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Why should the GameDev site exist?
I understand this question will probably be downvoted a lot, because it is seen only by people already using the site, but still:
I have some doubts regarding whether it is beneficial the game development site should exits as a standalone site. I would much prefer using game-development tag inside of Stack overflow.

Is game development really that different from a general software engineering?
What will be done to prevent general programming questions being asked here, like C++ low-level optimization tips?

It would be awesome if some of the sites could share questions via similar tags. I.E. questions tagged game-dev on StackOverflow would showup here, and questions here tagged stack-overflow would showup on StackOverflow. Just a thought I had while pondering the OPs question. That would help make the overlap less of an issue, I'm not sure what the other issues that would bring up are...

I could not agree more: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/merging-season/#comment-50346

Oh man, that would be a powerful way of sharing problems and solutions.  Someone needs to post it as a feature request.

Things that are part of game development, but aren't related to programming:

Graphics design - not the mechanics of doing 3d graphics, but the "look and feel" of the game, as well as the tools involved and the content pipeline.
Sound design - again, not the mechanics of calling APIs, but the techniques to make an immersive game and the process of getting sound into games appropriate.
Fun - the huge, extremely vague part of what makes games "enjoyable" and what makes them "boring".
AI - yet again, not the code part, but how to make AI that feels "human" or "good" while perhaps still being suboptimal.
Level design - how to lay out your maps to be "good", whatever that means for your game design (this can be anything from "well-balanced" to "immersive" to "challenging".)
Community design - multiplayer games (and sometimes singleplayer games) involve a lot of community participation, and rigging up a good community can be more complex than you might think.
Morality - Some MMOs are wrecking lives. What are our responsibilities as game designers regarding this, and can we make our games less "dangerous" and still just as "fun"?
Monetization - You can make a good game that doesn't make money. It's harder to make a good game that does make money.

I'm sure people can think of more.
Programming is certainly part of game development, but the converse is not true, and there are parts of even the programming subset of gamedev that are rather specific to gamedev itself.

That would be perfect for me - the programming questions would still go into the Stack Overflow. However, I am afraid this is not what most people here expect from it, as they mostly expect game development programming questions to be asked here as well.

I thin that programming questions that have specific game requirements, i.e. wouldn't be exactly the same in any non-game program, still belong here. Most of your low level optimization type questions fall into the exactly the same... category

To add to that: Game specific programming knowledge. You can't just shuffle off programming to stack overflow. Knowledge of tangent-space normals, path-finding optimisation and shader hardware just isn't in the broad domain. Even on gamedev I seem to be able to find questions too specialised in gaming programming knowledge to get answers. On SO they don't have a chance!

Your question is of particular interest to me, because I have the accepted and highest upvoted answer on the example of a programming question (one about optimisation) you think should be on Stack Overflow.
Here is a similar question on Stack Overflow. Someone actually made the point I want to make in the comments: "Optimizations depend on the context". You have to go half way down the page to find a brief mention of cache coherency - something to which I dedicated an entire (and seemingly very popular) answer. Clearly, for some programming questions, context is important.
The kind of programming problems that come up here on the GameDev site (example of mine) are very different to those that come up on Stack Overflow (another example of mine - game related but better on SO). Or at very least should do so.
And obviously there will be some fuzzyness. And it would be good if we had a way to punt questions between the two sites. But that is a small price to pay for the value of having a pool of domain-specific knowledge on this site.
(And it almost goes without saying that there are many other aspects of game development - art and business to name two big categories - that are clearly not suited to Stack Overflow).

StackOverflow is very, very active. It takes less than 5 minutes for something to disappear off the original view of the page. If you're looking for just game development questions to answer, they're difficult to find.
Something that only just breaches game development...say memory management, for example, should be on stack overflow. But some programming questions are more suited for here; things like 'how can I do pathfinding effectively' (bad example?), aiming at the algorithm side.

I think most people who are capable of answering questions well have their front page filtered to some degree; e.g. I have anything related to JQuery, SQL, PHP, and most Windows-specific topics ignored. The page is much slower for me. :)

I've got...about 40 tags filtered, and it still is too fast. :)

This is something that I wonder about too.  The SO communities that I participate in (notably the C++ one) have a lot of people who are very hostile to the idea of "restricted C++."  Any answer that doesn't make conspicuous use of std:: items gets downvoted, etc., etc.  I feel that the programming challenges of games, while not unique to games, do not tend to hit an appropriate audience on SO.  That said- anything not specifically game related I'll ask there, but it does always hurt me to see highly upvoted answers from folks who obviously don't understand the requirements.

Whenever I've asked game-dev-related questions on SO, I've gotten redirected to either Gamedev.net, the XNA forums, or here (in fact, that's how I discovered this place!)
I feel that game development really is a much different beast than normal software development, as I'm still relatively lost in making my first game, despite having about 5-6 years of non-game development experience.


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Why don't we allow repeat questions?
I am wondering why we would discourange repeat questions or reffer similar questions to answers that may or may not fully expound the current question.
My though behind this, we should not discourage peolpe from asking questions that are similar in nature or even a duplicate question. The purpose of this would be to build diversity in the answer base. Not all questions are easily answered and not all answers to those questions should be finite. Also, with an ever growing user base; we are allowing the questions to be re-evaluated by new members (hence diffirent outlooks to solving the same issue).
From my understanding we have no method of validating whether or not a question asked a year ago has an answer that is still valid in the present set of standards/evironments/practices. How do we weed out those questions that were answered but are no longer relevant (ie. the answer is no longer correct)?
This would also not push people away from utilizing these services. If we are creating a question and answer based community and we are so worried about community ethics that we belittle the intent or meaning of thier question; the community will not grow? This does not help people grow thier skillset to the point where they can ask well formulated questions. It makes them bitter or not return.
I guess what I am getting at is if diversity is revered in all other aspects of life, why would we ignore it here?

I was also thinking, why could we not merge answered repeat questiosn into community wiki's.

Moderators already have the ability to merge duplicate questions, when appropriate. Community wikis don't really enter into it.

Generally speaking when a question is an exact duplicate the question that is closed gets a link to the "source" questions and are left alone. This is so that if somebody searches for the same topic they can find at least something that points to the original question even if their search leads them to a closed dupe question.

This site should strive to make every relevant question THE canonical source of information on that subject. The answers are vetted by the community so the best answers appear on the top. That's the entire purpose of the this site. If someone asks a duplicate question, all they are doing is splitting up the information. If you trust this system, then when someone comes across a question, how will they know if the top-voted answer is the best or if a better answer exists on a duplication question on another part of the site? You can't.
The wiki nature of these sites means that each question should remain a living document. If you have more up-to-date information, you're supposed to update and add to the existing questions. If you simply abandon aging questions in favor of just asking again — declaring a do-over rather than improving the original post — how will users know if any given question is still relevant?
You can't; the system would be broken.
The internet is full of outdated and incorrect blog posts and forums. The very purpose of the Stack Exchange way of doing things is to get away from that whole short-coming of the internet… outdated and incorrect information.

The problem, here, and on other Stack sites, is that the answers far out-do the quality of the questions. I think that asking the same thing multiple times in slightly different ways is actually critical to 'getting the question right'. And since no one (NO ONE) ever actually goes back and cleans up/generalizes/merges questions, then having a bunch of similar questions with the same answers is actually the best-working approach to being canonical.

With multiple duplicate questions, someone looking for the answer later has to go through many questions to get the answer, whereas if we force people to focus all the answers on one question it becomes easy to find the answer needed, thus eliminating the need for yet another duplicate because finding the right answer is hard.  Also, it's easily abused. If someone posts a duplicate question it would take me a few minutes to find the other dupes, formulate a comprehensive answer, and get mad rep on someone else's work. There are simply too many problems with dupes.

"If diversity is revered in all other aspects of life, why would we ignore it here?"
Most technical questions have a best answer, or a small number of good answers (in which case the best answer is the one that enumerates all the good options). For questions that do not have a best answer, the SE platform provides Community Wikis.
Good answers are specific so I don't think they will go out of date nearly as fast as you expect. A corollary is that good questions can be specifically answered, by providing enough concrete information.
Above all, this is not a forum. We're not here to discuss how great our next game is going to be, or shoot the breeze about whether C# or Java is arbitrarily "better". Stack Exchange sites build communities of experts because the experts don't have to constantly answer the same question and can vote down rather than shout down the ignorant and inexperienced.

Yes, but good QUESTIONS are important too, and those are lacking in general on the Stack sites. I would venture to say that most technical answers have one or more 'best questions' as well. And yet the system encourages a 1:M relationship between questions and answers, so we never get to home in on that 'best question'.

The system encourages infinite questions. You can ask as many unique questions as you want in search of the best ones. But if you happen to ask a non-unique one, it should be closed.

