

high rated
Right, then. A lot of you have probably seen this before and are wondering why I'm reposting it. The reason is that I've gotten clearance from Fables this time to have it stickied. If anybody has any suggestions to add to the list or clarification to provide on certain points, please let me know. I'll try to keep this updated as best I can.

Howdy, folks. This here thread is a list of commonly-asked questions which newbies or members who haven't checked the forum in a while may be wondering. It's primarily aimed at new members (such as individuals who are coming because of Gwent, GOG Connect, etc.) to prevent endless threads/questions on the same issue. I remember when I first arrived here, and I certainly could have benefited from such a topic.

Basics/Getting Started
I'm new to the forum! What should I know?
- You should read the forum code of conduct, located here.
- This FAQ thread references less technical aspects and more common topics of the forum.

I don't feel like reading all this crap! I'm only here for a short while. Give me the bits I actually need!
- If you have a game-related question to ask, there are game-specific forums for each game in the store. If the forum is inactive, try asking in the main forum. If you made a question thread, please remember to mark a post as the answer.
- Before asking your question, check to see if it's already been asked before by searching followed by your keywords in Google.
- If you're having an issue with posting, try deleting the links in your post and checking the formatting of your tags.
- If you wish to see a game to GOG, do a search in the Community Wishlist. If there is an entry for it, you can vote for it. If there is no entry, you can make one yourself.
- If you have questions for the staff of GOG itself, please understand that the staff very rarely reads the forum. You will be more visible and would likely get a swifter answer if you click on the "support" tab instead and go from there.

What is GOG?/What does "GOG" stand for?
- GOG is a digital game store committed to selling DRM-free games.
- It was originally named "Good Old Games" in reference to the fact that it began with the goal of bringing quality retro games which don't work on modern systems or generally aren't available anymore to be available for purchase and play.
- It rebranded itself to just the acronym "GOG" after focusing more on modern and/or indie games to appeal to a broader audience.
- The store still continues to hold to its core values of DRM-free and retro gaming.

What is a PM?
- "PM" stands for "private message". It refers to the GOG chat system.
- If you wish to start a chat with somebody, hover over their forum avatar and click on "start conversation". If this option is greyed out, it's possible that their privacy settings only allow people who they've registered as friends to chat with them. It could also be that you've been blocked or that they've made their settings to disallow chat messages from anybody. The only way to find out is to ask the user and indicate your intention to chat with them.
- As of July 2017, GOG has altered the chat settings so that chat is restricted to "friends only" by default, even for old users who had it set to "everyone" before. If you wish to change these settings, go to "Orders & Settings" from your account tab, then click on "Privacy".
- The reason people tend to refer to the chat as "private messaging" is because the system used to work differently, somewhat of a paragraph-style private forum post setup rather than an instant messaging system.

How can I trade on GOG?
- GOG currently has no trading system implemented.
- Trading is possible via the forum. The trading thread is located here.
- In your post, explain what you have as well as what you're interested in.
- Directly trading a game for money is frowned upon. Consider asking what game the other party would be interested in, buying that for them, and giving that to them instead.
- An easy way to get somebody a game is to buy the game (or multiple games) as a gift, email that gift to yourself, and provide the other party with the code included in the email. If there are multiple games on the code, the giftee can choose what to redeem (see: "How does gifting work?").
- BEWARE OF SCAMMERS! While the community is friendly and open, there are some unsavory individuals who will attempt to take your games and leave you with nothing in return. If ever unsure about a deal, try asking the community itself what they think.

What is rep?
- "rep" or "reputation points" is the number located just underneath a user's avatar. Its intended purpose was to show how active or "involved" a person is in the community.
- The number increases 1 point per day for posting. You can also gain more points from receiving +1s on your posts or being marked as the answer on question threads.
- The number decreases when you receive -1s on your posts.
- You'll receive stars next to your rep number for hitting certain rep marks. You'll have 1 star at 25 points, 2 stars at 150 points, 3 stars at 450 points, 4 stars at 1,000 points, and 5 stars at 2,500 points.
- Neither rep nor stars gives you anything extra besides the number beneath your avatar in the forum.
Post edited September 06, 2017 by zeogold
high rated
Common Problems
Forum Issues
How can I find forum posts before January 1, 2015?
- Check the archives.

