text:
Am I not able to accept the answer?
I'm new to Unreal, and as expected I'm having a lot of difficulties.
I asked a question on the site and I received two answers, of which I understood little, or almost nothing, to be honest.
My question in question => How do one NPC follow a succession of target points?
That's where my dilemma comes in.
I think that if a person X tries to teach something to a person Y, and person Y does not understand, both are guilty.
I am to blame, and I think in this case, I am very guilty of not having understood.
What was written in the answers made sense to me, but that did not give me an idea of what I needed to do exactly to solve my problem.
But I think if I knew a little more about the Unreal, if I was not so new, those answers would be more than enough.
Of course it must be very annoying for those who will respond, create a project and program everything just to answer an issue, when the error may be minimal, lack of logic, a wrong function ... But I would love to have received parts of a blueprint (this was compensated by comments from users who answered the question). On the other hand, I felt great watching my own evolution.
Now that I know how to do what I wanted, I plan to post an answer to my own question and accept it.
Now I'm going to post an answer that someone as ignorant as I was was, understand and know perfectly well what to do. I intend to make the answer, that if I had received it, I would know exactly what to do.
I have already scored the two answers I received as useful, it helped me get to where I am (together with the comments), and if that is not useful, I do not know what it would be.
Other good questions have to do with the subject of this question:
A good answer exists but is not accepted
Accepting Answers
I also thought to edit the best of the questions (in my opinion, the one that helped me the most) and accept it.
Give me your opinion, do you think what I'm going to do is right? Do you have any suggestions?
Sorry for any typing errors. I'm not English speaker.

Self-answering a question is fine.
The answer you mark as “accepted” is the one that most/best helped you solve your problem. If no existing answer adequately covers what you found to solve your problem, then by all means, post an answer that does and accept it.


text:
Should this very old question with many upvotes as well as upvoted answers be closed as "too broad"?
See Strategies to Defeat Memory Editors for Cheating - Desktop Games
Fine question, lots of interest, but closed after 8 years as "too broad".  Is that the right action?
Also, it did get edited recently, yet the editor fails to even correct a dead link where the OP posts a link to their discovered answer.

Do you think the question is not "too broad" and is on-topic?

Also, the question was closed 4 years ago, so it makes it 4 years, not 8.

I think the moderator opinion means very little given the votes.  It’s what the customer buys sometimes, not what you want to sell.

Also, it did get edited recently, yet the editor fails to even correct a dead link where the OP posts a link to their discovered answer.

Fortunately, you were there to save the day!
Jokes aside, edits are meant to improve a post; although "Tiny, trivial edits are discouraged", they're not forbidden. It often happens that someone edits a post for something specific and does not check everything. If we forced users to make posts perfect when they edit them, no edits would be made.
Thanks for fixing that dead link!

I'll try to address your other concern:

Fine question, lots of interest, but closed after 8 years as "too broad". Is that the right action?

and

I think the moderator opinion means very little given the votes. It’s what the customer buys sometimes, not what you want to sell.

We have many fine, interesting and useful questions on the site. This is shown by the score of a question (the 'up arrow' hover message is exactly that, "This question shows research effort; it is useful and clear").
However, the score of a question is not related to it being on- or off-topic. When a question hits the Hot Network Questions list, and it gathers a lot of votes, it does not make it "super on-topic", it only makes it "super interesting".
The 'on-' and 'off-topicness' of a question is guided by what is defined in the Help Center, and also from the discussions that happen here, on Meta.
Rules regarding the score of a question don't really change over time, and the score of a question tends to only go in one direction, unlike what's on-topic for a site, which will change a bit more over time. What was OK to ask 5, 6, 7 years ago may have been considered too broad, or not very good, for the site a some point later in time. When that happens, we don't go back and review all the (45k+) questions to see if they're still a good match for the site. We close them as we notice them. This can be done by one person (a mod) or by 5 users.
The question you're referring to here has been closed as "too broad". I agree that the line between "OK broad" and "too broad" can be hard to trace. If one thinks a question has been closed but shouldn't have, one can leave a comment and vote to reopen it (the question will be sent to the Reopen Votes queue for others to review), or one can create a meta post about it, a bit like what you did here.
From what I can read from your question here, it's hard to see that you think the question is on-topic and should be reopened for that. If that's what you think, then please, by all means, create a new question and highlight why the question is on-topic and should be reopened.
If you think we should review what "too broad" means, again, a meta post here is the way to go.

I played a bit in SEDE, and dug up data about the time between when a question is asked and when it is closed.

I removed days 1, 2 and 3 because they were outliers w.r.t. the rest of the data. We can see that closing a question a long time after it's been asked is not uncommon.

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

sort: votes


text:
What should we do about link rot to popular sites?
As pointed out in chat, we have 295 links pointing to Glen Fiddler's site, which is no longer up. Based on the Pateron he had to support that work, it seems he is no longer working on that content. There was some further conversation in chat about what might be done to improve this situation and I thought it might be worth having a more formal discussion about the matter here.
What should we do about link rot to popular sites? Note: I'm not asking about general link rot & one-off problems, but situations like links to Glen Fiddler's site where there is a relatively large number of links.
Also, I'm aware of the general policy that good posts should work without links. I agree with that thinking. Rather, I'm interested in discussion about situations where many posts could possibly be restored to their original level of usefulness by addressing link rot to a given resource.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Are moderator positions granted for life?
I was looking at a list of our amazing moderators, and came across Jesse Dorsey, who has been inactive for over 5 years.  Is there any sort of criteria to retain your moderatorship?

The mod in question voted to close a question on May 20, 2019. Your question is still reasonable to ask, but your statement regarding that mod's inactivity is incorrect. Full list of SE activity.

Related SO meta post How is moderator inactivity identified and handled?.

And Can a moderator resign the post or be dismissed, and why?.

If you want to file a complaint about the moderation of the site (or the lack of moderation, or moderators?), I think your best bet is to contact the staff directly.

list of our amazing moderators

Thanks for the compliment :)

Are moderator positions granted for life?

As long as they're active and/or willing to moderate the site and/or don't do naughty things, yes, we can consider that they'll be moderators for life.
There are a couple of ways to view "activity":

Posting questions and answers (doing this is not part of the responsibilities of a mod)
Commenting, reviewing, editing posts, etc. (we have a user that only flags no longer needed comments)
Performing mod-only activity: handling flags, suspending users (not that we do that often), etc.

Thus, a mod could be super silent and look inactive but spend their days deleting no-longer-needed "thanks" comments.

Is there any sort of criteria to retain your moderatorship?

That's up to the mod and to StackExchange CM staff. A mod can decide to step down. The decision could also come from the CMs, or from the mod and CMs.
As an example, Tetrad was a mod before, but he no longer has his hammer diamond.

I want a hammer. I'll run again if we elect more.


text:
Is it a [bug], is it a feature? Do we really need a [bug] tag?
Looking at the main site, we currently have bug tag. (53 questions are tagged with it.)
It has no usage guidelines.
Is it noise? Do we need to keep it, if so, what should be its usage guideline/how would be use it?

I don't think we need it, and it should be removed:

Considering that a lot of users come here to ask about bugs they have with their project, that would mean that a large proportion of the new questions would need to be tagged as such, while the others would need to be properly categorized as architecture, art, etc. I think this does not make much sense.
I don't think someone could be considered expert in 'bugs' (but they could be very good at debugging).
It seems to be a meta tag, I don't think a question could be only tagged with bug.

Would we merge "bug" into "debugging"?

I don't think we should blindly do that, no. Debugging is about the process of finding bugs, and I doubt most [tag:bug] questions are actually about that process, but are rather about "I have this bug that I need help with".

In that case, I have been misusing the debugging tag! Thanks for the clarification, I'll fix my use of it going forward.

I agree. The alternative I see still has the problem of being meta-tags:
[x] + [debugging] means that the thing I made in [x] isn't working as expected. For instance, there's an error in my Java code somewhere.
[x] + [bug] means that I'm trying to use [x] to make something and it isn't working. For instance, Netbeans doesn't give me the option to run my code.

Revisiting this as I just ran into this question using the [tag:bug] tag. Does the relatively low voting suggest that the tag stays as is?

@Pikalek I think the "low voting" here reflects lack of interest and/or the question was not asked during a "peak of activity", not the "disagree" because there are no downvotes. The tag is on my list of those to be removed.


text:
Do we need two tags for Skyrim related questions?
We have two tags for Skyrim:

19 questions with skyrim-creation-kit
24 questions with skyrim-modding
15 questions with both

According to the Creation Kit Wiki,

[...]  everything you need to use the Creation Kit and make mods for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

This tells me that if one wants to make a mod for Skyrim, they'll need the Creation Kit.
Since I have not played the game, I'm asking:
Do we really need both of these tags, or one would be enough, given the scope of the topic (preferably skyrim-modding to be consistent with the others)?

I don't think we need both, mainly for the reasons you state in the question. skyrim-modding seems like the one we should keep.