First off, don't feel offended that your question was closed.

From my understanding we have no method of validating whether or not a question asked a year ago has an answer that is still valid in the present set of standards/evironments/practices. How do we weed out those questions that were answered but are no longer relevant (ie. the answer is no longer correct)?

First off the site is less than 2 months old, this is hardly the case.
Also, the vast majority of the time it's mainly due to the fact that people haven't searched .  If somebody posted a question, posted a link to the relevant related question and then said why the answers were no longer relevant or their particular use case had some difference that made the answers not pertinent, then it would be different.

This site is not that old, but I was referring to the SE collection of sites.

"If somebody posted a question, posted a link to the relevant related question and then said why the answers were no longer relevant..." That's key for me. If someone can explain why the existing answers are not good, that means they need a new one. If they can't explain why the existing answers are not good, then they need to learn why that is first.

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/

sort: votes


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Game development questions about UI
Hey guys, over at StackExchange User Interface we're fielding questions about UI and I thought it might be nice to mention it over here, as we haven't really had any UI questions pertaining to game development. It made me wonder if you guys are currently answering those here, and whether you think it'd be useful for the game dev community to be made aware of the UI community. If so, we might be able to get Robert/Jeff to cross-promote UI on gamedev or something eventually.
Thoughts?

I think the overlap between this and UI is going to be similar to this and stackoverflow itself w.r.t. programming questions. Namely, it's about the audience that reads this site more so than the content it covers.
That being said, there haven't been a lot of UI-specific questions here.

I think questions that deal with UI architecture (e.g. UI frameworks/subsystems) as they pertain to game development should be answered here.  General UX questions, especially those concerning UX design, should probably be fielded to the UI StackExchange.  Naturally, there may be some overlap, as there may be some design questions which are specific to games.  All we can really do is judge these on a case-by-case basis.  Personally, I'm fine if people ask UX design questions here, as long as they pertain to games.  However, if I feel the poster may get more useful feedback from the UI StackExchange, I will certainly let them know.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/


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Question had its view count lowered by 1k!
My question had 2k views this afternoon and 6 hours later it's at 1k. Any reasons why?

Around that time I was having major issues with the site in general (Add Comments button not working, "Show X more" not working). I blamed it on Firefox lameness but maybe something was wrong with the site backend.

There was a mistake checked in w/r/t the way view counts are calculated, so viewcounts were artificially high -- the bug was fixed and they were all reset to be correct.


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Should Game Development - StackExchange submit an entry to the Mozilla Game On competition?
Mozilla has a competition going for open web games with a closing date of 1/11/11. It'd be great promotion for this community if some of us were to get together and develop something fun and light-weight using open web technologies. :-)
Thoughts?

You might be able to find people to do that here but I don't think we're going to officially sponsor/sanction anything like that.  Unfortunately there isn't really an easy way on-site to coordinate anything like that either since the per-site chatrooms don't seem to be working yet.


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Write an Elevator Pitch / Tagline
We closed the domain naming thread (click for details).
Instead, let's start with a killer "elevator pitch!" Joel will be blogging about the elevator pitch approach to naming, but to get you started:
The Elevator Pitch
This isn't as easy as it sounds. Imagine the user who will never read your FAQ and you have two seconds to grab their attention. It should be catchy but descriptive. It should be thoroughly clear but painfully concise. Make every... word... count.
Here are some creative examples:

Gawker: Daily Manhattan media news and gossip. Reporting live from the center of the universe.
Gizmodo: The gadget guide. So much in love with shiny new toys, it’s unnatural.
Autoblog: We obsessively cover the auto industry.
DumbLittleMan: So what do we do here? Well, it’s simple. 15 to 20 times per week we provide tips that will save you money, increase your productivity, or simply keep you sane.
Needcoffee.com: We are the Internet equivalent of a triple espresso with whipped cream. Mmmm…whipped cream.

Use it as a Tagline
A shorter elevator pitch can be used as a tagline — something you can display in the header at the top of the page. If it doesn't fit, consider shortening it or creating a separate tagline. Here are some great examples:

Slashdot: News for nerds. Stuff that matters.
Lifehacker: Don’t live to geek, geek to live!
The Simple Dollar: Financial talk for the rest of us.

The Motto (don't forget your logo)
A logo begs for it own little, short tagline — like a motto. Maybe the tagline inspires the logo; Maybe it's the other way around. Mottos make good t-shirt, bumper stickers, and other marketing material. Either way, you'll recognize a good motto when you see it:

Just do it.
Think Different.
The Uncola.
Intel inside.
Like a rock.
The king of beers.

…and perhaps all this leads to a proper name and domain for your site… eventually. So let's start from the basics. Come up with a killer elevator pitch, tagline, and/or motto!

Should this be community wiki?

Yes, it should. Done.

What is this slogan nonsense? The rows of interesting questions and answers that greet visitors to the home page explain our purpose more clearly than any tagline!

Tagline: gamedev.com - Where game-makers go to level up.

(Alternately, game-builders, game-developers, etc). I don't have a pitch/motto, but thought I'd throw something out to get the ball rolling. :)

BeyondPolygons - Dreaming worlds, building games

No polygons!  It dates the site.  This suggestion would be BeyondSprites or SpritesNCola.com if it were the late 80's / early 90's right now, which would sound old by the time Quake came out.

Don't care too much for Beyond, but love the Dreaming worlds, building games.

Here ya go - voxel raycasting

BeyondPolygons - How games are made.

My favorite Tagline ever for a game company is "We create Worlds", but that is sadly already taken.
"If you build it, they will play" sounds cheesy as hell and maybe based on a fad/meme, so I don't think that works either.
Some taglines:

Giving your Graphics Card a purpose
And on the eighth day, We created Fun
Immersion Overdrive
Everything your parents think is evil
Blending the finest Arts into a lasting Experience

Name: BeyondPolygons (going with the flow here :))
Tagline: Some sites cover games. We cover game development.
Elevator Pitch: If you have any question about programming, designing, or otherwise making your game, we're your go-to site.

The nuts and bolts of game development.
Mostly nuts.

BeyondPolygons - Building worlds, one polygon at a time

BeyondPolygons: Beyond the dream of game development and into the reality.

Under the hood: Game design for developers

gamedev - It’s all fun and games.   But mostly games...

BeyondPolygons - "Good Game."

bugfragger:  ( and then a tagline )

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


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Sponsoring a community member to attend the 2011 GDC
The 2011 Game Developers Conference is Feb 28 - Mar 4 in San Francisco
http://www.gdconf.com/
We would like to sponsor someone from the gamedev.stackexchange.com community to attend this conference!
That means we will cover your airfare, hotel, and travel fees to make it to the summit, so long as you spend a little bit of time speaking / networking / blogging / sharing during the conference, and of course mention our fine, fine game development community here. :)
So, the question part of the question:

Does this make sense? What else should we be thinking of for the conference?
Who would like to go?
Who is willing and able to speak / network / blog / share at the conference?

Robert Cartaino, our community coordinator, will be following up.

Yes, it makes sense. A booth would be cool, I would LOOOOOVE to go but I have school D:. Can I call dibs on next year? :D

Other things to think about, if you have the cash, is more general sponsorship stuff.
http://www.jointhegamenetwork.com/event/gdc/sponsoropp.html
Speaking doesn't really make sense.  Maybe if we knew somebody who was already going to GDC and giving a talk and could plug the site at the end or something.  But that might be against the rules, I'm not sure.  It's a bit of a long shot either way.
Blogging, would that be on, say, a personal blog site or would that be an article or two written for the stackexchange blog itself?
Personally I've never been (so I really don't know a good way of promoting a site like this at a place like that, other than the usual "wear a t-shirt with a large logo and hand out business cards") but I wouldn't mind going.

I think sending someone to GDC to spread the word about our game development community, and share their experience with others who aren't able to attend, is a wonderful idea!
Off the top of my head, here are a few ways I think we could spread the word about GDSE (from least to most expensive):

Spokesperson – Essentially the idea presented by NAME – Send someone to GDC to spread awareness via word of mouth (and business cards/brochures)
Swag - People like free stuff. A well designed shirt could do wonders!
Advertisement – Designing an interesting banner to be hung near areas of high traffic could increase web traffic
Booth – The traditional way of promoting products/services at GDC
Party - A GDSE (co)sponsored party would be a wonderful way to raise awareness, although I imagine this could option could be quite expensive, and would require a lot of planning

Whoever we send to GDC needs to be sociable, professional, and in tune with the industry, as they will be representing ALL of us. :)

excellent suggestions, all. This is something we want to get serious about, as we believe so deeply in learning, and going to a conference to speak or participate -- and bring that back to our community through deeper participation or blogging -- is a great way to learn.

