text:
Bug: Cannot Use Chat When Over the Required Rep Amount
Edit: This issue was fixed at 20:32, July 01. No one knows how or why.
I have previously used chat (this morning in fact) and all the sudden, I log on and cant use it! I have over 110 reputation, and even more network-wide.
I have some pictures:
The GD.SE header:
https://i.stack.imgur.com/54PiG.png
The error message:
https://i.stack.imgur.com/kDDSS.png
all of my accounts on SE
https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZM95j.png
My chat account (in @ToddersLegrande's answer) was at 0 rep, but now it is 178.... I have no idea why.
Thanks to anyone who can help!
Edit: I just noticed that the 178 rep amount that i got is the combined amount of rep of all of my SE accounts, 111 from GD.SE, 52 from SO, 11 from The Workplace, 3 from Code Review, and 1 from Robotics. - 20:08 EST, July 01

Just for some basic troubleshooting (feel free to try again after each step): Restart browser; Clear cache/cookies on browser; Restart PC; - Just want to rule out the obvious here.

@ToddersLegrande hey man! i tried all of those :P none of them helped. Code and I were talking about this on the Google Hangouts

Try a different browser too maybe...

i shall, probably IE @ToddersLegrande

It's clear that the chat site is just defending itself from the overuse of stars.

Possibly related: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/136368/other-stack-exchange-accounts-are-not-shown-in-my-profile

Just did some spot checking and seems nobody has a profile right now. Still could be related at the root of things but I can't make a correlation as to why the chat issue only affects some users and how the chat issue can be fixed while this is still a problem... :|

@ToddersLegrande i have a new pic, its so wierd..... My chat account said my rep is 178 on GD

I've actually had a similar problem now that I think of it.
Chat.StackExchange Reputation Bug?
The mods were able to force refresh my account but I was able to get around it by switching my chat profile's parent account to a different StackExchange site and then back to GameDev.
Your chat account is here: http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/75273/theprogramm3r
There should be a [change] link right by the parent account field. See if that works for you.

** Assuming it was appropriate I would add the below details to the question if I could edit **
JohnMcdonald disappeared around 9:18PM chat time
JohnMcdonald reappared around 10:27PM chat time reporting similar problem as reported in the question
John reported the following details regarding what he noticed around the incident:
Available:
Rep on Gamedev; Check votes on Gamedev (needs some rep); Account on GD.SE, SO, and others; Chat on SO only
Not Available
Chat on anywhere except StackOverflow (sites affected included GD.SE and Arquade)
"Logging out and in didn't work, clearing cookies didn't work, using a different browser didn't work. I just had to wait 1 hour then everything was back to normal ... I was in chat at the time. I sent one message, and within 5 seconds, I tried to attach an image and it failed because I didn't have rep."
John reported that his network displayed exactly like the following image and was still displaying the symptom, though chat was now working. I have confirmed that TheProgramm3r's network profile is having the same issue as of right now.

John was unable to confirm whether or not his chat profile showed zero reputation

thanks. ill try that!

i have to go to dinner now, so ill be back in >2 hours. tnx!

Yup. All true. Very strange. Usually clearing cookies works, but not this time.

@JohnMcDonald yeah.
@ ToddersLeGrande still wont work :P Get on it SE employees!

Try again. Your chat rep came back. Log out and back in maybe?

its 178 tho... i only have 111 rep on GD.SE. I saw the test tho, but still cant post a message

Unfortunately I am out of ideas :(

Also, it's combined rep so the number there is correct.


text:
Page not found image... not found
The image that's supposed to show up on the "Page not found" page is missing:

Maybe it's just Chrome, but the image is sitting on a server that's different enough from stackexchange.com, it doesn't like it, when accessing the image that's supposed to be there:
https://sstatic.net/gamedev/img/404.jpg
This is what Chrome says:

Anyway, it's a minor thing, but it might happen with other things that are more important if they're similarly hosted on https://sstatic.net/gamedev/

Happens with Safari as well.

Works for me on Firefox, Chromium and Luakit. The image is loading from https://cdn.sstatic.net/gamedev/img/404.jpg and I get no warnings when visiting it. The SSL cert is valid and issued by GlobalSign nv-sa on 30/05/2013.

I have the same issue on a default chromium, but only when following the https link given in the question. The default page image displays fine on the not found page. This site appears to be broken for https sstatic.net identifies itself as *.stackexchange.net (or so the error message tells me), and this causes the issue.

This was changed to status completed and now appears to work as intended. Apparently by no longer using https.

Well it wasn't working for me at first, but after I went to https://sstatic.net/ it gave me that Chrome warning just like in your picture, and after I clicked proceed, it started working for me. If you read the error it says it's a server problem.
Just like with Self Signed SSL certificates, it is most likely an anti fishing protection. (Gone wrong in this case)
Here is what I get:

Yep, I had the same experience after allowing the site.

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

sort: votes


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What should we use chat stars for?
In the chat, messages can be starred by clicking the little star icon to the right of each message. The tooltip for this star is "star this message as useful / interest for the transcript." Messages thus starred appear in the right panel of the chat room UI, beneath the room and user information sections, sorted by some combination of the number of stars, message timestamp, and whether or not the star was a regular-user star or a room-owner's "pin" type of star.
Recently, I've noticed a significant increase in the number of starred messages that have little or no value to the room as a whole or to its transcript. In my opinion, one should only star a message that is broadly applicable to the topical interest of the chat room. For example, this message, this message, or this one.
Conversely, messages like this, or this, or this or this are messages that have little or no topical value whatsoever. Or they don't mean much taken out of context. Here is the full list of stars in our chat.
So, per a discussion in chat earlier today, I'd like to get the thoughts of the rest of the community on this particular subject? The consensus on MSO seems to be that since high-starred posts push low-starred posts off, the problem will be corrected via community moderation, but that doesn't appear to be the case given our relatively low chat population (or my opinion is in the minority).

You should move your opinion about it out of the question and into an answer.

Good idea. Done.

I use the star board as a shared bookmark list. I like to see:

Interesting/funny one-liners that can be read out of context, preferably gamedev or related to programming (eg. this, this, and this)
Links to gamedev articles/pages ranging from kickstarter to postmortems to pathfinding
papers (eg. this, this, and this)
Links to videos about gamedev (eg. this, this, and this)
Notable content from/links to your own game (I don't star them all, but once in a while). Screenshots, videos, release, kickstarter, steam greenlight, etc. (eg. this, this, and this)

Informative or funny gamedev related content that is useful to the community. Note that a number of my example stars aren't serious, and I don't think they need to be, BUT they should be readable out of context. If it's a case of "you had to be there", don't star it. Stars like #thatshowiroll don't help anyone and push useful stars off the board (thanks for unstaring that @Josh).

While I basically feel the same exact way, I don't know a good way to objectively determine what would fall under the interesting/funny one liner category and its basically the only reason I haven't written my own answer - I don't have a solution. I guess that's technically where the "higher voted stars get more visibility" comes in but it doesn't really prevent users from starring bad stuff. I guess that I would hope adding the "that can be read out of context" stipulation would help weed out most of the garbage.

Yeah, I'd say the ability to read a star out-of-context is more important than keeping the stars on-topic, within reason.

It's my opinion that stars (because they are public) should be reserved for broadly-applicable, topical messages about games, game development, or software in general. They don't have to be serious (humor is fun), but they shouldn't be generic fluff, links to typical internet meme images, or music videos. If you want to save an interesting message for your own use, that's what a bookmark to the message permalink is for.
Note that I'm not opposed to the messages themselves; I'm not advocating that our chat become a straight-laced police state where only on-topic discussion is permissible. I quite like the mix of casual banter and serious conversation we have. I am opposed to spamming stars on every single message that is remotely amusing or funny in the context of the current conversation, and thus plastering our starred message panel with what I perceive to be junk that is detrimental to the view of the community.
As a callback to one of the election discussions, I've been thinking that a possible approach to getting more experience professional developers on this site would be to actually introduce them to the chat first, since the more subjective, general discussion-oriented nature might allow them to talk in a fashion that did not stress them so much about violating NDAs. But I don't think having the star panel filled with silliness sets a great first impression of the room.

+1.... So True. Even if we keep the sillyness (as right now... @AlexM. 's My Little Pony fix...) we should at least put some EFFORT into not appearing stupid/knowledgeable.

As a suggestion, maybe we can introduce another room where it is strictly about on topic subjects, so we can introduce professional game dev. there. But generally speaking I don't find stars of much important (IMO) and I usually enter the room to communicate with other people with the same interest and strictly to talk about game dev.

Chat is supposed to be the place where we can let our hair down, where we don't have to keep to all the strict requirements imposed on the Q&A side of the site.
I think it's okay for chat to just be fun and helpful and less structured.  I don't see a need to make rules about how and when users should assign stars.  Just do it for comments that you think other users might like to see, and don't stress about it too much.  :)
At the end of the day, stars really don't matter.