I wonder about synonyms for this though. Creation Kit works for both fallout 4 and skyrim. But I agree skyrim-creation-kit makes more sense as skyrim-modding.


text:
Are board games and game shows on topic?
I have a new idea for a game show and wonder if Game Development is only limited to computer games? Which SE might be more appropriate?

Can you clarify, what question do you want to ask about this game show idea?

@DMGregory  Proof of concept. How to design a game show that would be for homeless people in a way that winnings would not be money or sold.

Now I'm curious what aversion you feel to awarding homeless people with money or things that can be sold. This sets off significant alarm bells. :(

@DMGregory most if not all game shows I have seen people are already doing OK. For what ever the reason the person is homeless the show does not want to award them anything that would be further destructive to them self or others. Things like food for a year or pay of back child support would be the award maybe rent.

That sounds like a question for a sociologist, social worker, or other social policy expert, not a game designer. Your question isn't really about how to make the game work, it's how to benefit a specific demographic. That's not a subject on which game developers are the most knowledgeable experts.

@DMGregory maybe would need to be structured like a like Press your luck but homeless addition.

I would strongly recommend discussing this with a specialist who works with homeless people before proceeding. This is an area in which you can easily do more harm than good, despite your best intentions. Understand the people and their needs first, then you can start to look for game designs that can serve those needs (if, in fact, a game is an appropriate way to address this issue - it might not be).

Oops, please disregard my previous answer. I'd overlooked past discussions and votes on this matter. Quoting Tetrad's answer in a previous Meta thread:

From the original proposal:
http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/2825/game-development

Q&A site for professional and independent game developers who would like to discuss the various aspects of video game development and
    design.

Generally speaking the answer is no[, board games are not on-topic here].  But, if it's a design related
  question that would make sense in the context of a video game, sure.
  There are lots of video games that are essentially board games.
My concern is that it's about the audience, not the question.  Most
  people on here are interested in video games, not necessarily board
  games.

(Thanks to Alexandre Vaillancourt and Josh for the correction, and sorry for jumping the gun!)
As mentioned above, there is an area of overlap between the these subjects. Many aspects of game design and development apply to both board games and digital games (as well as to game shows).
So, if the question could be phrased about a video game version of the game you're making, without changing any relevant details, then it would be on-topic here.
If you'd have to change a critical component of your question in a video game adaptation, like taking the physicality of balance & tangling bodies out of Twister, or taking the athletics out of a game show like American Gladiators, then video game experts might not be the most relevant folks to ask.
Board game specific design is on-topic on the Board & Card Games StackExchange, so you can reach relevant experts there if you have questions that are specific to physical games, or would benefit from an audience deeply familiar with and enthusiastic about board gaming. (Just note that tabletop RPGs & LARPs have their own SE)
Here, we'll generally be able to help the most with:

Computer programming, software engineering, and debugging in the context of games (for non-game-specific questions, visit StackOverflow instead)
Use of game-specific tools and libraries including game engines
Design and balancing of digital (or digitize-able) game mechanics to achieve specific outcomes
Publishing a digital game through brick & mortar video game retailers and online stores, and working with publishing partners

If your specific area of interest is outside of this - like in your example of how to help a disadvantaged social demographic - then you might find folks who know more or are more interested in talking about those issues on other sites.


text:
Do we need the [error-management] tag?
I just ran into a question with the [error-management] tag. Presently, there are only 7 questions that use it, all with low to no votes & all seem to apply it as a stand in for "I have an error/bug".
To my mind [error-management] means things like bug tracking, dealing with regression errors & logging crashes. Of those, only logging is here discussed with much frequency.
For comparison, Stack Overflow has a tag for bug-tracking, but not error management.

Remove the tag from questions where it is misused.
Using it as "I have an error/bug" is not particularly descriptive & already covered by debugging.
If actual error-management related questions do come in & use it fine. If not, it will eventually age out.
Right now it's limited to a small number of questions, so the workload & question churn is minimal.

For the record, I'm still open to other solutions. In the meantime, lacking superior alternatives, I'm going to mark this as accepted.


text:
Question about using a configuration file to launch game to a specific level - On-Topic?
I wonder if my question is acceptable for your site:

I'm making a game for Android which has multiple levels, following the common  practice where the player reaches a new level after the previous was completed.
During development, I would sometimes like to test the game directly at
a higher level without completing the previous level(s).
One way which comes to my mind is using a configuration file to run
the game in "DEV" or "DEBUG" mode. By adding data to this file, I'd be able to pass parameters to the game, to start the game directly at "LEVEL=F" for
example, or even create a special menu for running the game in dev or
debug mode.
Would this work or is there another more appropriate
method in this case?

Generally I'd avoid a question that asks "would this work?" because they all have one answer:
Try it and find out!
You're in a much better position to evaluate whether a particular solution fits your needs than strangers on the Internet who know no more than a few sentences about your game, your development team, your tech ecosystem, your constraints, etc.
More often than not, when you try it, you'll find that the answer for your specific case was "yes" - but that's not a very interesting StackExchange answer on its own (it wouldn't even meet our minimum character limits for a comment).
Or, more to the point, "yes, it can work, if you do it right" ahhhh, there's the trick. Just about any strategy that makes enough sense to describe to strangers could work. The hard part is the how of making it work.
So, I'd start with a bit of a flowchart:

Do you have an idea of how to solve the problem?

If not, search for existing Q&A / Tutorials about it.
If you still can't think of any way to solve the problem, then ask how to solve it, giving enough details of the context of your game to fit solutions into.

Now you have an idea: does that solution make sense to you, and seem suitable for your needs?

If not, what specific problem does it have? Do you feel it's too error prone, too much work, won't cover all the cases you need, etc?
Once you've identified why you don't like your current idea, ask for ways to solve those specific problems you've identified. (Just be sure to do the math / run a test to be sure they're real problems first, and you're not worrying over nothing)

Otherwise, you have a solution that seems suitable to your needs. You're probably right - it probably can work! So just try implementing it. Your idea doesn't need the blessing of the council of Internet strangers before you try it.
If it helps you gain confidence: plenty of terrible ideas have been implemented in successful games. By contrast, yours probably isn't that bad at all. ;) It might even be great!
Have confidence in your skills as a developer and your judgement of the situation. You got this!
What happened when you tried implementing your idea?

Did your attempt work, and serve all your needs? You're done. Congratulations, you can move on to your next feature without waiting for an Internet stranger to get back to you.
Did you get stuck somewhere in making your attempt? Now you have a concrete idea of where the hard parts of the problem are, and you can ask a more focused and detailed question using the concrete example of your attempt so far, and the knowledge you gained along the way.
Did you complete your solution, but find bugs or cases it doesn't cover? Now you can ask a question specific to solving those problem cases.

I think following this approach will help you get your work done faster, avoiding analysis paralysis and time spent on this site crafting/clarifying your question, waiting for answers, and iterating until the answers are actionable. When you do need to ask a question, these guidelines should help you ask more concrete, detailed questions that get to the heart of the problem you're having, so you get answers that are useful for what you really need.


text:
Good or not question about Android mini game
Is this question "too broad" or otherwise not a good fit for the site?

If I start a new Android mini game project today, is it a good idea to
  use (and learn) Kotlin if I already know Java and I already have quite
  a lot of Android boilerplate re-usable game code in Java?
I had a new idea and we have now decided for a name of the game. It
  will be a small aircraft which the player will maneuver in 2D and
  side-scrolling. To begin with I want to create it for Android. I am
  considering doing it in Kotlin because that it the new preferred
  language for Android, or maybe Unity engine.
(React-native or Flutter are not good choices for game development if
  I understand correctly.)

Thanks for asking here!
It is off-topic, "what technology to use", as described in the help.
Sorry for the brevity, I'm on my phone.


text:
How to search Stack Exchange Game Development
I am being stupid?  I cannot find an icon or box to search the site.  The closest I got was just now when I started to type the title of this post.

Good news! We have a help page just for that! How do I search?

You can find the search box at the very top of the desktop site:

On mobile, you can touch the magnifying glass icon next to the "All Questions" text:

And in the Android app it's again located at the top of the question list:

As Alexandre Vaillancourt points out, we also have a help page with more information about using the search feature.

Is there a version of the search tool that does not give pixelated results?


text:
Where is the line between informational and offensive?
A recent question contained an image that was removed as offensive.
The removed image "spoke a 1000 words," illustrated the problem and even reflected some of the technical issues of the problem that were not mentioned in the question. The image was highly relevant and I believe it was not superfluous or intended to be offensive.
In addition to being an actual example of the issue at hand, it also illustrated a related problem: You need to filter words that are similar or can be used a stand-ins for offensive words.
In this case, the letters "DIK", were visible as the offending term. With the addition of another letter, I can think of two offensive terms. This is an issue for those who need to employ such filters--How do you scan for modified terms?
The phrase that replaced the image ("a bunch of swear words and offensive terms.") does not reflect this issue and thus detracts from the question.
Obscenity filters are a common, real-world problem and of course important in the games industry. No one benefits from reducing awareness of the problem scope here.
So where is the line? Are SE's current CoC prohibitive of informational discussion in favor of not offending anyone?