Why won't my post show up?
- This problem could be caused by a number of things.
- If you messed up a tag (for example, leaving out a bracket when making something bold), it won't process properly and give you an endless "Please wait. Processing..." message.
- Similarly, if you try to post a link from an account with less than 7 rep (see: "Why can't I post links?"), this will happen.
- If the post seems to have gone through yet you still can't see it, sometimes it came at a point which started a new page on the thread, causing a known bug whereby the new page will be inaccessible for a small period of time. The solutions for this are either to wait, or attempt to post again after a short while and "bump" the page into visibility.

Why can't I post links?
- This is an anti-spam feature in the forum put in place in order to ensure that bots do not sign up fake accounts for the purpose of posting links to scam websites. If your rep is less than 7, you cannot post links, and if you attempt to, your post will not go through (it may simply say "Please wait. Processing..." without ever actually doing so or closing the box where you're typing your post).

What is "regional pricing"?/Why do I see so many threads complaining about regional pricing?
- Regional pricing refers to the base price of a game being lowered or raised depending on the country.
- GOG "gives back" the price difference to customers who buy these games by adding the difference to your GOG Wallet (store credit which can be used towards other games).
- The community of GOG is somewhat divided on the issue. Generally, people who can buy the same game at a cheaper price on Steam (such as Canadians, for example) tend to be the most upset.
- Another reason that this issue tends to be a point of contention is because one of GOG's original core principles was to ensure regional pricing never entered the store.

How do I lock a thread?/How do I change my thread title?/How do I delete a post?/How do I change my username?
- All of these actions, among others, can be performed by asking one of the blues to do it for you (see: "Who are the 'blues'?").
- If a thread has gotten out of hand or breaks the forum rules, it will sometimes be automatically locked by one of the blues.

How do I add friends?/How does friending work?
- You can request to be friends by going to the friends section of your account.
- Click on the button marked "invite new friend" and type in the username of the person you're looking for, then click "invite" next to their name.
- You can also request to be friends by placing your cursor over somebody's avatar to the left of one of their forum posts, then clicking on "invite to friends".
- Pending friend requests can be found at the top of the friends section of your account.
- You cannot send a friend request to somebody who has blocked you.
- Please understand that the forum community is generally averse to receiving friend requests from strangers or adding friends for the sake of having friends. It would be wise to get to know somebody before sending a friend request.

Why aren't I getting notifications?
- Ever since the new navigation bar was added (in April), notifications for chat messages, friends, forum replies, and game updates have all ceased to work on the website.
- Using Galaxy somewhat alleviates this issue, although bugs have still been reported.
- This section was last updated on July 8, 2017, so the information here could be outdated.

Store Issues
Can I use my G2A keys here?/What's wrong with G2A?
- Keys bought on G2A generally do not work here.
- False GOG keys are often sold on G2A and the site is generally frowned upon here. It is advisable not to buy GOG keys from G2A.

Why won't my review show up?
- Please be patient. Reviews can take up to a few days to appear.
- If your review hasn't appeared after 3-4 days, contact the staff or support for assistance.

How do I edit my review?
- As of yet, reviews cannot be edited manually.
- If you wish to edit a review, contact the staff or support for assistance.

How do I get a Steam key for my game?
- GOG does not give out Steam keys. No such option is available.
- The closest equivalent is GOG Connect (see: "What is GOG Connect") which in fact works the opposite way in that you can get a GOG version of your game if you already have it on Steam.

How do I get the game I want on GOG?/What is the Community Wishlist?
- If you wish to see a game come to GOG (assuming you haven't made it yourself and are attempting to submit it), your best bet is to make an entry on the Community Wishlist.
- This is GOG's system for gauging interest in things to bring to the website and the Galaxy client.
- Go to the appropriate section, then do a search using the bar on the left for your desired game or feature.
- If there are no entries for it yet, you can make your own.
- Please keep in mind that the Wishlist is currently in beta, meaning there may be bugs and other issues.

How does gifting work?
- While the suggested method of inserting a friend's email is an easy method, you can still give a gift without knowing the recipient's email address.
- Enter your own email and you will be sent a code which can be redeemed here. This code can be given to whomever you desire. People on the forum often use this method for giveaways (see: "How do giveaways work?") and trading (see: "How can I trade on GOG?'').
- You can access all gift codes from your order history page.
- If there are multiple games on the code, the recipient can pick and choose what they want to redeem. In this manner, the same code can be given to multiple people.
- Beware that gifting via credit card or PayPal is disabled on new accounts until 3 months after you have spent at least $10 on your account.
- You also may not purchase the same game as a gift more than once per day, nor may you make more than 5 gifts per day.
- The price of a gift will always be equal to the game's US base price or higher. Thus, if you attempt to gift a game that has a lower-than-base price in your region, its price will be increased to the base one.