+1 I agree that stars don't really matter. And I like the non-strict nature of our chat.

Oddly enough, over the past few months I've come around @JoshPetrie's point of view, and no longer hold this opinion.  (I'm not going to delete it, since it's carrying votes cast by others.  And it did accurately reflect my feelings at the time I posted it.)

When I come into chat rooms here, I check the star board. Heh. Starboard. It's on the right. :D Anyway, I often click links that are starred, and am disappointed with how many go to meme images. I don't mind the chat quips so much since they can be easily disregarded without clicking.
Though I think Josh has a point about us not having enough traffic for the best lines to push out the trivial ones. So I'll adjust my starring behavior accordingly, and hope others follow suit.

Call me the devil's advocate, but I feel that we should use stars for interesting topics of discussion. I'm one of the biggest abusers of chat stars that I see on this site, and I star anything that I find funny, interesting, or worth coming back to. I don't feel that stars should be a sacred token, because I don't ever bother looking at the starboard anyway after I've starred something. My main reason for using them is to show my appreciation to the person who posted the message I've starred.
Also, while I understand that the starred message board indicates to visitors what the members of the chat appreciate, and reflects upon the chat room and its users, I also feel that the chat rooms are off-topic often enough that whatever gets starred really is an accurate representation of the chat and its users. If a room is prone to serious debate about anything and everything (Lounge<C++> on SO comes to mind), then the starboard should reflect that. What I'm saying is that the starboard reflects what the room is, not what the room ought to be. Maybe the problem isn't with what should be starred, it's with what should be discussed in chat.

"I don't ever bother looking at the starboard anyway after I've starred something." is exactly the opposite of the point of starring in my opinion. If you want to give recognition to someone for saying something you like, just tell them maybe? That being said your second paragraph does make some sense... but there is some REALLY pointless stuff that gets starred. Such as "and/or valve" - which has two stars. What does this even mean? I feel like I shouldn't have to go back and view the context of the message for it to make sense.

There was some proposal to adopt "++" as a means of offering appreciation or agreement inline, as I recall. I feel that would be a better way to do this than starring things.

I agree @JoshPetrie . Along with Shotgun, i am one of those people who can abuse stars, although i dont as much. ++ is a much better way to express that appreciation. Possible solution: redact the chatroom topic to include a mention about the situation, including something about the new ++ style.

Well I think some of the sticked stars kinda set the tone. Anyways I really like the idea of splitting starring into two actions expressing approval and promoting visibility.
I do not like the idea of ++ and star though because there are 0 affordances to indicate the difference or purpose of either. Something like a thumbs up and thumbtack would be better imo. Basically something indicative of the two mentalities "lol nice" and "you need to see this because it will improve your life".

yeah, "++" came from "+1" which came from Google's "Like/Thumbs up" system (I could go on, but I'll stop here) : Source: http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/19?m=4866992#4866992

We can ask on MSO for actual changes to the chat (although they are notoriously low-priority usually, so nothing may happen; there have been outstanding requests to improve star moderation for a while) if we want. "++" is completely informal, it's true.

Yeah ++ came about when we had less active number of members who would actually say +1 on occasion. Since then +1 and ++ have kind of disappeared and people have just started starring everything. The point it has been brought up again recently isn't because we feel you must say ++, the point is that you can acknowledge how funny or interesting someone's post was without having to star it.

@JoshPetrie My bad I didn't realize that this would be a as self imposed community rule basically. I think the current situation is because of some of the more talkative members who have been very active recently. Encouraging it as a cultural thing is a good idea though I don't think it should actually be a rule considering how unofficial and difficult to enforce it would be.

Get HATS during the Winter Bash!

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


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Migrating more questions from SO to GD.SE?
Related, but old and not on GD: Is game development no longer relevant on SO due to the creation of Game Dev SE?
I'm unclear when, or even if we should be trying to migrate on-topic questions from StackOverflow to GameDev.SE. Migrating on-topic questions, that game developers are more equipped to answer than other programmers, is good for the ecosystem here and advertises the existence of this site.
When I tried to migrate this question, I got in to a bit of a comment war: How to know if the player is signed in?. The OP eventually cross-posted and got 8 votes, and an accepted answer with 7 votes: How to know if the player is signed in?
I also flagged this for migration: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17455038/parallax-background-resizing. But the migration was declined: "This isn't off-topic here".
If that's a reasonable rejection reason, is there ever a case where a question is off-topic on SO but on-topic here?
Where is the line?

That parallax question could be border line in both places, and I can see the rationale behind rejecting the migration. It is a coding question after all. It was cross posted here as well and has two close votes.

Aren't most questions coding questions? And I'm pretty sure the only reason that guy knows that this website exists and was able to cross-post is thanks to my comment. Maybe that's a solution, don't flag, just mention GD.SE in the comments?

I mean to say, it's not a coding question a game developer could answer better/differently than another developer. I agree that your comment brought him over here. I think commenting and flagging together are a reasonable solution. Then the moderators over there can decide, and the OP knows they have the choice.

@JohnMcdonald The problem with just mentioning it is that if its not a post that has gotten much attention on SO then they are just going to cross post anyway. Which do you flag as a duplicate?

You can't mark cross-posts as duplicates: "The duplicate question must exist on Game Development Stack Exchange". Do we really want to drop a link and encourage cross-posting?

Personally, I think we should (try to) migrate on-topic questions where game developers would be more able to answer the question than non-gamedevs. This is how I discovered this website, and I think this will help our community grow.

I agree with this. I don't know  what the "official" stance is, but even if a question is on topic on a certain site (SO in this case) I think migrating to more appropriate / better suited sites should be not only a valid option, but encouraged as well.

+1 I guess it's the SO moderators that have the final word in this, but the fact that this particular question was answered only on GDSE might help in favoring migration.

Fun that when i didnt know GD, i never got a single answer on gamedev posts os SO. People here are more capable for our suited problems.

The way I view it is there is a lot of overlap between GSDE and SO. Going by my understanding of the SO faq almost all questions that are about code and not hypothetical/theoretical on GDSE would be on topic on SO.
However, I think it makes since to direct to the most specialized site when there is any overlap. GDSE is more specialized than SO so all SO questions that relate to game development should be migrated. This not only applies to technologies (XNA, OpenGL) but to context. A question about Node.js about creating a server for a game’s leader board should be directed here in my opinion. There may be situation that arise unique to its association with game dev that allows users here to answer the question more completely beyond just the knowledge necessary to create the sever.
Also why on earth is there no GDSE option under migration at SO? That’s just dumb.
SO not allowing the migration of the mentioned question is strait up cannibalism and GDSE isn’t all that big to start out with, destructive behavior that is against the point of having the area 51 site in my opinion.
Anyways my point is I think that when there is overlap migrate to the most specialized group. Also add GDSE as a migration option from SO :/
Anyways I think the tagging system could be extreemly useful for sorthing out this sort of mess.

Why don't tags encurage redirects for off topic questions? Anything
  with the XNA tag on SO should be on GDSE with very few exceptions.
  Seems a simple way to handle whats on/off topic where. Share the tags
  but different SE sites claim certian ones.

P.S. I'm pretty sure GDSE would double in size and SO wouldn't notice a thing if when there was overlap the question was migerated to the most specilized site.

When dealing with soft, fuzzy border problems like these, I like to look at the intention.
Is the intention of the post to get help with game development? BAM, in the GDSE bucket.
The reason for this; there are a lot of game programming related questions that could be answered by a non game developer, but the risk of not getting the specific by-knowledge (game articles, relevant anecdotes etc), that is so valuable, is higher than the reward of cleaning out GDSE from non-pure game related content.
IMHO.

Personally I would migrate only questions that are obviously off-topic on Stackoverflow. If the question just begins: "I am making a game", edit it and remove the opener. Migrating is a good way to "save" a question, that can be useful on GD and would be probably closed on SO - since not many people know about GD there. And I am sure there are more game programmers on SO than on GD.
However the system has review, so if you feel that it should be moved, flag it (for moderator attention I guess) and comment on it. You can also bring this question to chat on GD where GD mods hang out often.
Maybe even start a question on meta whether a specific question should be migrated?

What exactly constitutes a question that is off-topic for SO, but on-topic here? The question you linked to is really just a bin packing problem, and according to a lot of people, programming-only questions should be migrated the other way. Fun times.

In my opinion we should rather do the opposite - move more questions from gamedev to stackoverflow.
There are a lot of questions here which are about generic progamming problems and do not need any special knowledge about game development. When a question could be answered by an experienced programmer without any special game development experience, it should be asked on stackoveflow.

I think a little of both is good. If you look at the question in sm4's post, it really is just a programming question. Maybe an identifying factor is not having answers for a period of time on either site, transfer to the other?


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Can someone accept her/his own answer to get the unsung hero badge?
I came over these two questions, which looked awkward due to the fact that the user has accepted his own answer.