I had to think about the purpose of this question for a moment...
I suppose it's a request of all of the active editors under whose care we often enter.
Thank you for your contribution, but please try to make sure your edits do not detract from the knowledge sharing process.
I'd like to believe that we can ask mature questions and post mature answers, in a valid context.

Downvoters on the answer should post an answer with which they agree. ¯\(ツ)/¯

Where is the line between informational and offensive?

there:
needs

does not need
Is the "offensive" needed to illustrate the issue? Yes, then maybe we'll tolerate it (as a community).
If it's not needed, and we can find "non offensive" ways to illustrate the issue (or the solution), then why use "potentially offensive" content? Some swear words are kind of "trivial" for me, but are "very serious" for others. Why annoy them when you know you could do otherwise and get the exact same result?
IMHO, this image that was posted was not needed. Yes, it gave a clear glimpse of what the asker was trying to avoid ("spoke a 1000 words", as you say), but anyone who got close to an Arcade game just knows what the question is about, which removes the need of the screenshot.
If you believe that "something is lost" with the removal, you can try and edit it back in yourself, somehow: you can try and highlight that issue, without resorting to using actual offensive words:

For instance, if I'm branded by Pepsi, and they don't want the offensive word "Coke" appear on the highscores table, users will figure out ways to get around a "Coke" filter with "Cohke", "C0ke", "CoI<e", "C<>ke", "[oke", ...

If you have better ways to improve the question without using the offensive words, then the power is in your hands :)

Mostly fair analysis, but you ignored the part of the loss of information, in this case, very relevant information.

And in this case, the OP is specifically trying to prevent the situation depicted in the image. I think it is wrong to claim that OP has the picture there to annoy those who find the words "very serious" "on purpose". (That's literally the opposite purpose)

OP's question is about an online leader board with users names in excess of 3 characters, not an arcade cabinet leader board with a 3 letter limit. At best, the image served as a visual depiction of how the problem has previously been seen in another context. At worst, it had list of words & abbreviations intended to shock and offend. To be clear, I'm assuming the actors who entered the combos into the cabinet intended to offend; I'm assuming OP did not, but rather was trying to illustrate a point. I agree with the edit - the illustration was superfluous.

As someone who proudly identifies as two of the slurs in the original image, I'd agree the question reads just as clearly without its presence, so it really didn't add additional information that was not already present in the text (which is more searchable, to boot!). So I think Alexandre is quite correct that a "need" for the image is not demonstrated here.

@Mars I have edited my answer. I don't think the intention of the OP was to be offensive in this case. As such, they mentioned in the comments that they did not realize it might have been offensive to some and they agreed that the image should be removed. Also, thanks for bringing this here :)

@AlexandreVaillancourt Thank you for taking the time to answer and even edit the answer :)

I slightly edited the question, as I think it was not clear, especially not for non-programmers, where the lost information that I'm referring to is. Yes, I believe everyone can imagine a leaderboard with offensive names. No, I don't think everyone immediately imagines that leaderboard with misspelled offensive names. In this case, misspelled offensive names are relevant to the problem scope and I think the loss there should have been addressed in the edit

I suppose in the end, this boils down to an inadequate edit, which happens all the time even without being connected to an issue of offensiveness.  What sparked the inadequate probably isn't important.

@AlexandreVaillancourt Very well written edits :)

@Mars Yeah, this happens. Often users will go and "put off the fire" (in this case, remove the image "Hurry, this image has hit the hot network question and has to be removed ASAP"), while not really taking the time to find a replacement solution. It's ok because the edit "improved the post". Also, sometimes the issue is so obvious to them that they can't see that the removal of the image (or the text) would remove something very important (most likely all the regular users here knew what this was about). So yeah, if you think it can be further improved, then please, go ahead :)


text:
Is it acceptable to make and accept my own answer in this case?
How to draw a smoother solid-fill circle?
@user1118321 submitted an answer that was useful but did not answer my question exactly; I did not want to use anti-aliasing for the edge of the circle. I've thanked him and suggested that he submit a different answer if it interests him.
I am also interested in @Pikalek's as-yet unsubmitted answer as he mentioned using an alternative method using the mid-point algorithm.
I have since updated my original post with an update on my progress instead of submitting it as an answer, even though I think it would qualify as "an answer".
My questions are:

Pikalek played a role in my solution and I would acknowledge this in an answer if I submit one. It feels very rude but I do acknowledge his answer and state why it was insufficient. Is it acceptable to modify someone else's answer for my own and accept it when I also asked the question? The difference in code is subtle but the result is significant.
I submitted my solution as an update to my question instead of rushing to answer it myself to not discourage others from submitting their own. I'm effectively baiting more answers with a solution in reserve. Am I wrong to manage my question in this way? If a better solution comes along, I will accept that instead.

I suppose that, while I do have an answer, I'm not satisfied with it. And since it is my question, I feel that my actions are justified.
I'm seeking advice on whether I'm handled this situation appropriately.

Have you though this situation from the point of view of a future reader? Imagine in a few months someone has the same problem as you, and they find your question, which answer would they need to read to solve their problem? I'm not sure about this specific case, but I'd say if an answer gives you enough "nudge" of what to do next and how to approach a problem, it's good enough. If anything, you can always edit an answer, if you feel it will make it more complete.

Is it acceptable to make and accept my own answer in this case?

I think it is.
The comment box says (emphasis mine):

Use comments to ask for more information or suggest improvements. Avoid answering questions in comments.

If a user posts an answer as a comment, then it could mean either:

They don't have a full solution but still feel like helping you
They don't have the time to write a full answer but still feel like helping you
They're afraid to lose rep by posting a wrong answer
Etc..

Nothing prevents another user to take that comment and turn it into an answer to reap the rep.
With the the reminder in the comments box, users knowingly forfeit these potential Internet points.
But that's just me.


text:
Can (Should) I provide small feedback on provided code snippets, while also answering the question?
Question
When a user asks a question and provides a code sample, should I try to answer the question without changing his/her code too much, or can I also provide some small constructive feedback on the given code (if small enough / relevant) with an updated snippet.
Origin
I remember reading that SE is not meant for direct code feedback as that would make questions / answers very specific to a situation, but I do feel that some code feedback (like the example below) could increase someones knowledge.
I am talking about answering the question first and then have an extra note with something like 'As a hint, you could also achieve the same result with less code, making it more readable for yourself and others' and then providing a snippet with changes. (I am not talking about any personal aspects such as code conventions).
example: (C# Unity)
private void Update()
{
    StartCoroutine("Changecolor", 3f);
}
IEnumerator Changecolor()
{
    yield return new WaitForSeconds(3);
    if(startstop == true)
    {
        int random = Random.Range(1, 4);
        if (random == 1)
        {
            m_SpriteRenderer = GetComponent<SpriteRenderer>();
            m_SpriteRenderer.color = Color.blue;
        }
        else if(random == 2)
        {
            m_SpriteRenderer = GetComponent<SpriteRenderer>();
            m_SpriteRenderer.color = Color.red;
        }
        else if(random == 3)
        {
            m_SpriteRenderer = GetComponent<SpriteRenderer>();
            m_SpriteRenderer.color = Color.green;
        }
        else
        {
            m_SpriteRenderer = GetComponent<SpriteRenderer>();
            m_SpriteRenderer.color = Color.yellow;
        }
    }
}
private void OnMouseDown()
{
    startstop = !startstop;
}

Which could be done with something like:
// store all colors in an array.
Color[] m_Colors = new Color[] { Color.blue, Color.red, Color.green, Color.yellow };

private void Update()
{
    if (startstop)
    {
        StartCoroutine("Changecolor", 3f);
        startstop = false;
    }
}

IEnumerator Changecolor()
{
    yield return new WaitForSeconds(3);

    m_SpriteRenderer = GetComponent<SpriteRenderer>();

    // select a random color from the array and apply it.
    // Count() - 1 as arrays start counting at 0.
    int random = Random.Range(0, m_Colors.Count() - 1);

    m_SpriteRenderer.color = m_Colors[random];
}

The question I used as an example: changing color of sprite not every frame
final note: My first (and last) post on GDMeta has been a while ago, so if anything about my question is incorrect / wrong, please let me know.

I'd say, the question you can ask yourself is, will others benefit by the changes? It's not only OP that people are helping by answering, but future readers as well.
I saw this answer when it was posted, and I was really confused about what it is trying to do. I agree with you that it could use a lot of work to make it readable, but if the OP is new on C# and wouldn't understand the changes, they would just ignore them.
I've seen answers before addressing this in a way to satisfy both the OP and other readers. Simply answer the question, being as straightforward as possible without altering the code a lot. After that, you can have some extra information, something like "It would be better if you did X and Y in your code, as it makes it better because of reasons A and B".
This way, the OP can read the new information, and possibly benefit from them, or just focus on the solution, which might be more time-critical for them. But future readers can see both the solution and possible ways of making the code even better.
In this specific case however, I think your code might look too complex for OP. On that question I left a comment because I'm still not sure what OP is trying to achieve.
Keep in mind there's always the CodeReview StackExchange, for people looking to improve their code.

