pick a subcategory for his\her thread as he\she posts it. Also, no subcategory will be picked by default, leaving the forum to show all threads as they are shown now, where the one that was most recently posted in is on top.

Would that be an okay compromise?

Yes it will, there'll be 3 subfora that I never check.

I'll repeat the suggestion I've made months ago: more balls.
The little colorful circles we have ? We could use more of them. Other than blue for news, orange for questions and green for everything we could make, say: violet ones for giveaways, red for general gaming, keep green for gog-related and add black for the "non-gaming" panopticum.
There could a side-bar with checkboxes for us to "filter by balls", or we could click on a given color to access posts only belonging to that particular ball.
Bonus points if you're colorblind ;P... stripes or different shapes could be added to fix this sort of inconvenience, though.

The problem with any of the forums I've been on lately is that they've put everything onto one page, and it becomes a freak'n click-fest to where you want to go. A very simple UI change in which your forum groups, and subgroups, hang out on the left of the page, while the particular subjects lie within the right would greatly ease navigating anywhere in the forums. On the first page, someone mentioned about wanting to ask about a particular game. With proper UI setup, some very basic DHTML, Javascript and CSS coding, and making sure the depth of subgroups don't go beyond two levels, navigating the forums to find what we want would easy as pie.

If the forums could be setup so that it looked more like an actual mail client, rather than static pages, I'd move right in.

The unconventional way the forum flows here is actually why I come and poke through the threads.

How about them hidden giveaways? The very notion of a giveaway subforum annoys me to no end.

IMHO, a sub-forum for giveaways / trading would make sense. Sometimes the first page is nothing but them. And perhaps another one for GOG-related news. Other than that, I don't feel they'd necessarily need to divide the forums into multiple ones. I can find the threads that interest me just fine with just a couple of clicks (first Page 1, then Page 2 :D) - more subcategories = more mouse clicks -> same information. But if we began to have separate forums for gaming talk and the things we're going to cook today, I think we've gone too far. I think they can both easily exist in the same sub-forum.

So, again:
GOG news
Off-Topic
Giveaways & Trading

those would be enough for me. And they even spell out the acronym GOG!

Maybe some tidying up would be a good idea , but I sort of like the forum the way it is really :)

I love the jumble, that way you stumble across some good posts you may not usually look for.

Hello!
Thanks to all of you who wrote their opinion. As I can see most of you think there should be at least some more forums instead of one big for all. Some of you say don’t make too many forums, and some say it won’t change at all, so get used to it.

You all are right. As we already have forums for the specific game question, it’s only about the “general discussion” forum. I also don’t want too many forums, so I tried to make only so much of them, that you are still able to tell in a second, where you should post or where you should look. Given these four forums I think it’s quite a good compromise. Since the meta topic is “Gaming” after all, I don’t want to split it. But giveaways are for sure a distinct forum (no one argues, or?). GOG-related stuff could be in a seperate forum, for all question concerning GOG specifically and not gaming in general. And last but not least, off-topic, which is simply off topic, i.e. not gaming. That is my suspicion, but what is the problem in opening three more forums? The forum software already offers these possibilities (see the 365 “game specific forums”). This is just of question of how to name them properly, make a how-to sticky in each one and there it is. Hell I could do this in 2h and everyone will be happy. GOG is just lazy it seems. Fine-grained? Maybe a false friend, I’m German …
You are well right, so I made very general assumptions. But they will help! I wrote it in the OP, the main gaming forum would only contain 40% of the topics, which would be a big improvement.

Yes, we can always give up fighting, that’s the laziest way. I don’t want to give up because I hate it having to search in a big swamp of non-related topics for the ones that could be interesting. It would be much easier if I was sure I only have e.g. gaming related topics and no giveaways, or the other way round: looking for a giveaway, just select the forum. Looking for off-topic? See there. Want to ask a question about GOG’s payment methods? Look into the GOG-specific forum. Sooo easy. And could be done in half an afternoon.

It’s not about less clicking, but about information filtering. If there was an intelligent filter program that gave me just all giveaway threads, I wouldn’t mind if all threads would be in a single forum. The point of forums is to sort all thos with similar meta topic into one place. That makes it easier to find what you search. It’s like having a clothing store with all trousers on the left and all t-shirts on the right. If they’d mix t-shirts, trousers and everything when there’s just space enough, the customers would need to search much longer …

But I see you agree with my four forums split. :) [Except I just would not make it GOG news only, but all GOG-related stuff and questions. For the news we already have blue orbs as a distinction.]