Examples:
How to use/apply class inheritance in Enchant.js
How can I place my Enchant.js game into a DIV in a fully-designed web site?

Can you get the unsung hero badge, from accepting your own answers?

Hmmm. Loophole?

@JohnMcDonald that would also be my guess, I wonder if it really is :)

I suppose it's possible. However, the user you linked only has one answer that qualifies. The accepted answer needs to have zero score to qualify towards the unsung hero. They would need an additional 9 answers accepted with zero score to get the badge.

At StackOverflow, I'd have Unsung Hero if it allowed self-accepted answers. As it is, I just need one or two more.

Self accepted answers do not count, authoritative answer here and here, where it also states that only answers older than 10 days (with no votes) are considered. Also wiki answers and deleted answers are not considered.
See also: List of all badges with full description.

Just confirmed this is still true: And a.OwnerUserId <> Isnull(q.OwnerUserId, -1)


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Rename Xbox tag to Xbox Original to avoid confusion?
I think we should change the xbox tag to xbox-original to avoid confusion between what used to be called the xbox one and what is now called the xbox one.

I doubt we'll have enough [tag:xbox-og] questions to warrent the tag, honestly.

I don't think this is necessary.

The original Xbox is called the Xbox. That is what it is.
People visiting this site, should at least have enough domain-specific knowledge to understand that the two systems are different.

I also just created a tag for xbox-one 15 minutes before this post.

That being said and thought I agree with your idea that people should have domain-specific knowledge, but I also think it would be nice if we rename the the current tag, and add a new xbox tag after that. This way people will be able to ask question specifically about any version of xbox or about xbox development in general.

maybe questions asking about MS policy fall in the second category.

I don't really see a need to rename the tag, and I especially don't see a need to have both 'xbox' (to cover "Xbox in general") and 'xbox-original' (or whatever). I can't think of good, on-topic questions that would be made more searchable by the existence of such a tag.


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Why are primarily-opinion based question not welcome on this site?
Recently, not constructive has been changed to primarily opinion based. Some questions simply don't have a strictly evidence- or fact-based answer and the best answer is the opinion of majority. Or sometimes it's the opinion of some authority that makes the perfect answer.
There are many great questions that helped me understand game development on this site and a lot of them are opinion based, with I think... answers.
Why are primarily based questions not welcome on this site? Apart from closing them is there anything else we can do to prevent debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion? Is it possible to deal with primarily opinion based question in other way?

Closed opinion based question that influenced me the most and the wisdom from accepted answer is repeated many times in other questions/chat:

What things should an indie game developer never do?

Great question that I consider opinion based and was not closed:

How to prevent the "Too awesome to use" syndrome

Question that I consider opinion based, but is nevertheless interesting (still very active):

How are boss battles important?

It seems like the site allows an interesting, although discussion/opinion based, question live every once in awhile. Maybe gamedev just needs these types of questions every once in awhile to get their discussion itch scratched.

I'm in favor of closing the boss battles question, and I don't like "what should a developer never do." "Too awesome to use" does seem to fit into the realm where there is enough balance between objectivity and subjectivity.

Well, I put the boss battles on hold, and the "what should a developer never do" was already closed.

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/

Mm.  Still not a big fan of the 'boss battles' question;  it's too open-discussion, without any particular question to be answered.  I think asking about the design behind boss battles is useful, but I'd really rather such a question be phrased as "How do I decide whether boss battles are appropriate for my game?", rather than as "Tell me why every other game decided to use boss battles and whether there's any research into the matter (whatever that means) and what function they serve".

Questions with answers that are based on a single person's opinion are fine, but when the principal basis of the answer must be subjective and there are little to no supporting facts or objective arguments to be made in favor of one answer over another, the discussion doesn't fit within the StackExchange model.
Those questions should be taken elsewhere, perhaps to the chat, where refinement of the actual query can occur and hopefully mold it into something that is appropriate for this. If not, the question should be taken to another forum entirely. StackExchange sites are not meant to be everything to everybody.

A question with answers that have a lack of evidence supporting them is a fault on the answers, but not the question itself.

Not always, though. Some questions are just questions about somebody's opinion.

The text of the VTC reason makes it clear: "answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific expertise" - this is standard SE wording and not specific to this site.  Josh is correct - some questions just fall into the category that cannot be answered without "IMO" on every key point.

This is my idea of the difference between this site and other gamedev sites:
This site is for questions that arise when you get stuck making your game (in any phase)
One should not ask here: Are boss battles important? It is a Game Dev question, and it is a good question. But it probably did not arise when the author got stuck making his/her game and therefore it is not solving a specific problem. I can't think of the right question that would probably arise when having difficulties designing a boss fight, but I think such question wouldn't be closed.
On the other hand, How to prevent the "Too awesome to use" syndrome probably was (or would be) asked by the author when designing such item.
IMHO this site should allow questions describing a problem, requiring opinion based answers that lead to solving the problem. General opinion based questions should be closed.
Of course there are many borderline questions and often people who vote close on one opinion-based question get interested in another one and won't vote... Sometimes a good question that might have good answer is closed. And I believe that's where the mods must take over and use their best judgement.

To hit on your point a bit more, I think the "voice" of a question (and the type of answers you would expect out of it) is pretty key.  I, personally, don't want "discussions about games".  There's a big difference between a game enthusiast asking why games do something and a game developer asking how to solve a problem.  This site isn't meant for non-game-developers to be able to ask game developers questions.  It's for game developers to ask each other questions.

These questions are interesting and fun to participate in the discussion. However, they are only the fun and interesting versions of off topic questions. Allowing such opinion generating questions opens the door to a wide variety of questions that don't have answers. Unfortunately, when we throw the bad subjective questions out, these fun ones go with. There is no correct answer to "Are boss battles important" or "How to prevent 'Too awesome to use' syndrome" or "What things should an indie game developer never do". All three of those questions just generate a list of individual opinions, without a correct answer. Real questions have answers.

I would disagree that the "too awesome to use" question can't have an answer.  It might have multiple answers, but it is a problem with game design that has solutions.  The "boss battles important" question can't have an answer because the question isn't sufficiently defined.  Specifically, the "important" part of the question almost begs for opinion answers because the audience for "who is it important to" is undefined and people just assume themselves.  "What should an indie never do" is just a list-of question.

I think all three of them can have answers. But none of them can have a correct answer. Because there is no single correct answer. There may be multiple answers that could be correct depending on the situation, but that's the point, "it depends".

Let's look at the three questions and evaluate what they are asking for.

What things should an indie game developer never do?

This is asking for a generalized list of stuff that game developers are encouraged not to do. And that's why it's not acceptable.
The fundamental purpose of all Stack Exchange sites is to build a functioning, searchable knowledge base of useful information, such that people can later find that information with ease (typically from a real search engine like Google). A list of suggestions for game developers to avoid is not searchable; it's just a random list of stuff. If someone found this question, it would only be by actually searching for "things not to do".
And people don't search for that stuff.
It's not even a comprehensive list, so if you're looking for things not to do, you haven't actually found it. You've found some things, but not all of them.
It's also too "chatty" of a question. While people could post their personal experiences with things they've done or seen done, people are more likely to just come up with stuff off the top of their heads. And the stuff will have no rhyme or reason to it: some will be game design, some will be programing, some will be art, etc.

How to prevent the "Too awesome to use" syndrome?

Is this question opinion-based? To a degree, yes. But the question is very clear and specific about what it's talking about trying to prevent. This invites people to provide theories of why this syndrome happens and therefore how to avoid it.
People are being invited to provide opinions on how to solve the problem. But that's not very different than people posting opinions about how to fix a particular program. People have different ways of solving the same problem. The thing that makes this question good is that the question itself is reasonably stated and meaningfully scoped. And thus we can judge answers based on that.

Are boss battles important?

This is really just a bad title. The question could be improved to ask about what bosses are and what function they serve in a game. And again, while it does invite opinion, it's still a specific, meaningfully scoped question.
On a site where less concrete, more subjective questions are allowed, we have to use good judgement to determine which ones are worthwhile and which are not.

Apart from closing them is there anything else we can do to prevent debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion? Is it possible to deal with primarily opinion based question in other way?

Like what? It's a binary choice: we either shut them down or we allow them. Anything less than switching them off is tacitly approving of them, thus encouraging others to provide the same.


text:
Is commenting disabled on this site?
I can't see the comment link under the questions. I've put my comment as an answer and it's got deleted. How can I add a comment here?

You comment wasn't deleted; there was probably a message saying you don't have the reputation for it.  See here privileges.  Also, I voted to close your question because it's about the site rather than about game dev.  That kind of question belongs on [meta].  Read the help section; it explains everything.

Actually your comment was an excellent answer to my question. Why didn't you put it in the answer section.
Is there a way to move my question to the meta site ?

I didn't answer because your question will inevitably be removed.  Yes, it might be moved to meta, the moderators can handle that.  But it has also already been asked on meta, so it might be deleted outright.