Personally, I think the challenge we're up against is figuring out a way to (easily) attract a large number GDC attendees to GDSE. I imagine most people on this site could write a few blog entries recounting their GDC experience, but the true value we gain from sending someone to GDC is the potential to increase the (aspiring) professional presence on this website.


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math markdown on this site
Can we have math markdown on this site (like on math.stackchange.com)? It will make answering some of the geometry questions easier

I'm not against it, but I also feel like if a question requires that much math in its answer, it's probably more suited for math.se, not here. Math here needs to be translated into readable code eventually anyway, so I'd encourage code-like answers rather than math answers.

@Joe Wreschnig, agreed, I would rather have psuedo-code than crazy math symbols. I don't know what a lot of those math symbols mean, but code I can read.

I'd vote this up, but for some reason I'm just asked to log in or register to vote.. and I'm already logged in.

@JariKomppa: maybe it works now? I'm sure voting this up even if it's old.

@JoeWreschnig: maths is used here as a language, not as a discipline; there are very few game development topics requiring complex maths that would be on-topic on math.se. Have you ever browsed a copy of Real Time Rendering? There is almost no code in there, but it's stuffed with very complex formulas and equations.

@SamHocevar Posting answers in the language of mathematics should be discouraged.  We want algorithms in pseudocode, not "Oh just solve this equation $$math$$ and that'll be your answer".

@bobobobo we also want proofs of these algorithms, which are often more easily written in the language of mathematics.

@SamHocevar I would strongly argue that proofs should not be outlined on this site.  A mathematical proof is off topic.

@bobobobo It’s great to be so opinionated; fortunately only the community gets to decide what is off-topic! I believe in the educational value of constructionist answers and will continue to write step-by-step proofs whenever relevant. Feel free to take a different stance in your contributions.

I want to bump this question again. It's been 5 years, and answers like this are sorely in need of TeX.

Several years ago this finally got completed. :) I'm voting to close this as a duplicate of the request that finalised this.

I was editing "Detect mouse click on a bezier curve's neighborhood" and was surprised to find that GameDev lacks TeX support.
Having TeX support would hugely improve readability of some quality answers such as,

Adding air drag to a golf ball trajectory equation
How to achieve uniform speed of movement on a bezier curve?

Although the majority of questions and answers present equations in code, it's useful to be able to discuss equations in math. Mathematical equations may have better documentation, are code agnostic and are probably how people studied the concepts in school.
I would love to be able to see this work,
$$
\Gamma(z) = \int_0^\infty t^{z-1}e^{-t}dt\,.
$$

Although I agree there is some usefulness for things like exponentiation, the latter equation you posted here is worrisome to me.  What does Γ(z) have to do with game development?

Seconded. To really grok what's going on with game vector math, it's nice to be able to see some real numbers written down the way you would if you were solving the problem on paper. That's laborious to lay out with monospace ascii. I also like having access to things like subscripts and superscripts so I can represent pre & post transformation versions of an entity, and readable exponents. Without this, we have to fall back on images for complex formulae - not ideal: http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/71392/how-do-i-determine-a-good-path-for-2d-artillery-projectiles/71440#71440

I'm pretty sure this is going to be status-declined, since this discussion has happened for other sites and they've turned it down.
Reference: LaTeX on Stack Overflow?
You can use http://mathurl.com/ in the mean time if you have the rep to post multiple images.

I do not see how it would really be a benefit; the primary math-related topics that appear are vectors and matrices; both easily enough displayed in either text or code.
If it needs integration as part of the answer, I think it's probably more a maths based question. (Or it could be shown as pseudocode).

There's also a lot of "physics" (actually, newtonian mechanics) where derivatives and partial derivatives are common. Also, there aren't many questions about lighting yet but anything a bit high level will require complex equations that have nothing to do with stackexchange.

I'd also disagree with the assertion that 'both are easily enough displayed in text or code'; vector operations are, at least for me, much more parseable with a bit of mathematics markup than they are in either text or code. Even just clean over-arrows and hats for distinguishing vectors from scalars, unit vectors from vectors, etc. can make a tangible difference.


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Who decides what questions to migrate and why?
We've gotten a couple questions (What sort of things can cause a whole system to appear to hang for 100s-1000s of milliseconds? for example, also Changing Palette for Day/Light Mode using GIMP) that I don't view as inappropriate for the site, but probably still better to target to SO or a different site. Just the presence of the word "game" in a question shouldn't be a reason to migrate here.
Do our moderators have any say about what gets migrated here, or is it entirely up to the moderators of the sending site? Maybe there should be some kind of approval from one moderator on both sides? (But then, I know most SE sites are starved for mod time at the moment also.)

Hopefully the mods on other sites, before they send questions here, at least have somewhat of an understanding of the scope of the site.
For example, the mods on gaming have determined that modding is off topic there, and we've determined it's on topic here, so that agreement is pretty easy.
Those two questions are somewhat random, though.  I won't say they're completely off topic, but the audience the original question was worded for feels a little different.
But there's no approval process for sending a question over, no.

Just to pop onto this - Gaming's questions can only be migrated to this site by one of the moderators, because there is no explicit migration path available. We'll immediately do map editor and mod questions since this is fairly agreed on both sides, but if anything is questionable, we will try to seek out one of the moderators (typically Noctrine, who I have seen on Chat) just to get a confirmation on the appropriateness.

Isn't it strange to migrate a question and then immediately close it?
Not really an answer, just another instance of the phenomenon...


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Good answer... to another question
I misread a question, and gave a detailed answer. This could be a good answer... but not to that question.
Am I supposed to delete it, or to leave it alone? Despite being unrelated, it might still be useful to someone... only, not to someone searching an answer to that question, maybe.
I never noticed anything like that on a SE site, so I've no idea if there is a standard way to deal with such a situation or not.

Just noting that you could create the question you thought you were answering and move your answer there. If you think it would be useful to people.

You should delete it.
If you don't, there are two issues at hand:
1) You may continue to get negative votes from people who agree that it's the wrong answer to that question
2) If somebody does come to that question, and see your answer with negative votes, they may think that it's a bad answer in general (assuming they don't read through the comments and understand the situation).
In case you haven't deleted anything before, you should know that deleted questions/answers aren't completely removed, they're just hidden from anybody who isn't 1) you, 2) a mod, or 3) somebody with over 10k rep.

Are you sure? I thought that after a while they became invisible to you, and remained visible only to the admins.

That may be true, I don't know.  All I know is that I'm pretty sure I can see all the deleted posts ever, but then again I'm logged in as a mod.

@Looris 10k users and moderators can always see deleted questions and answers, all the time. Original posters can only see their own deleted answers, and can do so at any time. Deleted questions cannot be seen by sub-10k askers, even if the asker remembered the URL.

I'd delete it. You can save it until someone asks a question for which that answer is appropriate or you can ask that question yourself and post your answer (unless the same question was asked before, in which case you can directly answer it).
You can also post it on your blog or website if you think it's useful to have it out there. Leaving a wrong answer to a question doesn't help anyone.


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2011 Community Moderator Election
The 2011 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 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.


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Has the nomination banner disappeared from the main site?
On the main site, the community moderator banner has disappeared. I can still see it on the meta site and access the election..but is it taken down or just my PC glitching up?

All banners are limited to 48 hours except during the "birth" of a new site. This is by design.
The featured meta election topic is the permalink on the main site.
(oh, and meta posts can only be featured for 30 days, after which the featured tag is stripped automatically to prevent staleness.)

Thanks for clearing it up; but why would this be exactly? I can understand for things like 'the site is being cleaned up', but I would've thought there would be a special category for things like that.

It looks like system messages can only stay up for 2 days.  I re-added it for now, but I suspect that it's a bug.


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Information on the moderator candidates
Yi Jiang has put together a nice site that use the Stack Overflow API to display information on the moderator candidates.
Click here to see all the information.
The information presented is:
What the candidate wrote when nominating themselves.

Answers/Questions on the main site and it's meta
Up-vote/down-vote ratio
Average reputation earned per post
Average reputation earned per day.
Participation in other Stack Exchange sites.

It displays what Yi Jiang considers to be noteworthy badges and whether the nominee has the badge and a summary of their recent activity.
The information is presented as is with no commentary.
It came about from this question on MSO Moderator nomination possibly useful statistics

Wow, that's really neat! Kudos to Yi Jiang.
Could there be the badge descriptions on the page as well? I mean, the names aren't as cryptic as something like an Xbox Live Achievement, but I still had to go and look to see what 'Sportsmanship' was.
And could there be a possibility for it to be linked to the election page?