What is GOG Connect?/Why isn't GOG Connect working for me?/What happened to GOG Connect?
- GOG Connect is a service employed by GOG which allows you to link your Steam account with your GOG account and subsequently get GOG copies of the Steam games you own. At varying times, usually indicated by a news post, you can go to the GOG Connect page, located here, and follow the instructions on the page.
- GOG Connect games are not available forever. After a set period of time, you can no longer redeem whatever games were being offered on your GOG account. The deadline should be mentioned in the news post which has indicated what GOG Connect games are available. If not, it is possible that the staff has not assigned a deadline yet. Contact support or a staff member and ask.
- If GOG Connect is not working, please check that you have followed ALL instructions on the page and checked the FAQ. One commonly-overlooked issue is that people fail to set their Steam profile to "public" (there is a section the left of the page which indicates this, in pink. It was not originally pink, but was made so after numerous cases of this happening). This has to happen so that the program can check your library and see whether you own the available games or not. You may set your profile back to "private" afterwards.
- If GOG Connect is STILL not working, it is possible that the servers are having an overload of users at the moment. Be patient, and try again later. If the deadline is approaching soon and you are still having issues, contact support and let them know about your situation.
- If there are no games available, check to see whether the deadline on the games has passed. If so, there will be nothing available until the next offer. GOG Connect has not necessarily been abandoned. Sometimes there can be a few months in between offers.

Can I remove a game from my account and give it to somebody else?
- Generally, no. There is no method for doing this and the staff will not allow it if asked.
- The only exception is if you bought the game recently (within around 2 weeks) and haven't downloaded it. If this is the case, email support and ask them to convert your game into a gift code, which you can then give to somebody else.
- You can also ask them to give you a refund and convert the game into Wallet funds instead.
Post edited July 09, 2017 by zeogold
high rated
Trivia/Forum Culture
How long has the forum been here?
- It has been around since the launch of GOG. The first ever post was on July 11, 2008, a news post by the staff. The first ever non-staff post was on September 8, 2008.

Can you give me a general impression of the people on the forum?
- The forum is made up of primarily 25-55-year-olds, leaning heavily on the middle-aged or older side of the charts. The political views tend to be a fair mix of conservative and liberal. There are people from all over the world located on this forum. Most users here are friendly, although you should judge each individual for yourself.

Who are the "blues"?
- The "blues" refer to the GOG staff.
- They get this name due to the fact that whenever a staff posts in the forum, their text is blue to distinguish them from normal forum users.

Who is Judas?
- "Judas" commonly refers to JudasIscariot, one of the most prominent staff members on the forum.
- He is known for being generally very helpful and performing tasks which fall outside of his job description. He is often the go-to staff member for forum problems.

Who is Fables?
- "Fables" commonly refers to fables22, the current community manager of the forum.
- She joined in the month of November in 2016 and has since worked to set up rules and moderation on the forum. There was little to no moderation for a few years before this.
- Her favorite color is green.

What is "The Keaning"?
- "The Keaning" refers to an event which happened during a GOG Insomnia Sale promo. In the Insomnia promos, there is typically one game discounted at a time, with the game changing after a certain amount of copies of the previous game are sold. When the discounted game became Jack Keane 2, it sold so slowly that the promo was stuck on it for a very long time.
- The Keaning resulted in lots of fake/joke reviews appearing on the page for Jack Keane 2 in a mock/humorous attempt to get people to buy the game and stop the promo from stagnating.

What is the "Good News"?
- This term refers to the introduction of regional pricing, as covered here. In the announcement, GOG referred to this as "good news", when it is looked down upon by a large number of the community (see: "What is regional pricing?").
- The term is now used mockingly by forum members whenever a perceived negative change appears to be coming to the website.

What does "too niche" mean?
- This term refers to GOG's responses to many developers whose games have been rejected by GOG's game curation team.
- The term was used so often that it became a running joke in the community.

What is "Mafia"?
- Mafia, also known as Werewolf, is a popular game which you may see on many forums. It is particularly popular on this one.
- It consists of two teams, the townspeople and the mafia. The mafia know who each other are, but the townspeople don't know who anybody is. The goal of the town is to "lynch" the mafia members during the day, and the goal of the mafia is to kill enough townspeople during the night that they overpower the town in votes.
- For more info about forum Mafia, check the MafiaWiki.
- If you are interested in joining a Mafia game here in the GOG forum, check the Mafia thread.