The answer you provided was not an answer to the question, it was a follow up question of your own:

I deleted your answer because it wasn't an answer. Further, it wasn't a good comment either because it was actually a question. So I didn't convert it to a comment.
You don't have enough reputation to comment, which is why the comment link doesn't show up. Ask and answer questions to get reputation. Then you'll be able to comment where you like. Do remember to keep comments as requests for clarification and for suggesting improvements. Not for "I'm having this problem too, what should I do". Feel free to ask a question about the problem you're having.

I'd ask this to meta but it says I need 5 reputation to be able to ask.
So I have to ask it in here...
What should I do in this given situation below?

I have a problem and I google it.
I found a guy here asking the same question with me.
There is no answer to him.
It's been a quite while since his question asked.
I want to contact him to ask if he found the solution in that time.
There is no contact information in his profile.
Asking a question under the question is wrong.
Commenting requires reputation too.
Even if not, my question is not a comment.

So, what should I do?

It's a problem that our system doesn't handle very well unfortunately. It's a common problem on the internet in general. There's a number of reasons it's a hard problem to tackle, but that's not the topic here. I'll try to get the other question some attention. For now, you'll just have to wait and see.


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Is this server (ie Game Development) under stress (or attack)?
I have been seeing regular weird issues recently when visiting this particular site, including very poor response and my tag customizations being invisible for extended periods of time. Usually it is only this site, of the 5 or 6 Stack Exchange sites I visit regularly, that are exhibiting problems.
Some details of the problems noticed:
 - several seconds to get mouse response
 - having to type characters several times because only 1 in 3 or 4 gets recognized
 - my tag customizations are lost
 - scrolling improperly
Is this a known issue or so far un recognized. I have been seeing it for a couple of weeks, but it seems (anecdotally) to be getting more frequent.

What browser are you using? Something similar happens to me occasionally using Chrome, related to this. The browser and sometimes entire computer starts to get unresponsive. If using Chrome, hit Shift+Esc. Check out how much memory your sites are using. You can also try closing the tab, then hitting Ctrl+Shift+T to reopen the closed tab. This work around solves the memory issue for me. Otherwise, please give more details as to what your setup is.

@Byte56: I am using IE10. This all sounds reasonable, except I am not experiencing any issues with SO, Board-Games, English Usage, History, Mathematics, or Physics.


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Should we make minor edits to correct mistakes?
Recently, I've made a couple of suggested edits to correct mistakes in posts, which were both rejected. One of these edits was to correct a misspelling of Somalia (it was spelt Somolia, which was a) wrong, and b) noticed by at least one other user). The other one, which was (in my opinion) slightly more significant, was to correct where a user had referred to the commutative properties of matrices as communicative - which is quite clearly wrong, and could cause issues for someone searching for further information on that aspect of matrix mathematics.
My opinion is that these edits should be approved, and as far as I can tell, this is the same opinion as the Help Centre - under the section 'When should I edit posts', two of the bullet points are:

To include additional information only found in comments, so all of the information relevant to the post is contained in one place
To correct minor mistakes or add updates as the post ages

While I can agree that the Somolia->Somalia edit was borderline and probably too minor to accept (and so I won't contest that), the second edit was correcting a mistake with regards to terminology, and looks like it should have been approved. My question is, then:
Should minor edits like these be allowed? Or is there some reason for blocking edits like this, even though they are correcting an error?
NB: Just in case you're wondering, or if you're going to point me to the meta question on here about minor edits and rep-farming, I'm only making these edits because I see them as a signficant error, or something which is annoying me, not for the mere 2 reputation I get from answering them. As for the edits, minor minor things such as adding backticks to the matrix maths was mainly to raise the edit to the six character limit (and because, in my opinion, it improved clarity - that's subjective, though) - I deemed the 'communicative' error bad enough to do that.

I agree about changing a misspelling of a country name. I would have accepted that.

Editing posts causes them to be bumpped which often leads to them getting new answers (that are often terrible) and reduces the number of active questions that need attention on the front page. Unless the answer has been broken because the passage of time and needs to be fixed or updated there really isn't much point in bumping it. I think that "To correct minor mistakes or add updates as the post ages" is more about keeping it relevent than fixing typos.

@ClassicThunder I know that editing posts bumps them to the top of the queue, but it's hardly as if the site was free of late answers - there's a review queue dedicated to it (and there are several each day).

Late answers and minor edits to old answers aren't really the same.

@Byte56 I was arguing on the basis that bumping questions gets them late answers from new people, which was ClassicThunder's point. My minor edit, however, would likely not have increased the number of late answers, which was Classic's issue.

Since I rejected both, I'll give my rationale for doing so. I think minor edits are typically OK. The edits you made are minor and I would accept them if the questions they were contained in were more recently active. The country change was borderline too minor and since the post hasn't been active in a month I rejected it. The communicative edit was more significant, but so was the time when the post was last active, it hasn't been active for two years.
I felt that both posts could still be understood and the answers were still useful without the edits. While the wrong words or spelling mistakes were there, I feel that in both situations, a reasonable person with just a little domain knowledge would be able to determine what was intended by the word choice.
So neither case made the posts "difficult to read".

Thanks for the rationale behind it. Honestly, I would still argue in favour of the communicative edit, but I'm not 2k yet :P

You're welcome to suggest the edit again, and I'll stay out of it this time. Then either a different moderator or two higher rep users can decide.

You're a moderator for a reason, I'm not going to go against your decision over something as small as an edit. If someone else wants to, they can, but I'll keep to my place for now.

This is the same reason I reject minor yet useful edits to old posts. However this is a stupid reason. It would be nice if Stackexchange allowed minor edits without bumping the thread to the front page.

It would be nice. But I think it stays the way it is to encourage edits to be significant.

Sorry to post a comment to an old post (somewhat ironically), although I know of no other way of asking you this question - was there any particular reason other than that the question was old for rejecting the second edit I made today? I can understand that it was old, but I thought the purpose of StackExchange sites was that the questions would still be useful to people in years to come, and therefore edits to old posts which help should be a good idea. I know it is somewhat like the case above, but in this case one user had already approved and I hadn't gone out of my way to make it.

@Polar Chat is always an option :). Yes, if an edit is just grammar and formatting, it'll have to be a pretty significant edit if it hasn't been active in over a year. Editing old questions is fine if the changes are significant. Updating bad links, or correcting misinformation are more significant than grammar and formatting.

@Byte56 I understand that, it just seems kind of pointless to reject it (I'm not encouraging it as a practice, but it's not harmful). As for chat, I couldn't find a way to notify you (hence the 'Delete me" room).

@Polar The reason to reject it is because it's a edit that shouldn't be pushing new questions off the front page. You can ping people in chat with @, same way you do it here in comments. That'll display the red notification with a link to chat.

Ah, thanks for clearing the chat issue up :)


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Starred Videos/Pictures
Do we have a reason that thumbnails aren't shown in the sidebar of chat? I noticed that they aren't shown in the sidebar, but are shown in the list of all starred posts. Why is this? There doesn't seem to be an obvious reason. Can anyone tell me why?

Mainly because of the space involved. The sidebar is significantly smaller and only meant to get a brief overview of links. If it is an image, in order to make the thumbnail fit it would need to be smaller than the standard scale of thumbnails in chat, meaning it would be almost pointless as the thumb would be too small to be any more relevant than the links to the image.
If we were to increase the size then we would make the sidebar post bigger and push other starred posts off the list (which already happens as it is with starred posts in the sidebar only being in the past 24-48 hours.)


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How about the tag "Bitmap"?
I mean they are a part of graphics, but if there is png, there should also be Bitmap.

I removed "feature-request" since the creation of a tag is possible without intervention from the SE team. You just need 300 reputation.

Tags exist to make questions more searchable; can you edit your post to include questions that you think would be made more visible or easier to find with this tag applied?

Ok, Thanks. I wasn't sure which of the must-have-tags would fit best.
I had a question here, where I wanted to know something about performance comparison between png and bitmaps. So I wanted to tag it with bitmap, so that guys who know sth about bitmaps would find it and tell me something about it. Just an idea.

Bitmap would be ambiguous, as it is also used as a data structure.

We don't really have a lot of tags for image file formats in use. png is really the only one, and it only has eight questions, and glancing through those questions, the png tag is either noise or not all that useful. So, I don't really see the need for the tag you are proposing (I'm not even sure png is worth keeping around, honestly).
That said, because you are talking about a file format and not 'bitmaps in general' I would suggest that you use the tag bmp for this, if you were to tag it at all.

but there is no bmp tag? I was about to use it, but it doesn't exist too.

No, it doesn't (and I'm not convinced it would be useful to add).

just saying. okay.


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Repeated notifications for the same edit
I've been getting notifications for an edit made almost a month ago multiple times, even after clicking it to mark it as seen.  I currently have three of the same notification

Bug?

clear cache maybe =/

Cleared.  Now we wait and see if it comes back...


