Less than a month after I joined, there was this thread in one of the subforums where people started attacking Muslims, and then the Muslims started attacking gay people. That's one of the few threads I've ever seen locked for bad behavior.

Sooooo I'd say the halcyon days are a lie and people have always been terrible. But I love you terrible bastards and she-bastards with all my heart, and I recognize the right of early GOG forum adopters to yearn for the days of yore before the rest of us came and wrecked the place. After all, that's half the fun of being a forum old-timer.

slow downhill sloop since late 2010 accelerating in pace ever since,

I went form visiting everyday posting in about 70% of the chats going on to logging n 1-2 times a week and rarely posting at all.

The price of increasing popularity i guess.

The more people there are on the forum the more likely there'll be clashes.
You don't even need to have made a salty or negative remark in order to be met with rudeness, simply responding to an OP's statement is enough to invite mockery, even from the OPs him/herself. They should be glad someone took the time to read their post, let alone leave a comment.

The migration of certain Steam gamers into GOG is another explanation, as the forum posts here have started to look more and more like those on Steam.

As mentioned, I think it is simply a matter of the community expanding. I suppose 1 out of 10 classy and high-minded topics are easier to find and remember than 100 out of 1000.

Some time between when I joined and when tinyE joined .

since i started my activity on the forum more than 1 year ago with this thread, i experienced most of the shit. the rest came about one month later. so all the "shit" was there over a year age and i guess even much longer.

the only new annoying thing that came up shortly before the witcher 3 got released, is probably one fucker/user that stalks the forum, downvotes every post that is critical against gog and futher posts of the same user in the thread of critic post. even reasonable and not offending posts criticizing gog get downvoted till they're red. i'd love to beat the shit out of that fucker.

No, no, no. It's sunday. Time for a "Y NO OLD GAMES?!" thread.

The 17th. At 10:48 a.m. to be exact.

When Steam started offering refunds...........

I <3 GOG with all of its miscreants and misfits.

It turned to shit when the Bradys went to Hawaii and Greg jumped over that shark.

Couldn't have said it better. We certainly have seen a change of demographics. Now, it is what has been so disruptive? Or is it the cumulation of a) on one side GOG not caring that much anymore about the community and b) GOG's extension making it more attractive for stalkers. / scammers to prey upon ?

One word, which is basically the ultimate guiding law of our existence....Entropy

There was definitely a period where things where good. But that wasn't right at the start. In the beginning there were the NMA bile fountains poisoning the forums' waters amongst other similar bigoted individuals stamping their metaphorical feet about every issue that doesn't really warrant that much passion in the first place.

You could argue that things have gone too much the other way. I don't know. But maintaining the balance between caring to an almost dictatorial degree and not giving a fuck is a hard one to maintain. We as a species have a tendency to swing like a pendulum from one extreme to another, completely ignoring the vastly superior middle ground time and time again. Addiction to the extremes is our biggest failing.

No, I've figured it out before already: it's the other people.