Your first concern has been updated - hovering over the badges will now produce a tooltip that explains what the badge is.


text:
2011 Moderator Elections - Town Hall Chat: 6pm UTC on the 29th
In connection with the moderator elections, we will be holding a Town Hall Chat session 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.  I am working with the candidates to find a time that allows the most participation.
The Town Hall Chat will take place Saturday the 29th at 6pm UTC, or 1pm EST.
(view on other timezones)
Here are the details so far:

I have coordinated with the candidates and done the best I could with a best fit match.  I would like to schedule this towards the beginning of the election phase. there are not enough candidates for a primary phase which means you'll jump right to the election phase.  This means that I am looking at the 28th-30th. As soon as I coordinate with the existing moderators and candidates to find a best fit based on availability, I will edit this post with details on the "when".
The Town Hall Chat will be a one-hour event using our chat platform.  You can register for the event here.
The format will be an open discussion.  Users are encouraged to pose questions to the candidate regarding their thoughts on moderation.
After the chat session, the transcript of the event will be permanently linked here.

Thank you to everyone who participated, particularly the candidates!  We had Tetrad, Ricket, and Noctrine in attendance.
The full transcript to the Town Hall Chat can be found here.
Whether you were able to attend or are just reading the transcript now, I hope this helps get to know the candidates for your vote. (:

The following questions were asked (click to be taken directly to that point in the transcript):

What does GameDev.SE need to work on in order to grow?
How do you attract high-quality questions that show-off the site?
How do you avoid burnout?
How do you feel about the current level of moderation on the site?
What is your criteria for determining whether or not something is a Community Wiki question?
How would you handle a question another moderator closed that you feel shouldn't have been?
How do you handle having a binding vote while at the same time leading by example?
How do you balance using a binding vote too early with saving the community from itself?
How do you handle off-topic questions that get answers / lots of votes that the community wants?
How do you handle questions raised on meta about your moderation actions?

Was scheduling the chat during GGJ a good idea?

It's more likely a side effect of the time of the elections.  Also I'm guessing that Rebecca took into account when the moderator candidates said they were available, so at least for us, it isn't that big of a deal.

Actually in my case, yes. I cleared my weekend for the GGJ and I'm happy to take an hour out of my day for this, whereas I might have otherwise been busy.


text:
Can we customize our maintenance page?
I guess this is more a question for the moderators or higher-ups in Stack Exchange...
There was some downtime a few minutes ago, so I was directed to this boring offline page. So then I moved on to Server Fault and was hit with another offline page (since it was also down), but that one has some blue screen images on it! No fair!
Is it possible for us to customize our maintenance page? I mean, hopefully this page shouldn't be seen very often, but if there is another downtime I'd like to at least have something to look at.
Or maybe even a simple interactive JavaScript (HTML5, if you please) game, like this or this or this?

I like the superuser one. http://sstatic.net/superuser/app_offline.htm

I like the Pong one, personally.

http://meta.gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/180/404-page-not-found-image-nominations There was this, but it died out (and that is 404, you're meaning offline)


text:
Candidates being in the same timezone a problem?
I had a look at the moderator candidates and 3 very good candidates reside more or less in the same timezone (according to their profile-page).
So I was wondering if that's something to consider for the moderator election? If we had moderators from around the globe, site moderation could be more or less 24/7?
What's your take on this? In the current state of gamedev SE it's probably not a very big issue, but might be in the future when the site continues to grow?

As (if?) the site grows, we'll hopefully get some community moderators, so it won't be as big an issue. For now, the site is pretty dead during non-US times anyway.


text:
How do you decide when to post here vs. on SO?
I just cross-posted a question and feel slightly dirty. It seems to me that almost any question here could also be posted there. The community there is so much bigger, unless the question is REALLY specific, I'd pretty much always be inclined to post there first.

Here is our discussion of when a programming question belongs here or SO. (And presumably also things like where an art question belongs here or the eventual art SEs, sysadmin here or Server Fault, etc.)
Here is our discussion of cross-posting. The short version: Don't.
Here is a more general question asking why this site exists separate from SO in the first place..

Those should be added to the FAQ, IMO.

@sprugman, good idea


text:
"Suggested Edits" page style seems broken
The text is the same color as the background, and the background isn't consistent with the rest of the /review pages.
Related, the "suggested edit count" box at the top (not shown) is just a solid orange square.

we're working on a fix for this.

The fix has been deployed. Please verify.


text:
Is there a way to search/sort questions by more complex conditions?
I'm looking to burn some reputation off via bounties, so I'd like to be able to look for questions with unaccepted but high-voted (>= 2) answers to throw those who answered a bone, or high-voted old questions with only low-voted answers to try to attract more.
Are either of these views possible?

Here is a simple modification I made to it to get questions with no accepted answers. http://data.stackexchange.com/gamedev/q/77290/unaccepted-but-high-voted

You would want to use the SE Data Explorer to do this. You can access it from http://data.stackexchange.com
Also, this query my be helpful for getting to what you are looking for.
http://data.stackexchange.com/gamedev/s/403/unpopular-questions-with-great-answers

I had no idea this existed and it's pretty nifty.


text:
No answer exists, but the site says 1 answer is there!
I asked a question sometime back, and then I saw someone answered it. But, when I try to open the page, all it says is 1 answer and there is nothing else there. There is no content, no-nothing!
Here it is: Improving first person camera and implementing third person camera
Out of curiosity, I checked out who posted that reply and it turned out to be a bot "Community". I saw a similar pattern of having more number of answers, than the actual answers on other questions too. It was the same bot.
Can someone please explain if this is intentional or what ?

Deleted answers.  Deleted user, hence the Community bot ownership.  Front page didn't update answer count, unfortunately.

the answer is a bit different in this case, as the underlying user was deleted. When answers are self-deleted by the user this will not happen.

In places this may happen, counts are synced up appropriately now.  If they can't be (rare edge case), they are synced up once a day (around 3 AM UTC)...just to be sure.


text:
Header has disappeared
Simply put, the header image on the main site doesn't load for me. I get:

Server Error
404 - File or directory not found.
The resource you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.

I don't see it (I see the header image when I click your link); maybe it's been fixed?

We were seeing some static files not getting copied to all servers in the web farm.


text:
Code doesn't get syntax colored
I've noticed that code snippets do not get syntax coloring like stackoverflow. Instead the whole chunk appears black and white. Is it something I've done wrong or is this a massive missing feature?

I have noticed this as well. What's curious is that it does appear colored correctly when I (for example) attempt to edit somebody's post.

Specifically, if I edit the post and make an actual change, then wait a few moments, it becomes colored.

@josh we're not exactly sure why this was never enabled, seems like an obvious thing, we're enabling it now

This is probably a server-side issue. On StackOverflow, code snippets in questions or answers have a special prettyprint class, eg.
 ...
 whereas on Gamedev the code snippets are served as
 ...
.

Code will now be styled by default - look here if you need to manually override a specific syntax.

It appears to still be an issue on the /review page.

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


text:
How should multiple-questions-in-one be handled?
This question on the main site made me wonder. There have been a number of fairly broad, general questions asked already, but this question in particular consists (in my opinion) of several broad questions:

What (if any) is the standard process for producing 2D sprites?
What are some tools that are used to produce 2D sprites?
Why does Flash's vector art style look good all the time?
How do I make Flash-style graphics without Flash's tools?
What are some hints for creating good 2D animations?

On top of that, several of the questions are highly subjective or likely better suited to be a community wiki.
What should the process be for handling such multi-part questions? Flagging, simply leaving a comment, or trying to answer anyway?

I don't mind questions that have a "major" and "minor" question inside them, too much, so long as they are tightly related. That's the limit, though. Anything more than that should be edited or close as Tetrad noted.
When I start to really object is when, as you noted, users ask four totally unrelated questions inside one "question".

Sometimes a question is best expressed as a series of smaller questions with some dependence on each other. It probably would be less helpful to the questioner (and anyone reading for educational value) if the subquestions are scattered about. That said, unrelated subquestions are bad.

It's in the askers best interest to have a question be as specific as possible since you get answers that are more directed.  People are more likely to vote on answers that explain something specific than a wall of text that touches on every point.
Personally I think the best way to handle it is edit the question so that the ancillary questions are just removed (especially if they're duplicates) but the gist of the question remains.  Sometimes that's hard to do.
In that case I'd probably just leave a comment saying why you think it's a poor question and vote it down.  When/if it gets edited reevaluate the vote.

I don't think we should be to anal about it here or on any of the SE sites. I think when someone asks a question with multiple subquestions its a sign that they are trying to solve an issue larger than an individual question, one which likely has interdependencies on the subquestions.
Fake edit: yes yes as other have said, a question with totally unrelated subquestions would be better served as multiple questions.


text:
Mark a question for wiki ?
I recently asked a question on how to improve upon my existing code. I was recommended, what I was doing was the right way of doing things.
I thought of deleting the post since its not valid anymore, but then I think it can be converted to wiki. I'm not quite sure how that works.
Here is a link to it:
Improve mouse movement in first person game
Please let me know what would be the apt action (wiki/delete etc.)?

