In the coming days we’ll be introducing a small change in GOG chat privacy settings - the default setting for chat conversations will be changed to "friends only”. The change will affect all new users, as well as those who have the chat conversation set to "anyone”. Users who have already switched the setting to "nobody” will keep their choice.

We decided to make this change to improve GOG users experience within the community. We receive more and more reports about unwanted messages, be it spam or scam, as well as some hostile messages from some users. We’re looking into those reports, and take strict actions towards those accounts, but changing the default chat privacy setting should fix the situation for users who would experience the issue before we can react.

The default privacy setting for new accounts will be changed today (Friday, July 7th). On Monday, July 10th, we will start rolling out the change for existing user accounts. This process can last for a couple of days, we will inform you once it's complete.

If you’d like to switch the setting back to "anyone”, after the change will take place, you'll need to go to your account privacy settings (https://www.gog.com/account/settings/privacy) and change the "Allow conversations with” option.

Small update for all of you discussing notifications here (e.g. friend requests, chat), as it was stated previously - our Top Men are working on it. :P Joking aside - it will come sooner rather than later. It will be a feature available for every user, of course.

Aaaand replies making me regret posting in the topic in 3...2... :D

Regarding the original topic - I think it's a better default too (as much as I'd love "anyone" as a default for convenience). Most of the users are not touching their privacy settings, and it was quite easy to scan through userbase to send spam (just look at the brave guys scanning our games database :) ). I'm surprised it didn't happen before.

It's not my area of responsibility. I can only ask you what would you propose as a mean of communicating it?
I meant MaGog, gog DB you mentioned, but also this scanning guy and e.g. SCPM looking for various ways to get sensitive/secret information about games that we add to database.

Forgot to switch it back. Should be all good now. Fire away!

That's sad. But you know how it goes. At some point, that's just what happens.