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How do I change one tag to another (a slightly different one)?
I've accidentally created a new tag (or so it seems): vertex-buffer while posting a question. Then in another question I needed a tag about index buffer so I tried index-buffer and found out that index-buffers (plural) already existed. So I used that one.
Then I thought - both tags should be consistent - either both plural or both singural. So I wanted to change my vertex-buffer in the first question to vertex-buffers but I couldn't because it was similar to already existing... well, vertex-buffer (the very one I was trying to change!). So I couldn't. Couldn't use the plural vertex-buffers in the new question for the same reason.
Please, tell me how I can make them consistent or do that for me.

I merged all tags of vertex-buffers into vertex-buffer and all tags of index-buffers into index-buffer. Originally I did the opposite, but it looks like the majority of our master tags are singular in nature.
The merge destination tags were not otherwise used, so I didn't create a synonym; this was a one-time merge.

I'm not sure if this counts as an answer but this whole topic is not about questions and answers, really. :P

I suppose what I meant to be implicit in my "answer" was that you can't do what you were asking for directly (it requires either a certain reputation gate to propose synonyms or a moderator to merge tags). You could have waited a while and I think the unused tag would fall out of the system, but I'm not sure. :)

@JoshPetrie There's a script that destroys "zombie tags" (tags with no questions) once per day, at 3:00 AM, IIRC.

To solve your problem, can't you remove the tag, save, edit again and add the similar one?
More general, I think questions with tags which are synonyms should be automatically replaced by one of those synonyms, for consistency.
I am not sure if a server side workaround exists, but otherwise you wouldn't get all questions of contentual one tag, but only of one specific synonym in the search results.

Nice idea but unfortunately it doesn't work. Even when a tag isn't used at all, it still persists in the system.

Ahh, so the issue is that a similar tag already exists in the system. Then this might be part of a moderator's job. But I don't know how to contact one for this subject.


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Help users to ask objective questions about architecture
I think that software architecture is a very important part of complex applications like games. Therefore questions about software architecture and design should definitely be part of Game Development.
Many users ask questions about their own architectures, but unfortunately, often in a subjective and opinion based way. Those questions cannot be answered objectively and are considered off-topic on our site, which is correct in my opinion.
Quotations of subjective written questions about game architecture.

What refactor or re-design would you recommend to allow the world class to accept ANY object? (Design issue: World class only contains Rigidbodies but custom objects need further updating)
my question is about situation when there is action between players at game (like items exchange, players money/tokens billing change). I know this depends on many factors, but please look at one of solutions below. (How game engines handle transactions between users?)
To summarise, given the described architecture of my game, how can I appropriately handle my game logic? (Game editor architecture)
What do you think, is this as bad as I think it is? How would you address it? (What part of my engine should load images and fonts?)
There is more to it than this, but I just wanted to highlight the central idea of what I was doing, and wanted opinions on whether a cyclical approach like this (Need opinions on my component based design)

But I saw multiple cases where users had real problems about architectures in game development, but had trouble formulating their questions in an objective way. To not (from their view, surprisingly) close questions of these users, I suggest collecting tips for formulating questions about architectures well, and providing them in the help center.
This is because I feel that many of those questions do target a specific and objectively answerable issue. But it is not always easy to hunt the actual issue down to the core problem and extract the needed information when writing a question. For now, we can just refer to the help page about on topic and off topic, but we can't easily give advice for doing better.
What do you think, could we find some simple guide lines for writing questions which are objectivly answerable and add them to the FAQ?

What type of advice are you thinking? What sort of advice would be specific to subjective architecture questions that would not already apply to subjective questions in general (that is not also question-specific and therefor not appropriate for a FAQ page versus a comment on the question itself)?

I don't quite understand what these 'real problems' are. Are one or more of the questioners in the examples you posted struggling with these problems? Could you give an example of an underlying issue that wasn't addressed properly?


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can I ask an algorithm question on game main site without code?
StackOverflow's picky about this, but I'm not sure about game dev.  Basically I'd like to ask a series of questions related to basic rendering ... e.g., "Android: What's the best way to draw a static background and place a few game pieces with out threading, then have a thread kick off when user touches a piece?"  Of course, I'd search thoroughly first and usually include my findings as links in the question.  My questions should be of use to others doing related methods.

Personally, I think algorithm questions that don't have code often work better, since when code is involved, it's usually more of a "Why isn't my implementation of this algorithm working?" type question. However, be careful with "What's the best way..." type questions, see here about those.

Apologies to the moderators here - I thought I was posting this in meta.gamedev --- must of been on the gamedev site by mistake ! Thx for moving it...

@Byte56 -excellent reference link ! Well worth spending the time working through its links.

Can I ask an algorithm question on the game main site

Yes. Algo questions are awesome. I want to see more of them

Can I ask "What's the best way to draw a static background and place a few game pieces with out threading, then have a thread kick off when user touches a piece?"

No. This is a really broad question that would be tutorial-length in scope. It would belong on a tutorial wiki or on a blog. More focussed questions on individual topics such as "How to I spin off threads in Android" or "How do I find game objects based on a touch event" would be the level of detail best suited for stackexchange.

Pseudo code Algo's can be informative for many since they're language neutral. RE 2nd item: Understood about too general. What would do you think the reaction would be if the question was posed more like:  " Option 1: onDraw a background, inValdate() once, then let looper wait for onTouch event, launch thread, once it's done it does callback to GUI, then GUI does onDraw. OR Option 2: Launch thread, draw background via thread, thread sleep, thread waits for touch notify etc... " Doing so would then be asking an either-or question. Answers would be in the form of 'option 1 better because ...' ?

I can't speak for everyone, but that seems like a directly answerable question to me, so yes.

The help section has plenty of detail on this: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask
Questions which don't involve code are fine.
You may need to be a bit careful to avoid your questions getting flagged as "what technology to use" or "how to get started" questions which aren't on topic here.
Asking for the "best way to do something" to me instantly makes the question subjective. Do you really need the best way, or will some other way also be good enough?

Ah, I should have "asked the Duck" first :)) - my question would have been less vague !  Luckily I'm past picking tech and am down the road a ways. Indeed many roads to Rome - brute force is usually good enough. Ultimately, my real question is " How do I make my games eat less battery ? "  Thinking about writing a new one called The Electron Pig (tm :) - guaranteed flop on both iTunes and Play. LOL  Of course, as Jimmy mentions above, _ Game Saving Juice _ would be a whole book. thx 4 pointers and links all !


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Why was this question migrated to SO?
The question at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18601128/trying-to-simulate-a-1-dimensional-wave seems to have been migrated from gamedev.SE to StackOverflow.  While it doesn't have 'game' anywhere in its title, it's clearly a question that arose in a game development context (as evinced by the fact that it was posted here in the first place); it's a question that's likely to be of interest to game developers; and moreover, as a programming matter it's unlikely to be of interest to anyone but game developers (I'm hard-pressed to think of any other field that would be doing this sort of simulation at this level of simplicity).  It was moved very agressively (within an hour of being posted) and AFAICT without any discussion at all, and I'm just a bit confused as to why this question in particular was picked out of dozens if not hundreds of similar simulational questions.

I migrated it because it wasn't specific to game development. Simulating a 1 dimensional wave is not something a game developer would know how to do better than another developer. Per the help, it did not pass the following test:

Would a professional game developer give me a better/different/more
  specific answer to this question than other programmers?

The question is asking about implementation of a mathematical algorithm:

m*x[i]''=-k(2*x[i]-x[i-1]-x[i+1])

Taking math equation and implementing code for it is not something that's specific to game developers. The question does not ask about games in any way.
Further, I can assure you I was very calm while migrating it, and there wasn't any aggression :)
Unfortunately, questions being posted here does not necessarily mean they have a game development context. This can be seen in the frequent questions about compiler errors, null pointer errors, linking issues etc. Those questions are typically asked here because the OP was in the process of making a game when the issue arose, but it doesn't mean it's a game development issue.
Even if the question we're talking about said it was for a game, it would be off topic here, for the reasons above.

Thank you for the quick answer!  I should note that I meant 'agressively' in the sense of 'quite quickly', rather than implying any sort of actual agression on your part.

I assumed that :) Just making it clear. Does this answer your question?

That said, I'm not sure that I agree with your assessment with 'would a professional game developer give a better answer than other programmers?'.  As I noted in my question, this sort of simulation is endemic to game development and shows up almost nowhere else; I do think a game developer would give a better answer to this question than other programmers would, because of experience.  What differentiates this from, e.g., a question about A* in your mind?  Both have equal levels of algorithmic content and both tend to show up primarily in game development contexts.

Well, I don't think they're equal. A*'s uses are very common to game development, and not as common in other environments. A one dimensional wave could have applications in a very wide variety of fields. As I said before, it's true that these issues may be commonly dealt with by game developers, but they're also commonly dealt with by developers in lots of fields. My goal is to get questions answered. If an algorithm question is borderline (on the side of SO in my opinion), I'd rather move it to SO where there's far more traffic and it's more likely to get answered.