So you suggest to not provide "more optimal" code, only "ways to make it better"?

@AlexandreVaillancourt I think showing a completely refactored code would be close to being off-topic. But advice on how to make the code better can help everyone.

My answer will go along the lines of TomTsagk, but will end differently:

provide the straight answer to their question;
add an horizontal line (blank line + ---);
tell them that you think of ways of making their code "more optimal";
describe what you think;
provide the code;
comment the code, explain what's going on.

Although they might not have a grasp of what you suggest now, your techniques and the code you use could get them intrigued and curious about new approaches.

I like both answers, as they are mostly the same as what I was thinking when writing this question. Making people curious about new approaches is exactly one of the main reasons as to why I would give feedback on those code snippets. I did not know (/remember) about that horizontal line, but I like that idea.

I've done this before, and typically the following applies:

If the provided code is OK, barring that it might benefit from some refactoring, then I prefer to leave it be.  The OP might be aware of this, or doing it this way for other reasons we don't immediately know about.

The classic example of this in a Gamedev context might be someone who posts code using OpenGL immediate mode; a reply that focusses on "don't use immediate mode, use buffer objects", although correct and good advice, is probably actually not very helpful in terms of solving the problem.

If there are other things obviously wrong with the code that would prevent the OP from achieving what they wish to do, then it would be a disservice to the OP to not at least point it out.

It may be appropriate to encourage the OP to ask a bunch of extra questions about these hypothetical other wrong things, rather than going down too much of a rabbit hole in your answer to their original question.

Finally, one should always remember that one may not be seeing the actual code in a question. Remember that:

Questions about debugging a problem must provide a minimal, complete, verifiable example of the issue...

The code that is posted may therefore be this example, with idiomatic correctness perhaps being of lower priority than illustrating the problem.


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Sooo..... how are we doing with this whole "moderator revolt" thing?
I met by chance one of the original/foundational SO developers at a bar the other day.  He told me it had been a long day and he needed a beer.  After talking I hopped on 'meta' later and saw the whole uproar over things related to moderators, community, etc. and understood a bit more about why it had been a long day for him.
What I saw was a lot of conflict about how SO is percieved as treating moderators.  But in here it seems pretty quiet on the topic.
Does the topic at hand bother anyone?   Maybe better as a chat topic, but meta is full of "chat topic" posts so I'm using it as my example a bit.
PS
If you don't know what I'm talking about, then that's fine - in fact it's a sign that the conflict going on in https://meta.stackexchange.com/ has indeed not showed up on your radar.

Are you looking for yes, no / taking a poll, or are you prompting for longer form discussion?

Are you specifically looking for mod's thoughts about this?

Like the tag says, discussion.  And I’d like to hear any opinion.

@TomTsagk As per the mod agreement, mods are volunteers, not employees, thus unpaid.

I'm concerned about it.
I come here to share what I know, learn things I don't know and to get some social interaction. I have strong concerns about doing that in a system where people are treated poorly. It's made me more introspective about my participation.
I'm also unsure what the relative lack of reaction here means. I could see that number of different ways.
The recent response by David Fullerton (Stack Overflow’s CTO) is promising; time will tell how those promises are kept.

I guess their commitment should be seen as "Look team, this is our focus now so let's not mess this up more". I found it "bold" and risky to give a timeline.

Yeah. That seems like a tight turn around between getting mod feedback & public announcement. Especially given the spectrum of reactions to date.

And in the retrospective this post by David lead pretty much to nothing.

I'm only active on GDSE at the moment. I'm a 12k member of SO, but I don't go there very often at the moment.
The impact of said events has been pretty minimal around here, and I think that's because our mod team and community are very strong. :)


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Do we need the [crash] tag?
Just ran into the crash tag here. There's only 4 questions using it right now.
Related reading:

Do we really need a [bug] tag?
Do we need the [error-management] tag?

It doesn’t seem very useful to me.


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Thanks for six years!
In the six years since I was elected to be a moderator on GDSE, I've had a great time working with and supporting the community here.
But ends come to all things. I've found myself with less and less time to put towards the site recently, and so I've decided to step down as a moderator.
Thanks for this opportunity, it's been fun!

I'll miss your steady hand at the wheel! Thank you for everything you've done to build and maintain this community.

Thank you for your contributions and advice, game dev & otherwise. Hope you can still drop by from time to time. I wish you well on whatever comes next.

Thank you for the truly amazing amount of effort you've put into the site! ♥

Maybe he found a Singleton in the SE codebase.

I'm not sure if I should vote up because of all the help you've provided in shaping this community and all the high quality help you've provided to users over the years, or if I should vote down because I'm a little sad to see you go.
In any case, I think you're a great mod and I certainly looked up to you for that role.
I wish you luck and fun in your other projects, and we'll always be happy to see you answer a question on the main site :)


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2019: a year in moderation
It's New Year's Day in Stack Exchange land...
A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:

We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.
  -- A Theory of Moderation

While there certainly are Moderators here, a significant amount of the moderation is done by ordinary people, using the privileges
they've earned by virtue of their contributions to the site. Each of you contributes a little bit of time and effort, and together you accomplish much.
As we enter a new year, let's pause and reflect, taking a moment to appreciate the work that we do here together.
And what could be more festive than a big pile of numbers?
So here is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Game Development over the past 12 months:
                  Action                  Moderators Community¹
----------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended²                                   4         18
Users destroyed³                                   5          0
Users deleted                                      3          0
Users contacted                                    7          2
Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue            240        961
Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue                36         28
Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue          53         83
Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue                51        282
Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue                236      1,626
Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue                96        100
Tags merged                                        2          0
Tag synonyms proposed                              2          0
Tag synonyms created                               2          0
Questions reopened                                42          5
Questions protected                                5         12
Questions migrated                                 5          0
Questions merged                                   3          0
Questions flagged⁵                                15        419
Questions closed                                 851        106
Question flags handled⁵                          223        213
Posts unlocked                                     0          3
Posts undeleted                                    7        104
Posts locked                                       3         74
Posts deleted⁶                                   264      3,426
Posts bumped                                       0      3,330
Escalations to the Community Manager team          2          0
Comments undeleted                                10          1
Comments flagged                                   9      1,736
Comments deleted⁷                              1,889      2,678
Comment flags handled                            113      1,632
Answers flagged                                   77        481
Answer flags handled                             406        152
All comments on a post moved to chat               9          2

Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Game Development without diamonds next to their names, and to the automated systems otherwise known as user #-1.
² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.
³ A "destroyed" user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.
⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.
⁵ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes).
⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.
⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).
Further reading:

Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? I posted a similar report here last year: 2018: a year in moderation...
You can also check out this report on other sites
Or peruse detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites

Wishing you all a happy new year...


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Is this 3D graphics computation question from Photo-SE on topic here?
Over at Photo-SE, we have a question from a new user that seems like it would be on-topic here:
Calculating the new coordinate of a point in the camera field of view after rotating the camera around the z -axis
I just wanted to check with your Meta before I vote to migrate the question over here.

Note: I also cross-posted this meta-question at Computer Graphics SE.

It's not "a perfect match" for our site, as we don't generally deal with simulating lenses and/or focal lengths, but I don't think it's completely off-topic either. I will not vote to close if it's migrated here.
If folks over ComputerGraphics give you a more enthusiastic answer, maybe you could move it there instead :)

Thanks for the reply. Based on the answer at CGSE, I'm going to recommend it over there, rather than here. Cheers! =)


text:
The questions that have a historical lock are still visible in the lists
I have historical-locked a question, and it's still visible from a /question list; however, it's written here that it should not be visible:

Additionally, on main (non-meta) sites, historically locked questions are omitted from normal question lists (those on the home page, /questions, and the various per-tag lists),

Is it possible to fix it (by hiding the question from the list)?
I thought I kept on seeing it in the list because I'm a mod and have super powers (), but looking at the list with an anonymous window/user, I still see it.

(For reference, my earlier edit was to ensure that this issue was properly tracked internally and could be forwarded to the relevant developer team to follow up, since this bug report is still valid.)


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Is it good tone to link your own (open source) projects to support your answer?
Often, when I answer a question it is because I have dealt with a similar issue or otherwise have knowledge/experience/tips regarding the problem at hand.
I write out the answer, possibly put in a code snippet or two if it is relevant, and then include a link to a project of mine (I only have like 3 on GitHub as I am kinda specialized). It is meant as a "further reading" kind of thing, with a short sentence or two explaining how it could be relevant. The reason I do this is I know that I would have found something like that extremely useful if I were in such a situation - I feel there is often lack of certain types of information, including working, practical implementations.
To add to this, the projects themselves aren't meant to succeed commercially or otherwise and are meant as a learning experience for myself, and by putting them online I hope to share the learning with others. The answers I give do not depend on the link either - it and surrounding context can be fully edited out of the answers and they would still answer the question.
Is this considered okay or obnoxious? Useful or unnecessary?