"Flagging" a question means clicking the "flag" link below a question and typing a message to the moderators.
That being said, there's no reason for that question to be CW.  If it's "not valid" because the answer says that you're doing the right thing already, then you should accept that answer and just move on.  Otherwise you should delete the question.


text:
Editing limits- disproportionate to impact of edit
I recently came to edit a question, which required the adding of a couple of format tags as his original code couldn't be read, as the original code contained some SO-specific markup. But when I submitted the edit, it said that my edit must be 6 characters minimum. I feel that this limit is poor because the quantity of code and the clarity of the post can be massively affected by a pair of backticks in the right place or clicking the code button once- that is, the edit limit should take into account modified characters, even if those characters are indirectly modified by markup instead of changed directly.

Covered here:
Are we discouraged from fixing typos and misspellings on Stack Exchange sites?
Is the post so otherwise perfect that nothing else in it can be improved? Really? If so then it is a rarified post indeed..


text:
Migration path to gaming.SE?
I wanted to vote to close this question of me to be migrated to http://gaming.stackexchange.com, but there are no migration paths available, so I request

A migration path to gaming.SE

This sounds sensible since every now and then a gaming question might end up here, or be at least very borderline like mine.

That is not a Gaming question, for starters. At Gaming, we don't handle mod development and map development. Gaming and Game Dev had an early discussion that marked them the subject of Game Dev, not Gaming. And, to wit, haha, you started that discussion.
As mentioned by ChrisF in the comments, if you want a migration path, you need to provide ample amounts of evidence. Questions that have been migrated to Gaming, for example, or ones that should be migrated to us. Ample means a fair amount - you need to prove that people are coming here with the wrong questions, not simply that they might.
At present, 0 questions have been migrated to Gaming from this site. Comparatively, we have sent 7 questions over here. Gaming doesn't have an opened path, either, because 7 is a pretty piddling number.
Until you actually become inundated with Gaming questions, the migration path is unnecessary. A moderator flag should be sufficient to migrate them when appropriate.

you got me there... thanks for reminding me. Too bad the downvotes on my question don't indicate consents, but maybe I'm misinterpreting that

@Tobias The majority of downvotes came before the discussion on whether mod/map questions were acceptable here. So I think they're just artifacts, for the most part. I can't explain the August downvote, but eh, you can't please everyone I s'pose. ♪

true, and neither should one try to do so :-7 Oh well, I guess I can still find my sleep...

In the meantime you can flag the question for moderator attention and ask for it to be migrated.
Moderators can migrate to any other site on the network.

since I get a "you have already flagged this question" I seem to have tried that some time ago, although I can't remember when...

@Tobias - ah, then asking here is the next step!

exactly. especially since I noticed there is not even a single migration path available at all (besides meta of course)

@Tobias - if you can find evidence of a need (I can see SO and Gaming as obvious ones) and post it as an answer here the team will take notice and add the path. A moderator can help by being able to review the questions that have been manually migrated.


text:
Text background color in code snippets slightly different color than the area background color
It's easiest if I just show a picture.  Screenshot from here: Flash framerate reliability
What it looks like on the site: (Chrome, win7)

If you can't see it, the background of the areas where there are text are an ever-so-slightly-darker shade of gray.
Image adjusted to exacerbate the effect:

Is this intentional?

You have eagle eyes. This was not intentional. I have made both PRE and the CODE to have the same bg. The change will be in the next deployment.

The color difference can really vary depending on the monitor you have, especially between CRT and LCD, and in the case of an LCD monitor, your viewing angle to your monitor. For example on both of my laptops (MacBook Pro and Dell), I certainly wouldn't call that 'ever-so-slightly-darker'; it's quite obviously a different shade than the background.
I did find the region of CSS though. Both in meta and in the main site, code blocks have a deliberate background of #eee: (the following snippet is identical in both CSS files)
code{font-family:Consolas, Menlo, Monaco, Lucida Console, Liberation Mono, DejaVu Sans Mono, Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, Courier New, monospace, serif;color:#222;background-color:#eee;}

I'd label it as a feature. I like how it makes the code block stand out, and I think that's the point.

I think the effect Tetrad was talking about was too subtle for you to notice. It's not the difference between the page background and the code block background. It's the difference between the code block text background and the code block block background.

OHHH you're right! I see it now! And now I understand the need for the adjusted image too! :)


text:
Community Promotion Ads - 1H 2011

Possible Duplicate:
Community Promotion Ads - 2H 2011

What in the Wide, Wide World of Sports is Going On Here?
TL;DR -- put images and links in the answers. If they get voted up enough, they will appear on the main site as community promotion ads.
But whyyyyyyy?
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 community game development blogs
the site's twitter account
scripts packs or power tools
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. And to click on it for great justice!
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.

Image requirements

The image that you create must be 220 x 250 pixels
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

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.

For the record I don't know if we have enough people that actually read Meta to hit that 6 score threshold limit.

Do we even have Twitter?

@Duck, did you click on the image?

It is clickable? Oh. I only just realised. >.<

I totally just threw this together in Paint.net.  If somebody wants to put more time into it (maybe a border and a better font) feel free.


text:
Can community moderators be given permission to enable software-enforced blacklisting of tags?
In the "useless tags" thread we've identified several tags that we'd like to avoid, such as design. However nothing prevents users from actually using those blacklisted tags, which creates something of a constant maintainability issue for us. Including a "this is a blacklisted tag" note in the tag wiki (as has been done for best-practices) might help in some cases, but not all. New users are also unlikely to find the meta discussion on undesirable tags.
In chat, Noctrine mentioned to me that a feature for disabling a tag entirely, preventing it from being used, does exist but is not available to "regular" moderators or general users (only to SE superusers or some such) -- I was hoping it might be possible to allow our moderators access to this feature so that we can keep our tag database more meaningful will less effort.

On Meta Stack Overflow, we're also pushing for this suggestion. We don't have a full-fledged feature request post outside of that answer, but please consider upvoting it to show support for this idea.


text:
Associate for 100 rep
If I remember correctly associating your account on any stackexchange site should get you 100 reputation straight away to "get you started".
I've convinced a friend of mine to start using gamedev.stackexchange, however he only has 1 rep which he's finding annoying because he wants to comment on other peoples answers.
Is the 100 "start up" rep no longer in effect, or does he not have enough stackoverflow reputation to trigger it, or is this a bug of some kind?
https://stackoverflow.com/users/244179/aphid
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/users/4399/aphid
Nb. I'm asking this and not him, because he doesn't have the rep to participate in meta yet!

You need a minimum of +200 rep in the network to get the +100 bonus, and your friend does not yet have that.
Note that to get the association bonus you will have to unassociate and re-associate later.

Thanks for clarifying that Jeff. I'll go and prod him into answering more questions ;)


text:
JavaScript error in jquery.min.js
This page (and apparently only this page, but I'm not sure why) has a JavaScript error:
Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property '0' of undefined

I'm seeing this in the JavaScript Console Chrome 11.0.696.28 beta in OSX. It is of course stopping all JavaScript on the page, preventing me from commenting or doing anything.

Huh. A couple other sites are actually claiming this same issue. Thus far it's been seen on Super User, Gaming, and Skeptics - each only on a single page.

This was examined and resolved by balpha. I'll quote his answer here:

This is fixed now.
It took a whole lot of single-stepping through callback after callback after callback, but in the end, it was actually a bug in the HTML code.
When you link directly to an answer (instead of just a question), this answer is shown in a highlight color which then fades back to normal (as everybody has probably seen).
We're in the process of converting our pages from the old ASPX view engine to Razor, and in the process of converting the partial view that shows a single answer (this conversion happened today), there was a little too much encoding happening, so the result for the highlighted answer looked like this:
<div id="answer-85877" class="answer" style="background-color:#F6F5EE;">

This is obviously anything but valid (but it actually depends on the browser how it gets handled). When the jQuery color animation plugin tried to find the current color, all it found was either garbage or nothing (depending on the browser). When it found nothing, this worked fine (except that you didn't see the animation); when it found garbage, this caused the code to throw up.


text:
Accepting an answer on a community wiki.
In my profile I get a blurb "Have you considered accepting an answer or starting a bounty for this question?" for community wiki questions I've asked.
Does it make sense to assign an answer to a community wiki question?

Related: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/23719/is-it-ok-to-accept-an-answer-to-community-wiki-question

It can; or you can ignore it. That message expires after a month or two and it won't nag you any further.