Fair enough; we'll have to agree to disagree here, I think.  I have almost never seen this sort of simple simulational code in other environments (games are arguably the main driver of simulation these days, just as they've become the main driver of graphics), but I've done very similar work on discretizing differential equations on multiple game projects. I also feel like this sort of question is more likely to get answered on gamedev.SE where it can actually get noticed in the noise, but that's another matter...

By the way, it seems to be doing pretty good over at SO.

Now Byte56 will be moving questions agressively and vigorously.Take that question! Aaaarrrghh!

Given that the accepted answer was from someone who has more rep on gamedev than SO, kind of best illustrates @steve standnicki's points, which I agree with from the ideal classification standpoint. From a user perspective, I do prefer posting where the odds are highest. But there seems to be inconsistent emphasis from moderators on whether we should be putting things in the ideal place or the place it gets answered quickest (or more likely to be answered).If the goal is to make gamedev the place to go for gamedev answers, then migration such as this doesn't support that goal.

I also notice that the poster of the question has rep on Mathematics, Physics, and SO etc. So he would seem to be aware of where he's posting in relation to classification and possibly even aware that it'd be of greatest help to game developers... thus posting it here.

Thanks for your input, I'll keep that in mind next time.


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Old edits on old closed posts now triggering reopen votes?
Lately we've been getting a number of re-open candidates. Some of were last active as far back as two years. In some cases, the last edit that was made to them is what's referenced as the reason it's been added as a re-open review task, even when the last edit was more than a year ago.
For example, this question was last active more than a year ago. But it showed up on the review queue today. It hasn't been touched in a long time, yet it showed up for re-opening.
Other strangeness is stuff like the re-open queue showing 30+ items to review, then only 3 items are reviewed before you're done and the review queue is empty.
Also, questions are showing up multiple times over the course of a few days:
A* Search in games
Showed up two days ago, today AND back in May. All were triggered by the same revision from three months ago.
So, all kinds of bugs here.

That old edits make questions come up in the reopen queue is by design. If a question has been edited after being closed, it is now eligible for reopening.
In regards to questions showing up multiple times - this has been fixed.

Thanks for fixing the multiple issue. I wasn't aware the reopen vote after edit was going to happen retroactively. If that's the case, it seems like there should be a limit on how far back that goes. Not as much for this site, but I imagine SO will be dealing with retroactive reopens for a while. Anyway, thanks for your quick work.


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Are language tags useless?
Language tags are really popular on GD.SE (3 out of the top 10 tags: c++, c#, java) and yet I've found them almost always useless. Just look at the questions list on the front page and you'll find plenty of examples. Most questions tagged with a language tend to be one of the following:

The problem isn't language specific (e.g. "How do I implement A*?" javapathfinding)
The problem is more specific than the language (e.g. "Alpha blending in pygame?" pythonpygame)

There are a few reasons why people use these tags; perhaps they prefer answers to be presented using that language. In very rare occasions there are gamedev questions which are language specific, for example a language feature that solves a gamedev problem in an interesting way, but I've seen maybe one or two questions like this. In any case I don't feel the popularity of these tags are justified.
Should we discourage the use of these tags, or start removing these tags from questions?

They are the easiest way to trigger syntax highlighting, much more accessible than manual language hinting.

Tags are for searching and filtering.
While there is some validity in the assertion that many questions are fundamentally algorithmic in nature and thus language-agnostic, in practice many users will want help tweaking a particular implementation in their preferred language.
Similarly, many answerers will prefer to demonstrate algorithms through example code, or pseudo-code, in the style of a preferred (or topical) language.
Consequently, there is utility for both askers and answers in being able to filter or search posts using language tags, and I don't think it would be adding any value or improving clarity to discourage their use or actively remove them from the site.
Redundancy in tags (such as python and pygame) only causes problems when you're trying to tag a question and hit the tag limit. At that point, presumably the user can decide which tag is more important and drop the other one. I haven't seen too many questions tagged to the limit or heard too many (read: any) complaints that we need more tag slots, so I don't think this is hurting anything.

Here on GD, the tag isn't a way to search for questions on the language itself. "What does the keyword 'mutable' mean?" Yeah, no. Go to SE. Those questions aren't here, no-one is going to be searching for them.
Instead, I see the tag as a hint for solutions -- and libraries. If someone flags a question using C#, the answer might probably come from .NET or a .NET-friendly library; they might be using XNA, and those people will come along, too. And a solution that refers to a python library would of course be irrelevant, even if it did solve the problem as asked. I'd hate to hear "if you were using python, you wouldn't have this problem," because it's irrelevant to the asker.
I think the language is part of the context. "How do I implement A* in C++?" is a very different question than "What is the A* algorithm?", although one could infer either if the question was just "How do I implement A*?".
Yeah, maybe it's often spurious, but I don't think it's detrimental to allow it.


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GameJam Proposal
New post opened here. Read that instead!
Over at the GD chat, we've decided it would be a great idea if GD had seasonal GameJams, to challenge game developers and increase their skills. And to bring fun to the table! We decided to hold the first (autumn) GameJam during the first weekend of November, that is, 12:00 PM Friday the 1st of November to 11:59 AM Monday, the 4th of November UTC time.
The main requirement of this particular GameJam will be for each participant to create a game that runs in a browser. The participant also agrees to release the game as open source, and all of the assets used by it should follow the same rules.
The participants are allowed to use assets (sprites, models, sounds, music etc.) that are not created by them as long as they're freely available on the web (e.g. on opengameart.org) and are compatible with the license constraints mentioned above.
Participants are not allowed to team up with others, and all of the work involved in the making of the game must be their own, with the exception of assets, as stated above. Participants are, however, allowed and even recommended to ask questions on the main GD site, as long as everything that's asked is ontopic as per the rules of the board. Interaction between participants on the chatroom is also allowed and recommended.
How we see this gamejam working:

Before the jam starts, an announcement (question, or answer to this
very question?) is posted on meta.gd with extra instructions;
As the jam progresses, participants answer the above mentioned
question, by providing a link to their game and sources;
After the jam ends, the question gets locked;
Participants play others' games and vote on answers (games);
The game (answer) with the most votes, wins;
After the voting has ended, all of the games are uploaded to a public
GitHub repo.

Since the GameJam's goal is to hone one's skills and bring developers together on our community, no actual prizes were thought of. If, however, the SE team decides to award promotional merchandise such as t-shirts or mugs to the winners, we'll gladly be okay with it.
We've not decided what to call this GameJam. So far our options lie within the list: { Seasonal GDSE GameJam, GDSE Challenge, GDGJ (GameDev GameJam) }. Opinions and ideas are welcome, so please share them here.

The logo should be three colored jars of jam, which resemble the GD.SE logo.

Halloween theme, please. :D

Honestly, i think that this competition should be judged by GD mods and other SE employees/moderators. Unless we can't vote on our own game, i see no other real way to make this fair.

Also, there should be cats. Cats are fun.

@TheProgramm3r you can't upvote your own answer... how will you vote on your own game? And even if you could it's a level playing field because then everyone just upvotes their own answer to counter balance everyone elses own upvote. This is a non issue.

@ToddersLegrande ah true, i forgot (already :P) that we were voting as answers on this thread. Sorry!

I assume code libraries/engines that are freely available online are free to use as well?

As long as the end result runs in a browser, yes. Unity is a valid choice, for example (it has that webplayer build option).

Vote for a theme here: http://meta.gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/1293/vote-for-your-favorite-theme-for-the-upcoming-gdse-game-jam

I think that having answers sorted by votes would promote bias as people may only view the first few answers and not see the others. Any way around this?

Good point. Join our chatroom and let's discuss the issue: http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/10960/gdse-gamejam

This is the excellentest idea.
My girlfriend drew us a logo:

(It's inspired by Shotgun Ninja's comment.)
Edit: Larger; background transparency.

Coolio! Let's see if we can turn this into a vectorial logo. Back in a bit.

@Alex Indeed. Feel free to edit the answer. Should this be community wiki? (Does it matter on meta?)

On the other hand, a crayon logo looks special and great. Could we get a bigger version? :D

I really like this logo. Especially as is. It's got that nice created feel to it. Also, I enjoy the rapidity of its creation, which kinda mirrors the rapidity needed in a game jam to make a solid product.

This is awesome.

We're happy you like it! I made a larger version -- largest I could manage from her drawings without quality loss. Also transparencycifisysed the background for great good.

Cool! :D Thanks a lot.

Awesome! Thanks for the mention!

We now have an ad with the logo showing on the main page :D

The Great GameDev.SE Hack-a-thon

This is a terrible answer. We're making games, not hacking. While I'm sure about 60% of the code that will be made for these games shall consist of horrid hacks and kludges, that's beside the point.