When done right, it's fine; the information for how to do it right is covered in the help on how to not be a spammer. The key points as I see them are:

The answer needs to be complete. If removing the link or mention of the project significantly reduces the usefulness of the answer, there's a problem. the problem may be  the answer, the question or both, but it needs to be addressed. (A well written answer with project link to a "where can I get resources" question is still in trouble because the question is off-topic.)
Disclosure is important. The Use text for flagging as spam currently reads (emphasis mine)"Exists only to promote a product or service, does not disclose the author's affiliation."

Based on the wording of your question it sounds like you're taking the right things into consideration. If the questions are on-topic, your approach doesn't strikes me as obnoxious, and I agree that providing some implementions as examples can be very helpful.


text:
Community Promotion Ads — 2020
2020 has come! But… oops, where did the time go? It’s already March! Belated as it is, it’s time for a refresh of Community Promotion Ads!
What are Community Promotion Ads?
Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.
Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?
This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:

cool game development related open source apps
scripts packs or power tools
project or blogs from notable or just community devs
cool events or conferences
anything else your community would genuinely be interested in

The goal is for future visitors to find out about the stuff your community deems important. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are relevant to your own community's interests, both for those already in the community and those yet to join.
Why do we reset the ads every year?
Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.
The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.
How does it work?
The answers you post to this question must conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored.

All answers should be in the exact form of:
[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]

   [1]: http://image-url
   [2]: http://clickthrough-url

Please do not add anything else to the body of the post. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.
The question must always be tagged with the magic community-ads tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.

Image requirements

The image that you create must be 300 x 250 pixels, or double that if high DPI.
Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)
Must be GIF or PNG
No animated GIFs
Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB
If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.

Score Threshold
There is a minimum score threshold an answer must meet (currently 6) before it will be shown on the main site.
You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats here.

Hi GameDev Community - The Arqade community spent a bit of time building some ads to share on different SE sites. We welcome a cross-post/collab on our community ads post as well :)


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Changing [xenko] tag to [stride]
The Xenko game engine has been renamed to Stride, and I just asked a question about it, implicitly adding the new stride tag without checking for [xenko] first. Oops!
Since there is only 1 question tagged [xenko], should it be renamed / changed to [stride], or should it be made a synonym? The [xenko] tag does have some description, but I mostly added the same text to [stride] already (which is not yet peer-reviewed).

Since it's a rename of the engine, I think it should be made a synonym of the new stride tag. This would help future visitors to see something "coherent" with the rest of the internet (those who have not been made aware that it was renamed, for example).

As a side answer (which is orthogonal with my other answer), it's not atypical to include the term "engine" into the tag.
So I would suggest we use the tag stride-engine instead of just stride.

I thought so too, but saw that the Unity engine only uses [unity] aswell, and went with that.

Yeah, we can't "rename" a tag, we have to modify all the questions, or create a synonym, and unity was created like that. The scope this tag here is much smaller and easier to "get it right".

Ah, I see. I thought it was done on purpose for Unity. Of course, feel free to use [stride-engine] then!


text:
Is there a bug with link-following?
If I follow the link in the answer to this question, it closes the current tab and opens the link in a new tab. This is with the current version of Firefox.
What is the best time to implement Multiplayer system?
Before:

After:

So you can't hit the "back" button?

Hm.... I'm not able to reproduce this in Firefox 76.0 / 76.0.1 or in Chrome 81.0.4044.138, both 64-bit on Windows 10. The link opens in the same tab for me, and my back button lets me return to the answer.

No, the back button is grayed out. "Undo close tab" restores the GDSE tab, leaving the Steam tab open.

The Firefox extension "Facebook Container" causes this behavior. So there's no issue with the site itself, I don't think.

Good find! May I ask how you tracked down the cause?

I remembered that in the right click menu it's not "open in new tab" it's "open in new Facebook tab" referring to that plugin. I thought then that maybe that plugin was causing the issue. So I turned it off, and the problem was fixed.


text:
Making sense of the “Game Development” icon
What does the 3 blocks in the "Game Development" icon represents and how is that related to "Game Development"?

Can we change it to something that is more related to "Games" or "Development"?

Did you have something in mind that you feel would better reflect our subject matter? Or a set of criteria you'd propose to judge candidate submissions?

I guess anything related to games or "development" would be fine but I struggle to associate 3 floating cubes with games. If you want to go with "building blocks", at least make it look like building blocks. Perhaps like toys?

I'll confess a lot of my game development projects start with coloured cubes as placeholder art. Some arguably finish that way too. Games like IDARB (It Draws a Red Box) suggest to me that this is not an uncommon development experience... ;)

Origins & explanations of the logo and other site design tidbits can be found here: Design for Game Development Site


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Have we abandoned the rule about generic programming questions?
Tl;dr why is there a close reason for "Generic programming question" if we are not closing and instead up-voting and answering blatantly off-topic questions? Has the rule / community consensus about this topic changed? If so why is the close option still there?
Related:

Do we still consider programming questions off topic if the context is game-dev related, but the problem turned out to be generic?
Generic programming questions are off-topic, period. Right?

Over the last few months I've mostly removed myself from this stack entirely, because almost every single question being posted is of the form "How do I [generic programming issue]. Oh and I'm programming a game". The way I see it, and has seen it for all these years, is that if you remove the game-development part of a programming question and the question still makes sense, it belongs on StackOverflow.
I know some top-users & moderators are of the mindset that disallowing questions like and closing them will deter people from joining the network, but I argue that having low quality questions asked by users who will in many cases not even come back to look at the answers, and even less bother accepting / up-voting, is extremely detrimental to "recruiting" (or whatever you want to name it :D) new people to the network. I also imagine the steady influx of these low-quality questions is driving dedicated and long-term users like me away.
I don't want to make this into a long rant. I think most people that read Meta know what I'm talking about so I'm instead going to give a few examples of questions (1 of each are mine, trying to be as objective as possible) that I believe are on-topic / off-topic / borderline for this stack.
Off-topic. If you remove the "Oh and I'm programming a game" part from these questions they are still valid programming questions and should therefor be posted on StackOverflow.

Switch statement efficiency in game code
python sockets: receive data only when data is available?
I'm creating a game in javascript of people moving on a board/grid. I don't want people to be at the same place at the same time. How do I fix this?
Is there a reason to inherit both generic and non-generic version of an interface? (Mine)

On-topic. Usually specific to a certain game engine, e.g. the physics in Unity or AI in Unreal Engine etc. If you removed the context of the game engine they would not make sense (or become too generic) hence I believe they are valid for this site.

Prevent a RigidBody2D from penetrating into a Kinematic2D moving platform's CollisionArea2D
Expose private methods to inspector? (Mine)

Borderline. These questions still make sense if you remove the "Oh and I'm programming a game" part and would be valid without them, but I still believe the answer would be different when given in the context of creating a game. These are hence up for discussion about if they belong here or not but I think these should be allowed here.

How can I save game "professionally"?
How to throw an object without having a curve trajectory?
GLSL - Only draw arond point / flashlight effect (Mine)

Thanks for posting this in meta!
Both past discussions you have posted seem to have this stance:

If it's blatantly off-topic such as a compiler error, or a language syntax issue, I [user1430] will unilaterally close it.

I know we, mods, do close questions that are generic programming questions as described above, so:

Have we abandoned the rule about generic programming questions?

From a personal point of view, no, we haven't.
This brings up another issue, and I suspect that is the one that is causing you (and us) the most frustration:
Community effort.
Mods being "human exception handlers", our role is not to shape the policies; we can, however, enforce them once they are clear. When we feel a question is "borderline" off-topic, we defer to the community. We may even answer it! (Because "borderline" is different from user to user, even when the user is a moderator.)
The tools we have at our disposal and our observations allow us to gauge the community effort, i.e., the participation in moderation activity by non-moderators. This effort has decreased during the past years.
If the community feels like enforcing or broadening the definition of what is a "programming question" that should be asked on SO, mods are not there to oppose, and mods don't have binding votes in those decisions. Aside from spending more time voting to close questions and reviewing the close votes queue, posting in Meta is the community's best bet in bringing changes and improvement (although we would still need more activity here).
If you have proposals for improvements or changes in that regard, I'm sure the community will be happy to read them.

This post has highlighted a fact: we have 3 places where we mention the policy about closing questions that are only about programming:

Close > A community-specific reason  >

Programming questions that aren't specific to game development are off-topic here, but can be asked on Stack Overflow. 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?"

Help/on-topic:

General programming questions more likely belong on Stack Overflow instead of here. 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. For more discussion on that topic, see this question on our meta site.