This boils down to differing opinions on what CW is.
On this site, we've used CW for many list-ish questions, which is not encouraged on many other SE sites - SO in particular. Answers really don't make sense in these cases.
When CW is used for subjective questions, there is often a best answer, even if it is still subjective - perhaps the person with the most experience, or the most citations, or sometimes, sadly, the only person who managed to answer with understandable grammar. In these cases marking an "answer" serves to give some closure to the question and as a kind of "super-upvote" for future readers.
This is most useful when the subjective questions meet the criteria for good subjective questions - in my opinion many non-CW questions on our site still fail these hard (e.g.), let alone our CW questions.


text:
Is it OK to ask for thoughts on / experience with <game-relevant middleware>?
Say for instance, I want to implement something into a game that seems to be doable judging by public information/advertising of a certain middleware package, but I'm sensing trouble down the road when things get more intrigued - is it alright to ask for specifics about that middleware product?
Questions might be along the lines of:

"Does <middleware> allow for an easy way to provide custom memory allocation?"
"Does <middleware> rely heavily on callbacks?"
"Does <middleware> lend itself well to being used in job systems?

From the Faq: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/faq

You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page. To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking subjective questions where …

every answer is equally valid: “What’s your favorite ______?”
your answer is provided along with the question, and you expect more answers: “I use ______ for ______, what do you use?”
there is no actual problem to be solved: “I’m curious if other people feel like I do.”
we are being asked an open-ended, hypothetical question: “What if ______ happened?”
it is a rant disguised as a question: “______ sucks, am I right?”

So for your 3 example questions, I would say 1 and 2 are answerable questions.  3 is a bit more subjective without more details.
And of course if said middleware is under NDA you're probably not going to get answers.

Thanks! In the NDA-case I might at least find out that it is in fact under NDA :)

I wish I could simply add a comment to Tetrad's answer, but I don't have enough street cred yet ;)
There's not just NDAs, sometimes it's not practical to do honest reviews with negative sides if the company you're working for has a business deal with said middleware company (don't forget that you have companies that own many middlewares and tools used throughout the industry, I won't name the company but most people know who I'm talking about), as it might make them unhappy, especially if your username can be linked to your real name and the company you work for!

That is a problem indeed. Thanks for mentioning, though!


text:
Possible Conference Speaking Sponsorships -- 2011
We're evaluating the feasibility of sponsoring a member of the gamedev community to speak at a conference in 2011.
Speaking is a relatively big "ask", so this needs to be planned many months in advance. Let's get started!
We'd like the community to establish where ...

What relevant game developers' conferences are coming up in 2011 that have open speaker slots or calls for papers?

... and then who.

Which members of the community are strongly interested in being sponsored by Stack Exchange, Inc to speak at one of the above conferences in 2011?

To be clear, the speaker is free talk about anything he or she wants so long as it would be roughly on topic for this site -- with a quick acknowledgement of support from Stack Exchange and a mention of the community here.

What does it mean to speak? Do i have to speak about gdse? Or it is about speaking about something proffesional and just propagating gdse by showing it exists and there are proffesionals here?

@nota "speaking about something proffesional and just propagating gdse by showing it exists and there are proffesionals here" -- this, exactly. We just want to enable avid members of the community to speak, as game developers, on topics that interest them.

If i can speak about my work (or better work of team i'm part of) i would love to speak on conference. I also really like this site and community and would like to propagate it. I work on renderer for movies integrated into Maya based on gpu rasterization - c++/directx11 (nobody did that before). So my contribution can be something like "How did we made whole feature movie on something like game engine"... Or just start discussion like "Do we still need raytracing?" or maybe somebody might be interested in "Volumetric effects into game engine", which is my current work.
I just propose. Not sure if this is correct answer here. I'm presenting it in computer graphics conference in three weeks, so i will see how succesful i will be.
renderer can be found here, current version is capable to do much more than what you can see on a website. But images have to be keep secret at the moment because all of them are part of the movie. Teaser will be available soon (no secrets then) so you can consider the curent quality of renderer. Also something can be found on my youtube channel (with programmer art warning).
tl;dr; : I propose myself to speak about renderer which uses game like technology to provide same outputs (1:1) as build in high quality renderers in Autodesk Maya, but 50-1000 times faster.
Edit: Here is teaser to the movie (with EN subtitles). I also was presenting this renderer on a computer graphics conference, i think i was kinda successful, people liked it :). So i feel to be qualified enough now.

GDC San Fran, one of the largest conferences, has just finished. GDC Europe is in August but is closed for submissions.
GDC Online (http://www.gdconline.com/) is still open for subs until the 5th May, and it runs 10-13th October in Austin, Texas.
I may be being thick but I can't find anything on GDC China's website (http://www.gdcchina.com/) about submission deadlines.
The Paris Game/AI Conference (http://gameaiconf.com/) is also closed for submissions this year.
Having said that, for 2011 I am looking to apply to speak at a range of these conferences. As long as it sat well with my employers I would be willing to be sponsored by stackexchange.

Corollary to https://gaming.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2052/possible-conference-speaking-sponsorships-2011/2059#2059

PAX is probably viewed as much more of a consumer-based conference, but I'd imagine their PAX Dev conference in Seattle, August 24-25, would have many more indie-type devs at it who are a lot more open about matters of development than larger houses.  They are currently looking for speakers and panelists through June 1.
I don't create games, so just tossing this out there.


text:
Adding the tag to the title. Yes or no?
See this question as an example.
The user added OpenGL to the title, and tagged the question OpenGL. What do you think about the "tag" being in the title?
I know that over at gaming SE, you shouldn't add the tag into the title. Eg. Starcraft2: How can I remember to build Supply Depots all game? is bad, it should simply be: How can I remember to build Supply Depots all game?

Personally I hate this. If it's important, work the tag into the question grammatically, e.g. "How do I color my model in OpenGL?", "How do I change the color of a texture in Cocos2d?". If you're just going to slam ungrammatical tags on it, well, we have tags for that.

Aye for this practice. This is how the rest of the Stack Exchange Network operates as well - if you're going to include the tag in the title, do it organically. We already automatically append the most popular tag of a question into the page title if the title doesn't already contain it - prefacing a question with the tag is either redundant to this or makes it look extremely awkward.

Ok, I'm going to keep an eye on titles like these and edit them if necessary.

@bumm correct, this is my guidance -- if the tag works "naturally" in the title, use it there. If it does not, then the most popular tag is added to the HTML <title> on the page anyway, so you're covered in either case.


text:
Haven't achieved Electorate badge?
I wasn't too sure about this until I checked today and saw a breakdown of my votes cast on my profile.
The Electorate badge states: Voted on 600 questions and 25% or more of total votes are on questions
I've voted 639 times, 634 up votes, 5 down votes with 354 votes on questions and 285 votes on answers. I believe this is what the badge is asking for, unless I'm mistaken.
Is this a bug?

To earn the electorate badge, you must:
1) Vote on 600 questions
2) At least 25% of your total votes must be on questions.
You have over 600 total votes, but not over 600 votes on questions.

Thanks very much :)


text:
Are beginner "design review" questions acceptable?
This question on Stack Overflow was pointed out to me: RTS Game AI Thread
The essence of the question is, I suspect, fairly basic, and certainly touches on topics that have been covered here before...
But he's taken the time to sketch out what he's trying to accomplish, and recognize that the architecture he's considering... may actually not be that great of an idea. IMHO, this is great - provided someone with some experience is willing to put the time in to analyze and comment on what is still very much a newbie question.
Provided they're reasonably well-though-out and written, is this something you would welcome here?

We do have an architecture tag..I assume that is what it is meant for :)

I agree, that's the kind of question I'd enjoy answering here, and it's reasonably game development related.

As long as they do some kind of research or effort, I don't have a problem with them.


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"Visit Meta" attract question link area is displaying old questions
Not sure if this is a bug, or just something I haven't noticed before, but I thought the set of links to questions under the "Visit Meta" sidebar on the main site always display new or most-recently updated questions from the site meta.
But when I've glanced at it today, I noticed that it was linking to questions that seemed old. So I checked, and sure enough, the questions currently displayed for me (1, 2, 3 and 4) don't appear to have any recent activity that I can see.
Is this expected behavior, perhaps because there just isn't much meta discussion so the algorithm for picking these featured questions eventually selects older ones? Or is this a bug?

Maybe it's sorted by magic?

We changed the meta house ad so it displays a larger, more interesting variety of posts from meta on the main site -- it fills in this order

anything that has a featured on it
"current events" from the weekly meta hot tab
beyond that, pick at random from the 50 most recent non-negatively scored meta questions

I felt the meta house ads were getting stale and repetitive as they were...


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Cannot chat in chat
I'm not able to use chat. It says that my login informations are too old, but it is not true. I also tried various browsers with no success.

What does http://chat.stackexchange.com/help say?

@balpha That is interesting, now is everything working. I have no idea what the problem was. Sorry.

No problem :) If you run into issues again, we have a "when-all-else-fails better-than-nothing" secondary login; be sure to be logged in to gamedev, and then go to http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/users/chat-stackexchange-login and click the button (works on any other StackExchange site as well).