You've never heard of the term hack-a-thon? :)

A Hackathon is a kind of collaborative programming marathon. They're good! This is a compliment of sorts, not an insult. :)

So, to my understanding, a game jam is a very specific type of hackathon, since we want to make games specifically. I think it would be good to have a specific name.

What is the reason for the web-based requirement? Python is the only language I know, so how can I participate?

Fewer dependencies for the user to download and install. Easier to test drive. No need to download or install games.

Some links to good resources for learning tech which is suitable for game development but runs in a browser: JavaScript, Unity, ActionScript and Processing (using Processing.js to render on the web).

https://github.com/pyjs/pyjs - Python to Javascript Compiler

Rules clarification: what does "run in a browser" mean? Does this include Flash, Java applets, Silverlight?

Yes, Flash, Java Applets and Silverlight are permitted.

Could the person posting possible include a bounty for the winner? That seems a fair reward.
As for the name I dislike the idea of an initialisation. Perhaps a play on the words game and jam? Such as jam-stuck perhaps.
Other ideas for names:

Fearless Jam
Carouse
Game Exchange

Do you mean offering a reputation bounty as a prize for the jam itself? I think that's a terrible idea, because it goes against the philosophy of what reputation should represent on a SE site.


text:
Suggest or choose a theme for the Fall 2013 GDSE Game Jam!
At the beginning of the GDSE Game Jam (November 1st, 12PM UTC), the theme will be selected randomly from the top 10 voted themes. At drawing time, I will sort the list by votes, any ties for the top 10 will be randomly chosen from the tie group.
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.
Rules for proposing a theme:

One theme per answer
The theme should be expressed one to six words. No details. Allow room for different interpretations. If you have to choose between specific and interesting, go with interesting.
You can propose as many themes as you want, please ensure you're not duplicating an existing theme.
Please make sure it's actually a theme, i.e. "Physics Puzzle" is a type of game, not a theme.

Don't get upset if you get down votes. It's part of the process.
You can register for the jam here, but it's not required to participate.

To make voting a little easier, you may want to sort the answers by active. Go through a vote on all your choices. Then, when you come back later, you can sort by active again and just vote on the newest ones.

Feel free to add the voting reminder to your suggestions, to meet the minimum length requirements. But please don't add more details about your theme suggestion.

There can only be one.
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Mad scientist.
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Swarm
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

In the beginning...
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Escape
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Orbits.
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Evolution
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

The hero is the bad guy.
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Stack Overflow
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

In the end, you die.
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Most wanted.
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Time is broken.
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Blast
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Mutually assured destruction.
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Dungeons / Caverns
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Go into the light.
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

One last time.
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

What have you done!?
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Then everything changed.
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Fight fire with fire.
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Deception.
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Transportation
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Past and Future.
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

You can't take it with you.
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Entropy
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Revenge.
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Rainbow/Spectrum
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't

Pacifism
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Negative Space
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Winter is Coming
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

The Greater Good
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Streets
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Weakest link.
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

The road less traveled.
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

The fifth element.
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Suicide.
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Failing Senses
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Portals.
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

The darkness inside.
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

God mode.
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Ground Hog Day / Time Loop
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Cards.
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Night time.
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Emergency!
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Access Denied
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Fact or Faith.
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Is that your final answer?
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Once upon a time...
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

The Source
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

So Very Many
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Big bets.
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Halloween
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Ghosts.
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Take the long way home.
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

Science vs Religion
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

The 60's.
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.

One last dream before...
Vote up the themes you want, vote down the themes you don't.


text:
Should we better define the scope of GDSE to include graphics programming and image processing questions?
Well, a lot of the questions here are graphics or image processing related but are not game development related. According to our Help Center those are not game development related. This question about Ray marching is the one that got me this idea. This is clearly a graphics programming question and not gamedev.
You know not everything about graphics programming (like scientific visualization), geometry or image processing is game development related, even if they have many common things such as intersection testing or acceleration data structure this doesn't mean that the question is game development or game engine related (such as this and this and many others). For example if I have a question about Path Tracing is this considered on topic? According to our current help center and site polcy it is not (or it should not be as it's not explicitly declared) but people here are just accepting it and answering it  ( and probably most my answers are graphics programming).
Well, I still think that those questions can be reasonably answered here, and should be explicitly considered on topic. So my suggestion is somehow big, that is, GDSE in its current form should also include image processing and graphics programming questions, so people are encouraged to ask those questions here instead of other sites like SO.
So the question is what would we gain from this site becoming gamedev and graphics programming:

People interested in graphics programming, image processing and not
only game dev may/will come here eventually. Hopefully this will enhance the quality
of the questions and the site.
Graphics programming questions will finally have a proper place to be asked. So instead of questions spanning multiple SE sites. This will be the proper place to ask them, so they should be migrated here whenever they show up on other sites. I even have an example I answered on SO a while a ago.
Game development is a very loosely defined term. Explicitly defining graphics programming that are not only related to games ( and probably image processing) will bring us better quality questions, and consequently enrich the website's knowledge base.
There is a proposal on Area51 for graphics programming, I think that this should be merged here instead.

So to summarize, my suggestion is to declare this site as gamedev and graphics programming (and probably rename it!). I would like to hear how is this possible? And your opinions on the subject, to be honest I find it very logical, but probably most of you wont agree with me.

There is an image processing (and other kinds of signals too) site.

I don't think we need to explicitly state this anywhere; the general consensus of the site so far is to allow these sorts of things unless they get too deep into the math or physics behind the problems (in which case we usually migrate to the math or physics SE sites).
You could make the same arguments of AI, databases, and so - game development covers a broad array of computer science topics (like most practical applications thereof). If we are overly explicit laying out every subdomain that is on-topic, not only does imply exclusion of those we fail to list for whatever reason, but it also means we have to adjust the wording of those explicit guidelines more frequently as new SE sites pop up (such as the new graphics programming site on Area 51, which I don't support specifically because it would muddy this issue further).
I think the existence of this thread will serve as endorsement enough for the subjects you mention.

I think we already get those questions, and I don't recall seeing any of them closed because they weren't game development related. GDSE gets a lot of questions that are not specific to game development, and we are actually pretty lenient in our acceptance of these questions. We still accept them because there's nowhere else in the SE network that fits better.
However, I don't think we should redefine the scope of the site to explicitly include them.  While graphics/image processing strategies are often used with game development, the same could be said of sound and music processing/creation, 3D/2D art asset creation, AI design and more. All of which are not explicitly called out as on topic.
The point being we get a lot of questions that are not unique to game development, but we're not redefining the site to explicitly allow them.
I think we're happy to answer graphics/image processing questions that are related to game development here. I also think it would be a mistake to open that up to questions about graphics/image processing that are not related to game development.

The problem here, touched on in Byte56's answer, is that there's a lot more to game development than just graphics programming.  By explicitly accepting general graphics programming questions to the extent that they get equal billing in the site name, the whole topic becomes skewed and this site becomes more of a "graphics programming and this other stuff" site rather than a "game development" site.
As it stands there's already a heavy slant towards graphics in the questions being asked.  Open the site's main page on any given day and somewhere between 50% to 75% of questions will be graphics questions.
That's not necessarily a bad thing right now, but slanting things even more in that direction will risk elbowing out the other, equally interesting, topics that generate good and useful questions.
If anything there's probably a more valid case to be made for splitting off graphics to it's own site (like the Area51 proposal) and keeping this site for the other non-graphics topics.  I don't think I'd personally support such a case as I'm uncertain if there would be sufficient interest in those other topics to justify maintaining a site for them (I'd like to see further discussion on the matter though).
The current approach of silently accepting graphics questions even if they're not explicitly game-related is working fine; there's no real reason to mess with it.

I like your point of view, and mostly agree with it. My point though, is the ones listed in the question, that we might get better quality questions. But anyway it seems that accepting them silently is fine so far.

General graphics programming questions that are not directly game development related are on-topic on this site. From the help page:

A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself... Would a professional game
  developer give me a better/different/more specific answer to this
  question than other programmers? If yes, then feel free to ask it here.

The above rule of thumb applies pretty well for the interesting graphics programming question we have seen here.

To be honest I don't know if a game developer would give me a better answer regarding; path tracing? radiosity calculations? geometry analysis? volume rendering? I call this one a graphics programmer, and maybe he never wrote a game (regardless if some of the knowledge intersects as I stated in the post). So I don't think this is valid.

And even it was on-topic (which I believe is not currently) my post is to make it explicitly on-topic.

@concept3d Better answer than who? As Byte56 said, there is no better place for those questions currently. If the graphics programming site in Area51 materializes, this would change though. Note that I'm not against your proposal, I was just stating that the questions are already on-topic here, although not very clearly.