How do giveaways work?/What is the "giveaway culture" on the GOG forum?
- The GOG community tends to be extremely generous. As a result, many giveaways often spring up around the forum.
- It is common courtesy to first read the OP and fully understanding what needs to be done before asking for a game.
- Be sure to thank the person who gave you and/or donated the key, whether through a post or via PM (see: "What is a PM?").
- There are many wonderfully creative ways to make a giveaway yourself.
- In order to make gifts to give away, simply make your purchase as a gift to your own email. You will receive a code that can be used by anybody at the redeem page (see: "How does gifting work?")
- If there are multiple games on the code, the person receiving it can select only the game or games they want and add those to their account. This way, the same code can be given to multiple people.
- You can also contribute to another person's giveaways, or one of the ongoing Community Giveaways.
- The Community Giveaway is a series of large giveaways which have been successively hosted by users trentolf, IAmSinistar, and moonshineshadow. They have been extremely popular due to their being contributed to by the entire community, a central "hub" giveaway of sorts.
- All Community Giveaways are currently defunct except for an offshoot, "The Community Giveaway - Steam Edition" hosted by user zeogold.
- Zeogold is currently collecting GOG keys with plans to re-open the Community Giveaway.
- Giveaways are commonly announced here.

What is Barefoot Essentials?
- Barefoot Essentials is a Tampermonkey/Greasemonkey script for your browser made by user Barefoot_Monkey that provides several enhancements for using the forum.
- Some of the functions include restoring the currently-broken notification system, helping to identify bumped topics, splitting giveaway threads into a different category, and allowing you to import your GOG library into a GOGWiki account to display to others.
- You can find the script, along with more information, here.

Stuff I could use help on:
- I don't know enough about the scripts in here to reliably write up a section on them. They're quite helpful and deserve to be mentioned, but I feel like if I try it myself, I wouldn't be able to provide much more information than "Well, these exist."
- Is the whole scandal about rep worth mentioning? It's definitely something new people should learn doesn't matter, but I don't want to bog the thing down with too much negativity.

Note to self to add:
Add information about scripts
Post edited July 09, 2017 by zeogold
zeogold: Bring your helpful suggestions
Scripts. Adalia Fundamentals, Barefoot Essentials and Gog no rep.

Edit: gogrepo.
Post edited April 20, 2017 by JMich
nice one! Cheers
Giveaways by community members are often announced here.
low rated
zeogold: Bring your helpful suggestions
JMich: Scripts. Adalia Fundamentals, Barefoot Essentials and Gog no rep.
I think you forgot one. :P
tinyE: I think you forgot one. :P
Indeed, gogrepo. Thank you for reminding me.
tinyE: I think you forgot one. :P
JMich: Indeed, gogrepo. Thank you for reminding me.
Joke missed :P
Friends and "lol buddy friend me" threads.
"Good old games" and release stats.
"where is my steam key"
Starmaker: "where is my steam key"
Is this legitimately a thing?
low rated
Starmaker: "where is my steam key"
Plokite_Wolf: Is this legitimately a thing?
nothing she posts is legitimately a thing. :P

she can only see about half of the people who posts in here which makes her take on forum activity limited at best.
Post edited April 20, 2017 by tinyE
Just one minor nitpick:
zeogold: What is "The Keaning"?
- The Keaning resulted in lots of fake/joke reviews appearing on the page for Jack Keane in a mock/humorous attempt to get people to buy the game and stop the promo from stagnating.
The game was Jack Keane 2.
Starmaker: Friends and "lol buddy friend me" threads.
"Good old games" and release stats.
"where is my steam key"

Plokite_Wolf: Is this legitimately a thing?
Sadly, yes.

Want might to add "This is not Steam?!"
Starmaker: "where is my steam key"
Plokite_Wolf: Is this legitimately a thing?
It happens. Shockingly many people don't know what a file system is or what to do with installers and still operate computers somehow.

(I don't blame them. Most people, including me, don't know the first thing about how drugs work, and yet they keep popping pills. Now that "app stores" reduced the need to interact with files, fewer people know they're even a thing. This sort of selective ignorance is not a moral failure in general, it's bad in the specific because people are getting scammed, legally fleeced, and locked out of productive jobs.)