As Ben pointed out, always try
http://chat.stackexchange.com/help
first.
It is also linked under "I'm having trouble logging in to chat" in the faq http://chat.stackexchange.com/faq


text:
Is there any way to disable frequent-tag highlighting?
Apparently I have been frequently visiting questions that have an 'ai' tag. Now questions with an 'ai' tag appear highlighted in yellow. Is there any way to disable this?
I tried going to 'set tag preferences' to disable it, but there is no option to do so. In fact the 'ai' tag does not even appear there.

Why is Stack Overflow suddenly orange (#FFEFC6)?
There doesn't seem to be an option to disable it outright, but a work around seems to be to use the favorite/ignored tag system in some capacity.  So, in theory, if you mark a tag you don't like as ignored it'll remove all that stuff.

Or put a nonsense tag in.  I'm partial to [unicorn]. (:

[unicorn] it is.

Actually I recommend giving the favorite system a legitimate shot; I really like it myself, especially on the more popular sites (like Stack Overflow) where you would otherwise be overwhelmed by all the questions there.

I agree with Ricket. It sometimes seems to know me better than I know myself.


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Why do Ignored Tags just highlight out, rather than disappearing like on SO?
Obviously there are some questions I can't answer, nor am I that interested in them (e.g. facebook). I tried adding them to the ignored tags list, but they just show up slightly grey. I was expecting it to be StackOverflow like, and I would not see them at all.
Is this a bug?

There's an option in your preferences called "Hide Ignored Tags". You need this marked in order for the tags to be hidden, rather than just greyed out.

SO has some more rigorous filtering of the front page so that it doesn't show ignored tags and prefers interesting tags.  The idea being that they want to present a list of questions that are more interesting to the user.  That, and just showing "latest" like the other SE sites would be a lot of noise due to the sheer amount of traffic they get.
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/stack-overflow-homepage-changes/
So the reason you're seeing them here and not there is due to the filtering, unless you turned on that "hide ignored tags" flag that was brought up already.


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Should we, and if so where, post solutions to problems if we use a solution which isn't one of the answers?
If you ask a question such as the following:

How can I design some feature X so
  that it is Y, and supports Z?

(e.g. this question)
Obviously at some point you're going to work out how you did it. Since this is designed as a site to learn, I think posting the solution you used (if it differs from the answers given) could be useful to other people. I'm not suggesting posting your solution and accepting it; I'm saying to accept the suggestion that was most useful and put yours as a tool for others to learn from.
However, is this more suited to be posted as an answer to your question, or edited in as a 'Here's how I went with it' end to the question itself?

Personally I think posting your solution as an answer is the more "correct" way to go about it, so that the masses can vote on a solution (up or down) depending on how good of an answer it is.

If it's an answer to the question as stated, I recommend posting it as an answer.
If the nature of the question changed somewhat in the process of discovering your solution, I recommend posting it as an edit.


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Points not getting added for voted up question
On gamedevelopment.stackexchange i have added the following question:
"Most useful free third party Android Game libraries?"
As of now it has been voted up 4 times. However, my points are still the same. They are not increasing. What should I do? What help can I get?

That question has been changed to a community wiki question by a moderator, so nobody gets rep.

ok. Havent noticed that earlier.Thanks!

@GamDroid be sure to mark this answer as "accepted" then.


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Would questions about Maxscript be appropriate, would they be answered?
I am wondering, would GameDev be a suitable place for questions about MaxScript?
MaxScript is a scripting language developed by Autodesk for 3DS Max, therefore, its specific to a content creation app. which is used predominantly in game asset creation*.
That said, its likely any questions will be 'generic programming' questions, and have not so much to do with game development but more with using this particular program - therefore StackOverflow or SuperUser may be better places.
However, if an esoteric question about this particular package was going to be answered anywhere, I would reckon it would be here as the concentration of users of Max are going to be much higher on GameDev than anywhere else.
(*Probably)
Are programming with Maxscript questions on-topic for GameDev? Are those capable of answering those questions most likely to be here?

If you're using it in a game development scenario and it's, well, having to do with game development, I'm pretty sure it'd be acceptable. It strikes me as being the same as asking questions about, say, C#.
What I'd suggest is looking at c#, and looking at all the questions it does have, especially recent ones. There's obviously a whole bunch that are directly GameDev-related. But some will stretch the line somewhat, and they seem to be acceptable since the underlying intent is still around.
Not every question satisfies it, though. There's a lot of cross-overlap with Stack Overflow, but if it's far enough then it'd be off-topic.
In understanding that, I'd expect that MaxScript, which is predominantly but still not exclusively used in game asset creation, would be valid as long as you're still within the realm of asking about game development. Rather than, say, basic scripting elements. Basically, acceptable MaxScript questions that'd get answers would probably be on the same lines as our acceptable C# questions.
That's my interpretation of how it'd be acceptable here.

I was thinking it would be much the same as a question about any other language. The thing is, what makes a programming question specific to game development? Really, if you break down any question far enough it will always be a generic programming problem. This is confounded more by the fact that Maxscript will never be used 'at runtime' and so it is likely all Qs will be 'generic', as they will relate to things like building exporters. (Does the fact that its for an exporter make it game related? hmm). In any case, when I get stuck next ill post a Q about it and see how it fares :D

@sebf What I'd suggest is getting yourself a handful of example "MaxScript" questions. You can either post them in your question here, or you can do a primer evaluation of your own by comparing it with how they look like our questions about other languages.

One I really need answered is "Can I reference a MaxScript file from another one, in order to call functions from it?"
That, I would say, is a general scripting question; but that said, some of those you linked are no more 'game oriented' than that other than the context given (making my game classes more OO as opposed to my program design). The most game specific part of my question is probably (the rather tenuous) 'its a likely requirement for any exporter'.

@sebf How does it compare to the making classes available to others C# question?

well I'd say I can't really see any difference other than that the linked Q has given context of a game (I would say the answer to that question would be identical whether or not it was for a game, just like the answer to mine would be the same whether it was for an exporter or a script to setup a render for a movie).
I personally like the way GameDev operates; I think its much better to have too many OT programming questions, than too little. But I don't want to clog up GD with scripting questions simply because its on the only SE site I think ill get an answer ;)

I'd think it would be on topic, but would make no guarantees about whether or not a hypothetical question would be answered.

If the question is directly about game development then it fits here. If it's not directly about game development however (eg. general 3D animation) then unfortunately there's no place for that in SE. Try asking on highend3d or cgartists.
There probably ought to be a 3D animation site actually, but oh well.


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Why doesn't SE work in IE7?
Most pages have no formatting and most scripts break while viewing the pages in IE7.  Why is this?  Was this overlooked?

we can't reproduce this..

why are you using IE in the first place?

School limitations -__-

I've seen this happen when IE7 has an error while downloading a linked resource (e.g. a script or stylesheet) and then caches the corrupted resource. Try pressing Ctrl+F5 to thoroughly refresh the page and see if it looks okay.
Are things also broken on the meta site? Does it look different from this screenshot?

Here is an image of our logo, see if you can see it below or click this link.

Yes.  No formatting and a lot of the scripts are broken.

So your machine looks different from that IE7 screenshot? Then it's a problem on your end, not the site itself. The stylesheets and scripts are loaded from cdn.sstatic.net - make sure that site isn't being blocked by something (hosts file, firewall, browser extension). For example are you able to see this image?

When you earlier had a link on that site, multiple browsers (not IE curiously) had the same issue I was having.

Here is the link from earlier; I removed it because it timed out before reaching the IE tests. Is the page on your computer looking like the two screenshots of the Dillo browser? Because the Dillo browser doesn't support scripting or anything other than plain HTML and images, according to Wikipedia - so it actually looks correct considering the browser. Furthermore, you still haven't answered my questions and I'm trying to help you diagnose your problem...


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Community Promotion Ads - 2H 2011

Possible Duplicate:
Community Promotion Ads - 1H 2012

What in the Wide, Wide World of Sports is Going On Here?
TL;DR -- put images and links in the answers. If they get voted up enough, they will appear on the main site as community promotion ads.
But whyyyyyyy?
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
the site's twitter account
scripts packs or power tools
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. And to click on it for great justice!
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.

Image requirements

The image that you create must be 220 x 250 pixels
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

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.

Sourceforge page, http://sourceforge.net/projects/construct/, thanks for the opportunity and interest!


text:
A good answer exists but is not accepted
I have been trawling through this site for a while, and I often go to answer questions that already have a more than acceptable answer, only the person that asked the question either doesn't deem it a good enough answer, or maybe simply doesn't come back to the site to accept the answer.
I realize the accept % is here to try to enforce people to accept answered questions, but could there be a way to automatically promote the highest rated answer to an answer should the question be inactive too long? Or maybe just include the highest voted answer in the quickview aswell?
The reason is that a question could have a great answer only people searching for a similar answer may not see it at first.
Thanks,

Really the only person who can know that, for a particular question, an answer has helped solve their problem is the question asker.  We try to encourage people to mark questions as accepted, but there's no way to force a question as accepted (as far as I know).
For the rest of the community, voting is the way to express this.  The default sorting algorithm puts highest voted answers near the top, so people searching for something should, in theory, find the answer they are looking for.