Does this type of graphics / image processing not occur during games?
I would be inclined to say that by their very nature they appear to be related and both sides could gain something from tripping over in to information meant for the other side.
My thinking here ...
GDSE maybe should be more "3DSE".
If that got too big or not focused enough there are always those Area 51 style sites popping up to help build a divide.
The more information I can pull from 1 place the more likely I am to use that place as a source of my data, google if nothing else has taught us that.


text:
GD.SE's Winter GameJam - How should we choose the theme?
It's almost time for our second gamejam, and this question here is quite important.
How should we choose the jam's theme?
I will post some sample answers to start with. If you have a better idea, post it as an answer. Upvote the answers you like, downvote those that you do not like. Pretty simple!
Remember, we also have a chatroom dedicated to the GD.SE GameJams, so drop by if you feel that there's a need to discuss this or some other matter further.
http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/10960/gdse-gamejam

Accepted answer "We build up a list of possible themes that were voted by the community, and use a computer program to pick one at random, like we did for the first jam." on 8 Jan 2014.

We build up a list of possible themes that were voted by the community, and use a computer program to pick one at random, like we did for the first jam.

We choose a single user from the community (based on reputation or gamedev experience?) to come up with a theme. That particular user will also not be allowed to participate in the jam.

I'm willing to be that user. MUHAHAHHA

As would I, since I have no particular desire to actually make a game for the jam.

b-b-but the democracy :v

Picking randomly isn't exactly democratic either ;) I think you're just afraid of the horrible horrible theme I'd concoct.

@JoshPetrie Now that it's been decided that a theme will be picked randomly, your horrible horrible theme should go into the list from which the computer program will select.  It should go into that list at least three or four times, I reckon!  :)

What if Byte or Josh picked one of the top-rated user-submitted themes?


text:
GD.SE's Winter GameJam - Should we accept non-web games too?
The previous jam only permitted web-based games. The decision was taken after we took into consideration that web-based games have few dependencies and generally don't pose a threat for the player's system. At most, you need a browser and a player such as Flash Player or Unity Player.
If we were to lift this requirement, would you willingly download games as executables and run them? Vote on the answer that applies to you.

Accepted Trevor's answer on 8 Jan 2014.

Gamedev.stackexchange.com site is about developing games.  Any sort of games.
We allow questions about all sorts of languages, about the creation of downloadable games, about PC games, about mobile games, about freely downloadable games and about commercial games.  We have questions about DirectX, about OpenGL, about Unity, about GameMaker, about Flash, about XNA, about Construct, and dozens of other languages, tools, and platforms.
Why in the world would we want to limit participation in the site's events to just one small fraction of our users?
No -- our site events should be inclusive.  Participating in a game jam isn't about winning -- it's about participating;  about meeting people.  Showing people what you can do and admiring what they can do.  It's about being a part of a community.
We should be celebrating the people who make this site what it is.  Not excluding people on the basis of who we think won't get many votes and therefore shouldn't be allowed to enter in the first place.
Consider this a vote for "don't splinter the community".

You've swayed my vote. I agree that should allow any platform.

Yes, I am okay with downloading and running executables as well as any requirements they come with, from the jam's participants.

I'm for this, but my only fear would be that users would play more browser based games rather than downloadable ones because they are quicker to start, meaning they may get more votes.

Yep, a standard format for submission allows each game an equal chance of being judged. I think it's a mistake to not require a web entry. It's fine to accept builds for other platforms, but a web version should be included.

No, I'd rather the jam was limited to web games.


text:
What can be done about a user spamming the site with ads?
This user has five answers posted that are all the same spam advertisement for some website. I have flagged their answers as spam, but is there anything else we can do to prevent this from happening?

I've removed the offending account. The best thing to do is flag. If a post gets enough flags it will automatically be removed. Otherwise, one of the moderators will respond to the flags within a short period. Thanks for letting us know.

Flagging is the only thing that can be done. Rest assured, the response to the flags is usually quick, so no serious damage can be done by such users.

I was thinking about the same problem, I usually flag as fast as possible, and I think other users do the same. So unless the spammer is seriously flooding the site with ads, I don't see any serious damage taken, otherwise maybe there should be some other mechanism to deal with it.


text:
Should we consider questions about parsing file formats on- or off-topic?
We have several questions floating around asking for help loading  with  and/or , or converting between various file formats. For example, the following:

https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/60477/converting-dwg-to-obj
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/49774/sfml-tmx-map-loader-for-isometric-view
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/51537/loading-mtl-file-as-in-libgdx
loading a sequence of obj in java
Can GMod/SFM models be converted to Unity GameObjects?
What does this FVF value in the FVFData block of an .X file equate to?
How to convert .max files to .egg on linux
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/64080/png-file-loading-error-in-imagemagick

In general, should we consider questions of that form (loading and/or converting specific file formats) off topic? On topic? Something else?

I think it depends. If the file formats are game development specific and the question is about the format structure (as in, how the data is arranged), I think it could be on topic here. Some formats are poorly documented, and might benefit from experienced game developers.
If the questions are about how to code the conversion, it would be a better fit for stackoverflow.

So in other words, "what is the format of ," where filetype is some game-specific thing, is on-topic, but "what is the code to load .pngs" is not?

Yep. Like "How does X format store rotations?" or "How do I find the parent child relationship in format Y?" would be on topic. But, "How to convert from X to Z?" is not on topic (because it's too broad/unclear) and "How do I convert format Y using C#?" is also off topic.

Seems reasonable to me.

It's my opinion that these sorts of questions aren't really game-development related (in the sense that a game developer would give a better answer); fundamentally the process is to read the documentation of the file format and perform basic file IO based on the documentation therein. This would work for most file formats out there and isn't a game development topic.
Similarly, I don't think we need to be a wiki-like repository for code snippets to load every file format in existence in every language in existence, and that's the only other reasonable answer I can think of for such questions.

I think general parsing problems should be asked on Stack Overflow, unless it is specifically about dealing with a kind of material, transformation matrices or bones data (sth graphics or game related). I think it should dealt with on one by one basis like other programming questions, if a game developer can give you a better answer, then it is probably on-topic.
On a side note, some 3D formats are really ugly to parse, 3D PDF for instance.

I recently did some work with parsing Skeletal animation data from Assimp, and the top answer here http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/26382/i-cant-figure-out-how-to-animate-my-loaded-model-with-assimp was my solution in the end really. I think having a sort of community wiki for various file formats might be worthwhile?

@maccard maybe you can open a new discussion here on meta about the idea. Sounds neat.

Done! see: http://meta.gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/1447/community-wiki-style-answer-towards-parsing-file-formats


text:
Why did I get an email saying I've asked a question on GameDevelopment.SE?
I  just got an e-mail 3 hours ago from do-not-reply@stackexchange.com:

Recently, you asked a question on Game Development Stack Exchange, but you haven't verified your email address yet.
Click on the following link to verify your email and set a password so that you can log in.

I'm pretty  sure I have never asked a question here, or even known about this specific SE site's existence. Is this a bug, a january fools prank by SE, a phishing trick (can't be, do-not-reply at stackexchange is SE's official email), or has someone been using my acckount?
I've gotten the same e-mail about Sharepoint.SE, Unix.SE, Skeptics.SE, Japaneese.SE, HomeImprovement.SE, SciFi.SE, Personal Finance Money.SE  Database Admins.SE and TeX.SE. I have previously posted on TeX.SE, but not anytime recently.
Thanks.

An account other than yours (but sharing your email address) was recently used to ask a question on the Game Development site that was considered inappropriate and deleted.

So, does that mean that someone is misusing my e-mail address? Is there any way I can stop such a thing?

Yes, it looks like somebody is using your email to register for accounts and making posts attempting to impersonate you on other SE sites. My advice, when you get an email like you described, would be to post on the meta for the site as you did in this instance (or ask for a moderator in the site's chat room). They will be able to take care of the problem.

Thanks! So should I re-post this on meta.SharePoint, meta.Unix, etc.?

I guess. You could also perhaps try to post it on meta.stackoverflow, which may get you the attention of a staff member who could address the issue more widely.

@ JoshPetrie: Thanks again!


text:
Should we have a community wiki question related to parsing file formats?
Following on from the discussion here, someone mentioned that some 3d file formats are poorly documented and suggested that if a game developer can give a better answer than a programmer (on say StackOverflow) then the answer should be found here.
From my experience, 3D file format parsing is quite difficult, but the reality is that most formats are easily parsed using assimp, which in itself is quite a beast. I was recently trying to extract some skeletal animation from a collada (dae) file built using 3DS max and exported with it too. I had to parse the bone structure, along with the animations structure, and the answer on Gamedev.stackexchange.com was pretty much my go-to for the entire project.
What I would suggest is keeping a community wiki style answer, with a few explanations similar to the last one mentioned, and pointing new users towards it?

See also: http://meta.gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/1439/should-we-consider-questions-about-parsing-file-formats-on-or-off-topic

That's the sort of thing that external wikis or sites would be good for, not StackExchange.
I am against this idea because it would set a precedent for allowing these kinds of "how do I get started" resource-gathering questions, and I don't think those questions fall into the purview of the questions that this site should host.