[Smiling Spectre]

Originally Posted by oldskoolgamer

Ok, since I'm not a regular visitor here I didn't know things were that bad. Still, one would expect that the person who kills one link would at least look at others on the same page

Wrong. It's one thing to find game page in browsing and put it into "sold" state (one tick, actually), and totally another is to read review, found link mentioned in it, and found another links for forum and extras. You need to actively search for it, because it's not the common practice to have game links right in the review - I am personally translated about hundred of reviews, and never seen it before. It also requires the different access levels in the different places, actually. (Status can be modified with "translator" level, extras - by full mod, and forum requires forum mod access).

More importantly, does this sort of oversight not leave the site open to action?

Yes, it is. But as it was never a real problem before, we was slightly more relaxed than it was safe. And actually thank you to draw our attention to it.

Right, so first and foremost, was GoG making a simple polite request or demanding a takedown on legal grounds, i.e. with a DMCA notice?

You are having slightly wrong picture, as I see.

1. Site was sold to Studentis then Abovo long ago. They are owners, and they benefits from site. And it was _their_ decision to kill review. I have no idea, if it was request or takedown - Abovo answered to Japo about copyright notice only when he asked what happened.

2. All people who you sees here are community. We have no money for our job, no credits and no authority, except those indirectly granted by Abovo. On the opposite site is Abovo itself that does almost nothing for site, except hosting it. Errors in engine persists for years, and communications are clogged. So don't be surprised that mods here are not exactly devoted to the job.

Maybe it's time to appoint some passionate dependable community members as new mods...

Problem is, site is very messy in its code and its access levels. I personally had to spend about month to fix the whole tag structure of site after it was accidentally destroyed in two hours by the simple careless translator, without much access rights - and I was horrified, because in reality there was hundreds of obsolete and duplicating tags just because of routine translator work. Also, after some error (and no one knows which one) link connection was broken altogether, so now any modification in English tag system automatically destroys all tags in all translation. And no, while Abovo knows it for years, it wasn't fixed so far. So it's very dangerous, unfortunately, and while passionate mods could be good for site, we are not telepaths to easily found such mod, and any error here can be fatal. :/

That said, with a site of this nature you must admit it is permanently on slippery ground anyway. Just as happened with UG, the same can happen any day here no matter how careful you try to be

Yes, of course. But it's like miner work: if you have the chance to be blown up in the any hour of your work, it not means that you must be careless and ignore safety altogether.

Thanks for reading and good luck with the site!

And thank you for seemingly understanding the problems.