Note that this links to another Meta post which adds

If I'm asking about, say, a path finding algorithm, SO is probably not the right choice since if its for a game, you'll probably trade off some accuracy for more efficiency (different needs/goals). But if you're asking how to reverse the order of an array, then a game developer is going to give the same answer as any other programmer, so it probably belongs on SO.

And the two other questions you posted

If it's blatantly off-topic such as a compiler error, or a language syntax issue, I [user1430] will unilaterally close it.

There is some slight discrepancies between all three. Perhaps this needs to be fixed (with a future meta post).

I'm planning one more meta post about reducing the amount of votes required to close a question, and another one to "unify and formalize" the descriptions of the "generic programming questions are off topic."

I have done this: Do we want to lower the amount votes to close/reopen a question? and Generic programming questions are not a good fit for gamedev.

In my opinion, we should keep and enforce the rule about general programming questions. If it's how to access a script on a game object in Unity, it's kind of just a C# question (the script is a property of the object), but it's really closely related to how Unity does things... so that's ok.


text:
Do we want to lower the amount votes to close/reopen a question?
It's no secret that the user base and active user base as declined over the past years. At all times, we had significanly less users to help manage the site than we get on Stack Overflow.
Yet, the amount of votes required to close a question is still five, just like it was on SO. To push it further, SO lowered the threshold from five to three at the end of last year.
WebApps got through a similar process.
In order to help improve the quality on the site, if StackExchange ever gives us the possibility, do we want to try and lower the threshold to three votes needed to close/reopen a question?

There is no guarantee that SE will do this for us, as far as I'm aware, but it's worth to try and let the CM team know we are interested.

Marking this with "status-review" to let the CM team know that we'd be interested in this. Meanwhile, I'll see if I can try and manually close/reopen the questions that have 3 close/reopen votes or more.

Since it is nearly 1 month ago, do you get any feedback from SE if the possibility exists?

@wychmaster Nope, I think it's on their todo list, but they did not get to it yet. I suspect it's not on their high priority list, though, so I dont expect any news anytime soon.

Thank you for the response. I think this "feature" would be interesting for other sites too. For example, the Computer Graphics SE where we currently have no active moderator and the active user count with enough reputation to cast votes is too small to effectively handle anything else than spam due to the high threshold. Do you think the lowering would be available to other communities too once it is "done" or do we need to create our own site-specific special treatment request?

You may have seen that we conducted a test on 13 network sites — please stay tuned for the results of that step and next steps on this.

Yes.
Paddingpaddingpaddingpadding

Almost 2 years since y'all escalated this to the Community Team — apologies for the delay there! But the good news is you now officially only need 3 close votes to close a question on Game Development SE!
After looking at the data, I think it's clear that there's no reason for y'all to have this set at 5. Thank you so much for bearing with us while we got to this request.
We'll check back in with you all in a few months to see how things are going — if things are going great, we may not post an update but please feel free to leave a comment if you want us to post something.
Here's some basic stats of how things look:
Over the last two years, you've had decent numbers when looking into what percentage of questions that received at least one flag or vote to close actually ended up getting closed. While there are some dips here and there, things have been generally in the 70-80% range and the numbers of posts this represents are relatively small (around 50~60 in average in the past year).

The graph below, however, does show something that is a bit more concerning:

When working on this project, Catija had found two primary use cases for this change:

When too many items are going unhandled (not unclosed, just unhandled)
When the moderators are doing the bulk of the closing/reopening.

Because the mods here are casting the bulk of the final close votes (which are, actually, mostly the first close votes), the first graph looks good — however, the mods shouldn't be making these decisions on their own, even with other users weighing in. This creates an imbalance between closing and reopening as the mods now have to be really thoughtful about reviewing for reopening.
So, my hope is that changing this to three votes to close/reopen will take some of the workload off the mods and also increase the number of posts that find their way to be reopened - assuming it's worth reopening them!


text:
General programming questions are not a good fit for gamedev
Programming questions about game-related engines/frameworks/library API are welcome. Another reason to ask here is when one thinks that a professional game developer would give a better/different/more specific answer to the question than other programmers.
Otherwise, general programming questions more likely belong on Stack Overflow instead of here. This includes programming questions about:

language API (e.g., how to use a list or a vector in your favourite language),
compiler errors, linker errors, runtime errors or exceptions,
general networking strategies,
language construct optimization,
etc.

As usual, some questions will be borderline, and we expect the community to vote to close them as they think.

This is based on past discussions:

Have we abandoned the rule about generic programming questions?
Generic programming questions are off-topic, period. Right?
Do we still consider programming questions off topic if the context is game-dev related, but the problem turned out to be generic?
Programming Questions: Here or "Belongs on Stackoverflow"?
This question's revisions


text:
Should we remove the source-code tag?
There are currently 43 questions tagged source-code, which to me seems like a totally useless overly generic tag. Should we remove it?

I think we should.
Although some questions really ask about "source code" in a general way, this appears more to be used as a meta tag or a sign of an off-topic question.


text:
Is Serial upvoting fine?
I suddenly noticed a single upvote on a lot of my old questions and answers. I know serial downvoting can be punished, so I am curious how this works?

StackExchange's automated systems do watch for serial upvoting over both the short and long term, and they will revert the votes if they detect what looks like misuse of the system - ie. someone voting up a user's content because of who posted it, rather than for the quality of the content itself.
I've had it happen to me a few times, where I'll get a surprising jump in rep from votes on old posts, and then the next day my reputation tracker will look like:

-80: Serial upvoting reversed
+10: upvote
+10: upvote
+10: upvote
+10: upvote
+10: upvote
+10: upvote
+10: upvote
+10: upvote

It's a little disappointing, but I wouldn't call it a "punishment" per se, since nobody loses reputation overall - you're just back where you were before your new fan got carried away. I'm not aware of any automated penalties that apply to the voter either, though if the pattern of behaviour repeats they might get flagged as a potential sock puppet or rep farming account for human review.
You can see previous discussion of this on other Meta sites in the network:

Serial Upvoting reversed?

I am a serial upvoter

Does serial voting cause the voter a reputation change?

Is there a more permanent solution for repeated serial voting by the same users?


text:
Congratulations Philipp
Today, user Philipp has reached the mark of 100k rep on gamedev.
With 21 questions, 1822 answers and ~3 million people reached over the last 8 years, that's a lot of help provided to hobbyist and professional game developers!
Congratulations, and thank you!

This is not a question. Come on man. :)

:P Maybe I should have used a question mark instead of a an exclamation mark at the end?

"Should we congratulate Philipp for 100k?" I'm sure you'd get a ton of YES answers. :)

Thank you to all the people who found my content helpful enough to shower me with imaginary internet points. I hope you are all able to learn as much from me as I am able to learn myself by answering your questions. Also thanks to everyone who corrected me whenever I wrote nonsense. I always enjoy learning new tricks or getting my misconceptions corrected. Yes, seriously.
And now get back to work and create some cool games. See you again when I got to one million :)

"And now get back to work" How did you know? Are you watching me??

Those points are not imaginary. They have a real world impact on both the storage bits in the database and in how people respond to your posts. :)


text:
Gamedev's Winterbash 2020 Showcase! [proposal]
The event post is here. Thanks for the feedback and happy showcasing!

This is a proposal for an upcoming event here on Meta. I'd like to get feedback on the tiny details of what you think would be good parameters or if you see flaws or potential improvements.

With 4042 questions asked and 3098 answers provided during the past year, we've been able to help a lot of folks!
Likely, some of our users have been able to publish a game, whether it is on the different mobile, desktop or web platforms.
Here, I'm proposing we help those who contributed to the site to showcase their newly published game.
Here are the rules:

We'd like you to post one answer per game.
Of course, you will add a link to where you publish your game, but the answer can't be a link only one: please tell us about your game, this is a sales pitch for your game ;)
You must have received at least 100 reputation on gamedev between December 1st 2019 and today. (Whether it is from questions, answers, bounties, or even if you've edited 50 questions and got rep for it.)
Your game must have been first published between December 1st 2019 and today. We need to be able to verify this. A published game can be:

a game you have made on your own as an indie
a game you worked on at a game development studio (yes, you can still be proud of your work in this case)
a game you produced during a game jam
a game that was released in "beta" or "early access" during the past year, or that was in beta/early access last year and is now out of beta.

The links you provide must link directly to the distribution platform(s), it must not be a "short link" such as bit.ly, or include some kind of redirection.
No new answers will be allowed once StackExchange Winterbash 2020 is over.
As always, the content must

be SFW (Safe-For-Work)
respect StackExchange Code of Conduct and Acceptable Use Policy, such as (but not limited to):

No bigotry.
We don’t tolerate any language likely to offend or alienate people based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion — and those are just a few examples. Use stated pronouns (when known). When in doubt, don't use language that might offend or alienate.

No harassment.
This includes, but isn’t limited to: bullying, intimidation, vulgar language, direct or indirect threats, sexually suggestive remarks, patterns of inappropriate social contact, and sustained disruptions of discussion.

Sexually Explicit Material. Accounts that use Stack Exchange to post sexually explicit or pornographic material, or links to it, will be suspended.

If you think the content of the game is not safe for everyone, please make sure you add a warning notice to your answer, something like an ESRB content descriptor.

Again, this question is a call for improvements, don't go and post links to your game(s) just yet ;) Wait for the actual showcase to begin with Winterbash 2020!
I'll improve this post with proposed changes from the answers here.

The Community Managers discussed this internally (I'm a CM - HI!) - and the main concerns we have are similar to Pikalek's - that we're not promoting anything that is NSFW or otherwise breaks our own Code of Conduct or Acceptable Use Policy.
To quote from these documents:

No bigotry.
We don’t tolerate any language likely to offend or alienate people based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion — and those are just a few examples. Use stated pronouns (when known). When in doubt, don't use language that might offend or alienate.

No harassment.
This includes, but isn’t limited to: bullying, intimidation, vulgar language, direct or indirect threats, sexually suggestive remarks, patterns of inappropriate social contact, and sustained disruptions of discussion.

Sexually Explicit Material. Accounts that use Stack Exchange to post sexually explicit or pornographic material, or links to it, will be suspended.

If you add rules around this to your guidance, this should keep the event in lines with what we allow here. Game designers who are concerned that their game may come close to crossing a line can indicate their concern in a content warning note in their answer, similar to including an ESRB content descriptor.
It's important for y'all to realize why, in particular, linking to pornographic content can be a problem - it can cause the site (or even the entire network) to get delisted from web filtering software.
Aside from this, we're really excited to see these sorts of community-centric and community-led events on sites, so please have a ton of fun and let me know if I can help with anything.

Thanks for the suggestions, I have updated the Question!

Does there need to be some declaimer stating that SE has the finally say regarding what it is willing to promote?
It might be a premature concern & I don't like the idea of place explicit content rating restrictions on the entries, but there's overtly NSFW content on Steam & presumably other platforms as well. Given that Stack Exchange is a business, I could see some potential complications. It might be good to just note that up front.

Thanks for the question, I'll check with SE what they think about it.

Could be wise to have this condition in case someone tries to promote a game containing hate speech or similar too.


text:
is the tag [surface] useful?
The surface "seems to be a mish-mash of questions about DirectX Surface data structures, supporting Microsoft Surface tablet computer hardware, vector algebra involving planes, and contact with the skin of an object."
Currently, it has been applied to 23 questions & has no posted guidance.
The idea of being an "expert in surfaces" (at least with respect to certain definitions) seems awkward in a way that suggests it might be meta.
So, for community discussion: is the surface tag useful, and if so, how to we want to apply it?

Glancing at the question list, it seems to me like it is a meta tag.
The only usefulness I'd see would be about its usage on questions about "Microsoft Surface" (the device) because we have questions about ipad and such, but, thanks to DMGregory who spotted it, we only have about one question asking about this.
Tags that are attached to only one question are stripped from the question by the system after some time.
Thus, the tag appears useless and could/should be removed and probably added to our blacklist.

Cool. Should I start removing the tags or is this something better left to diamond studded mods?

@Pikalek You can go ahead :)

“Tags that are attached to only one question are stripped from the question by the system after some time.” — note: only if the tag has no description. (thankfully that's the case here)

@doppelgreener that's good to know!

@Vaillancourt I just finished removing the last batch of surface tags, not sure if anything special needs to be done with the tag itself...

@Pikalek thanks! Maybe just adding it to the list here would be the last step!

@Vaillancourt Done, thanks for reminding me about the meta-list!


text:
Show us your game! - Gamedev's Winterbash 2020 Showcase!
With 4042 questions asked and 3098 answers provided during the past year, we've been able to help a lot of folks!
Likely, some of our users have been able to publish a game, whether it is on the different mobile, desktop or web platforms.
Here, I'm proposing we help those who contributed to the site to showcase their newly published game.
Here are the rules:

We'd like you to post one answer per game.
Of course, you will add a link to where you publish your game, but the answer can't be a link only one: please tell us about your game, this is a sales pitch for your game ;)
You must have received at least 100 reputation on gamedev between December 1st 2019 and today. (Whether it is from questions, answers, bounties, or even if you've edited 50 questions and got rep for it.)
Your game must have been first published between December 1st 2019 and today. We need to be able to verify this. A published game can be:

a game you have made on your own as an indie
a game you worked on at a game development studio (yes, you can still be proud of your work in this case)
a game you produced during a game jam
a game that was released in "beta" or "early access" during the past year, or that was in beta/early access last year and is now out of beta.

The links you provide must link directly to the distribution platform(s), it must not be a "short link" such as bit.ly, or include some kind of redirection.
No new answers will be allowed once StackExchange Winterbash 2020 is over.
As always, the content must

be SFW (Safe-For-Work)
respect StackExchange Code of Conduct and Acceptable Use Policy, such as (but not limited to):

No bigotry.
We don’t tolerate any language likely to offend or alienate people based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion — and those are just a few examples. Use stated pronouns (when known). When in doubt, don't use language that might offend or alienate.

No harassment.
This includes, but isn’t limited to: bullying, intimidation, vulgar language, direct or indirect threats, sexually suggestive remarks, patterns of inappropriate social contact, and sustained disruptions of discussion.

Sexually Explicit Material. Accounts that use Stack Exchange to post sexually explicit or pornographic material, or links to it, will be suspended.

If you think the content of the game is not safe for everyone, please make sure you add a warning notice to your answer, something like an ESRB content descriptor.

How about ongoing game development? I have been working on my project since 2008(2013) and it is nowhere near final release xD Although it is very playable and has already seen 11 major Alpha releases. GDSE was a great help throughout too :-)

@Kromster I'm sure we would get nice in-progress games too, but I felt the "released" games would get lost in the "in-progress" games, mainly because "in-progress" would also include "hey look! I have started this Pokémon clone yesterday (oh, and I'll abandon this project in a week or two)" games. Perhaps we could find a way to showcase those as well, as this could help further development of gamedev's users games.

Thanks for reply! Maybe wip projects will need to have a released playable build. I really want to share mine, but I don't want to be causing any trouble with that. P.S. Maybe seeing the project link in my profile will help to get the state and formulate the rules better. Dunno )

I’m voting to close this question because the submission period has ended. Thanks for participating!

Here's a little toy I built in a weekend for TOJam this year.
The theme was "Together, but Apart" so I wanted to play with mechanics of combining and separating things, which quickly turned into an excuse to play with goopy metaball shaders.
I had this mental image of blobs of liquid that look like glass orbs somehow containing sky, leading to:
The Weather Inside
(Free on PC, Mac, Android, or play in-browser via WebGL)

Click on or drag the blobs around to see how they react (especially satisfying on a multi-touch display)

Exploration Mode offers a light puzzle. Experiment to find out how blobs combine to make different kinds of weather. The "Discoveries" list in the ⋮ tab on the left can give you some clues about what to try next.

Creative Mode turns off all the discovery-tracking and "chemical reactions" between blobs, so you can just have fun finger-painting with the sky.

Thank you to Zsolt Szanati for doing sound design for the game, with additional sounds by Mike Koenig via SoundBible.com.

i love this concept!


text:
Markdown support for tables
All sites across Stack Exchange are now able to use tables via Markdown!
Do we need a "to do" list similar to our MathJax PSA?
If so then add it here as an answer.
If not, just keep the functionality in mind when editing & posting.

tables! But I'm not sure we need such a post, though; that being said, you can have it if you think it's useful and you want to use it as a reminder of all the work that needs to be done here :)


text:
2020: a year in moderation

As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the past 12 months.
As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web:

We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.
-- A Theory of Moderation

That doesn't eliminate the need for having moderators altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by regular folks. Every bit of time and effort y'all contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference.
So as we welcome 2021, and in keeping with tradition, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some exciting stats. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Game Development over the past 12 months:

Action
Moderators
Community¹

Users suspended²
1
5

Users destroyed³
72
0

Users deleted
16
0

Users contacted
2
0

Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue
159
532

Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue
21
43

Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue
45
83

Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue
47
231

Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue
101
1,864

Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue
41
94

Tags merged
3
0

Tag synonyms proposed
3
0

Tag synonyms created
3
0

Tag highlight language set
5
0

Questions reopened
41
1

Questions protected
6
9

Questions flagged⁵
29
327

Questions closed
854
22

Question flags handled⁵
202
153

Posts unlocked
4
0

Posts undeleted
8
62

Posts locked
8
100

Posts deleted⁶
520
2,234

Posts bumped
0
4,000

Escalations to the Community Manager team
1
0

Comments undeleted
22
0

Comments flagged
11
139

Comments deleted⁷
2,161
936

Comment flags handled
98
51

Bounties canceled
2
0

Answers flagged
131
577

Answer flags handled
599
109

All comments on a post moved to chat
18
0

Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Game Development without diamonds next to their names, and to the automated systems otherwise known as user #-1.
² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.
³ A "destroyed" user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.
⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.
⁵ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes).
⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.
⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).
Further reading:

Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: 2019: a year in moderation

You can also check out this report on other sites

Or peruse detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites

A big thank you to Shog9 for writing the queries and script to facilitate fetching and posting this data to all the sites in the network, and to Brian for the subsequent work making the whole thing more user friendly.
Wishing everyone a happy 2021!

There are no specific stats for "not handled" right? E.g. if a first post review task is never reviewed, it will be "hidden" in the "Community" column, is that it?

Those tasks age out, so I'd assume they don't show up on the table at all, yes. Will try to confirm.

@Vaillancourt If we're looking at "Tasks reviewed", we're counting user actions (blue button clicks) and not the tasks themselves. If a post landed in the queue and aged out, that would count as zero points, but if 2 users reviewed the post it would count as 2.

@BrianNickel (and JNat!) Thanks! Would it be possible eventually to count also the tasks that have aged out?


text:
Should we consider Blender related questions off-topic when they're not about game development?
A question was recently bumped by Community. This question is about blender, but not in the context of game development.
We typically allow Blender questions, but since StackExchange has a site just about it, should we have the rule that if the question is not about game development, we close the question and/or ask for migration?
FWIW, we have this meta question, that says that this kind of question should be asked on blender.se, and the tag itself suggests this too. I'm asking if we should formally consider those off-topic. This would allow mods to close them on sight, and non-mods to refer to something when voting to close.

Worth revisiting. The linked meta question lacks an accepted answer & looking at the profile data, it looks like OP raised the issue & then left.

Yes, the apparent consensus is that they should be asked on [blender.se], but should is not mandatory. There is this pandemic now, our governments tell us that we should not travel abroad, but since it's not forbidden people do it anyway.

Officially off-topic, refer them to BSE in my opinion.

+1, I think this is in line with our generic programming questions policy.

I don't see a compelling reason not to off-topic Blender questions that aren't about game dev. Even in the grey area of "a game dev would give better answers to my question", the question would need to be framed in a way that would make it game dev related. Not game dev related means not on-topic.


text:
2021 Moderator Election Q&A - Question Collection
The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it on the election page.

Game Development is scheduled for an election next week, 12 April. In connection with that, we will be holding a Q&A with the candidates. This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation.  Participation is completely voluntary.
Here's how it'll work:

Until the nomination phase, (so, until 12 April at 20:00:00Z UTC, or 4:00 pm EDT on the same day, give or take time to arrive for closure), this question will be open to collect potential questions from the users of the site. Post answers to this question containing any questions you would like to ask the candidates. Please only post one question per answer.

We, the Community Team, will be providing a small selection of generic questions. The first two will be guaranteed to be included, the latter ones are if the community doesn't supply enough questions. They are included at the bottom of this question.

If your question contains a link, please use the syntax of [text](link), as that will make it easier for transcribing for the finished questionnaire.

This is a perfect opportunity to voice questions that are specific to your community and issues that you are running into currently.

At the start of the nomination phase, the Community Team will select up to 8 of the top voted questions submitted by the community provided in this thread, to use in addition to the aforementioned 2 guaranteed questions. We reserve some editorial control in the selection of the questions and may opt not to select a question that is tangential or irrelevant to moderation or the election.

Once questions have been selected, the candidates will be able to answer them as part of their nomination post on the election page as described in the announcement on Meta Stack Exchange. The full questionnaire is usually around 10 questions total.

This is not the only option that users have for gathering information on candidates. As a community, you are still free to, for example, hold a live chat session with your candidates to ask further questions, or perhaps clarifications from what is provided in the Q&A.

If you have any questions or feedback about this process, feel free to post as a comment here.

Here is a set of general questions, gathered as very common questions asked every election. As mentioned in the instructions, the first two questions are guaranteed to show up in the Q&A, while the others are if there aren't enough questions (or, if you like one enough, you may split it off as a separate answer for review within the community's 8).

How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?
How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?

In your opinion, what do moderators do?
A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?
In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?

Should there be a link somewhere here or on the election page to the fine prints, i.e. that a moderator must accept the Moderator Agreement, and be 18 years or older to be a moderator? Maybe folks would like to know this before thinking about becoming a moderator?

This is the "inverse" of question 2 proposed in the Question text: How would you handle a situation where another mod did not close/delete/etc a question that you feel should have been, and they answered it too?

I feel like I owe some apologies here....

Oh, it's not really you :) When I was not yet a mod, I've seen mods answer some questions that I thought were off-topic. And I probably answer some of those questions myself :P

Some too-young-to-use-the-site users come and ask questions here. Some very new developers come and ask questions here. Those too-young users are not allowed to use the site and should be reported (with their account deleted by the CMs), and very new developers ask off-topic questions that need to be closed. They're often desperate and need help. How do you feel about having those folks' dreams blocked because of the actions you need to take?

Perhaps this is a good question to ask of how they would like to triage questions in the future, maybe a more aggressive "are you sure you haven't seen this post before" interface? Mods helping devs, and devs helping mods.

@A13X I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Do you refer to the folks asking very entry level questions?

@Vaillancourt Yes, sorry I may have misread that but that's what I would maybe do for entry-level questions. I agree that "too-young" users probably need to hold off on creating an account altogether.

I'm not sure if there is a good way to implement this. New devs often don't know how to search well or what to search, or they don't understand the solution presented to them is the solution to their issue.


text:
Editing whitespace
This question originally had a lot of vertical whitespace; I made an edit to reduce the whitespace and make the question easier to read with less scrolling. However, after making the edit I'm second-guessing myself.
Usually when a question has excessive whitespace, it's because the author pasted badly formatted code with a bunch of random empty lines; when I see this, I'll remove excessive empty lines from the code to make it easier to read.
However, in this case, the author intentionally used the whitespace to separate logical thoughts.
Did I overstep my bounds by editing out the extra whitespace? Should I have added a horizontal rule to maintain the intended separation with less vertical space? Should I have left the question as-is?

Thanks for taking the time to ask about this here. As a mod, I usually like to hold off on answering to see how the community might like to weigh in, so I don't overly bias the outcome. So, let's see what folks have to say...

I would have approved the edit had I found it in edit review queue. And I would have made similar edits if I came across the question in the new posts review queue.
You applied your best sense of judgement; I don't see that as over stepping. And the risk in this case is low - if you had erred, your changes could have been rolled back.
I agree that the use of   suggests the user had intentionally added the line breaks. But intentionality doesn't necessarily have precedence over community standards. And the community standards are in part determined collective best judgement of the members.
I've removed a lot of line beaks. I've also left in some that I wouldn't have used in my posts as a matter of aesthetic because taking them out didn't necessarily improve the post. If you're following the editing guidance of "edit to when it improves" and adjusting when needed based on feedback, you're doing a good job.
Thank you for taking the time to help.

+1 to everything Pikalek has said. I'd particularly emphasize that rolling back an edit is very easy if folks disagree with the choices, so I generally err on the side of eagerly editing, and accepting that sometimes my edits won't stick.

Thanks for the input!

(I started to write this before the other answer was posted, but could not finish it earlier, so I'm posting it anyway. The other answer is good and I have upvoted it.)
I think one of the reasons why we don't have a vast array of font sizes and colours available for editing questions is to try and keep some consistency across the site.
In line with that, the vertical spaces between paragraph also helps consistency across the site, so IMHO, it makes sense to remove the white space as you did. However, yes, I think replacing those empty paragraphs with horizontal lines would have helped keep the logical separation of thoughts.

Did I overstep my bounds by editing out the extra whitespace?

I don't think so.

Should I have added a horizontal rule to maintain the intended separation with less vertical space?

I think so.

Should I have left the question as-is?

I don't think there is a should or should not here. You think you improved the post to make it easier to read, and that's what we expect when the posts are edited.

A note about horizontal lines.

I find them useful to separate a post with multiple aspects to them, like...

An intro.

A core.

A conclusion, or a set of notes or references.

But they can be annoying if they're over used.
Alternatives exist when you want to add variety:
Big Titles
Smaller titles
Heh... another type of title....
Titles with dashes
Bold stuff on its own line
(with the continuing text...)

You get the idea...
More information about these alternatives is available in the Markdown Editing Help or the subsequent Advanced help:

Thanks for the input!

I'm glad you posted. My answer neglected to address the <hr> component of the question. You went one further, covering that & some useful alternatives. Thanks!


text:
2021 Community Moderator Election
The 2021 Community Moderator Election is now underway!
Community moderator elections have three phases:

Nomination phase
Primary phase
Election phase

Most elections take between two and three weeks, but this depends on how many candidates there are.
Please visit the official election page at
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/election
for more detail, and to participate!
If you have general questions about the election process, or questions for moderator candidates, feel free to ask them here on meta -- just make sure your questions are tagged election.