Indeed, but it's a shame that a highly voted answer to a question that has no accepted answer is not immediately visible from the question list... Is there no way to do this?

What do you mean by "visible from the question list"?  Questions with answers with upvotes have the number of answers in green.  Questions with an accepted answer have the number of answers on a green background.

Don't ever hesitate to add a great new answer to an older question:

new answers always bump the question, which means more people will see the question and your new answer.
if it's a good answer, the community will always upvote it, regardless of how old the question is.

However, this assumes the original question is interesting enough for the community to click on in some way -- if it's a really bad question (title, etc) or an extremely obscure topic. Thus, I would "punch up" the question with an edit1 as well when answering. This maximizes the chances of people seeing both a good question and your great new answer.
win-win!
1 below 2k rep, your edits will go into a suggestion queue, but everything here is editable by design.


text:
Can we have more visible question highlighting?
I find the faint yellow background given to "interesting" posts (those that have some of my favourite tags on them) a little too faint. Depending on my angle to the screen, I sometimes can't discern it from the white.

Anyone else have trouble?
I can see StackOverflow's yellow background colour fine and it's still reasonably unobtrusive. Can we steal their yellow?

I have no issue with the current yellow. I think it stands out pretty well. Perhaps your brightness is odd?

My brightness is the factory setting on an almost-new mid-range monitor and it's been fine otherwise... Perhaps I am a margin case then, but why not support the margin if it hurts nobody else? As far as I can tell, the StackOverflow yellow hasn't been complained about.

The yellow is vibrant on my MacBook (but of course), and my Cr-48 also shows it just fine except as I get out of its viewing angle. I wonder how common a problem this is? Also, Aku, if I were you I'd start wondering what other colors are being dulled or completely missed with that monitor.... :-\

It appears that the relevant CSS style classes are "tagged-interesting" and "tagged-ignored" -- if your browser supports custom CSS, you can probably override them to tailor the background colors or whatever more to your needs. For example
.tagged-interesting {
  background-color: red !important;
}

will really stand out.

Might as well, if the problem is mine alone. Thanks!

+1 I can see the yellow fine, but it's ugly. Changing too :p


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Need for software-design tag?
There was a question on Game Development where the tag didn't really fit the bill, but a "suitable" tag doesn't really exist.
Software Design/Modelling method and tool for games?
The question is about software design methods, but is tagged game-design, which is wrong, but software-design doesn't exist, and architecture doesn't really fit.
Any ideas?

We discussed this a bit here: Should the "design" tag encompass architecture AND game design questions?
Personally I'm of the opinion that "architecture" does fit.

Sorry for the re-ask then. I'm not a game designer but I have notions and agree that the misuse of 'game-design' as a tag is repugnant :). In the case where the architecture tag is in debate, should we change tags or just leave the inappropriate tag?

If you see cleanup work that needs to be done, feel free to do it.  We all chip in to make the site a better place.

Got there before me :P

I think it would fit pretty well in the programming tag, as well as the tools tag. I personally do not think it fits in architecture since it's more of a tool than the actual code itself.

I see where you're coming from. I would'nt say programming though, because he's not specifically asking for code, and for me tools would be more an actual program, though indeed he is asking for a 'tool' to help define an architecture.

@3nixios I would consider it to definitely be programming - it is part of the programming process. And UML is often done via UML modelling programs.

For me the design (which can be done on paper) and the actual programming of it are different. You can have a software design that requires certain things, but will not stipulate how it will be implemented, that is the programming side of things. Of course certain things are implicit with UML for example, but whether you implement it in C# or C++ is a programming problem. Anyway this is more a discussion for the forums methinks? :P


text:
Game Development Moderator Cards
We recently printed some business cards for our Stack Exchange employees and they turned out great.
It got us thinking: our sites' moderators have been working hard to keep our sites high quality for the past few years. They may not be employees, per se, but great community moderators are why our communities are safe, sane, and worth visiting in the first place..
If you're a gamedev.stackexchange moderator, would you be interested in having your own Game Development Stack Exchange contact card? Would you find it useful?
I can see them being handy to pass out during your local gaming sessions or game dev conferences.
Below is a mockup:
(click on image to see full res version)

Of course Twitter ID/phone# are optional. It can be Skype, AIM, URL etc.
Note: the text rendering in the mockup is slightly blurry. But when printed it will be crisp.

He is supposed to be Turkish. Some say his father was German.

Nice - congrats to the moderators, you deserve it. (And kudos to SE staff, too).

Absolutely! As you said, it would be handy to hand out at local game dev conferences or sessions.
I would probably even be willing to pay for them if you make the design and offer it through some sort of business card printing site. I'm proud to be a moderator here.

OK, moderators have officially been mailed the form to obtain the cards. Stay tuned!


text:
How can I follow new answers to a question?
Questions that don't yet have answers are sometimes interesting. There should be a way to get notified when answers come.
This would allow...

knowledgeable zealots to follow questions they know something about so they can critically review incoming answers
curious monkeys to follow questions they know nothing whatsoever about and receive delicious knowledge from incoming answers

...both of which further the goals of the site by teaching and learning, respectively.
How's that sound?

If you mark a question as a favorite (by clicking on the star on the side), then you can track activity on the question. The system is not all that robust, but it can work for this.
When you hover over your display name at the top, a table drops down that includes a row for "favorites". When a question is marked as a favorite, activity on that question (namely, new answers, comments, and revisions (but not revisions to answers!)) will increment that number. You can then click the "favorites", which will link you to the favorites section of your profile. The topmost entries should be the ones with the most recent activity - and hence you'll be able to keep track of whether or not new answers have shown up.

So the "follow" feature is called "favorite"? Good enough.


text:
Better filtering/sorting by tag of the questions page?
When I add "ignored tags" to my profile, it greys questions out but leaves them in the flow.  I don't know whether this is something that simply hasn't propegated from stackoverflow.com yet or something, but this behavior seems to be different (and less useful) than what happens on SO (it doesn't even seem to show questions that are on the ignored tag list).
What's the deal there?

In your profile page, under the prefs tab, there is your list of favorite and ignored tags. There's a checkbox beneath the ignored tags labeled hide ignored tags. If you check it, then it will hide your ignored tags in the same way that you see on Stack Overflow.


text:
Game Development Stack Exchange swag for top users
As a thank you for being awesome, if you are on page 1 or page 2 of …
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/users?tab=reputation&filter=all
… we'll be sending you a little care package shortly:

Game Development Stack Exchange t-shirt in your size
Game Development Exchange die-cut, vinyl stickers
Stack Exchange sharpie
Stack Exchange pen
Stack Exchange stickers

You can expect to get an email soon with details on how to confirm and provide your mailing address and size preferences.
T-Shirt

Sticker

The rest of the items you can view in the Stack Exchange store — direct links to sharpie, pens, stickers.
Congratulations!
(for anyone else who wants this swag, but isn't on page 1 or page 2 of the all time top users -- the limited edition t-shirts and stickers will be available for purchase from the store soon as well)

Awesome, made my day.

Thanks! Tokens of appreciation are always welcome. Brought a smile to my face after a very rough week.

Wow, Thank you very much! Unexpected gifts are always awesome! :)

I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised when I received an email about this. Very cool! :)

:) Very cool stuff. I totally put AAGrapsas, though, instead of A.A. Grapsas; but, I figure you guys'll figure that one out! Really cool that you're doing this!! Much appreciated!

Oh noes! Huge kudos to jhocking though!

What about for the most amazingest new users? Like Trevor Powell, Valkea and... me? :P

@3nix we see you! http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/users?tab=newusers

Oh I almost missed it, didn't see the mail, thank you guys very much :)

status update ?

@will 6-8 weeks .. everything is in progress!

I realise this is an exceptional case. Still, with all due respect and congratulations, I point out that this still is not a question and those still are not answers. Ironically, this "question" implies that precisely all of you ought to know better. Next time, just send the emails and leave the chatter to the chatroom?

@aku this is a perfectly acceptable topic for meta, see [meta-faq]

@Jeff I can't see your point. The FAQ encourages questions and discourages using the Meta as a "random discussion area". This is not a question. This is, however, a random discussion.

@aku it is a discussion about a promotion benefiting the gamedev.se community -- it is 100% absolutely on-topic. It directly affects at least 72 members of the gamedev community, and anyone else who would like to obtain gamedev swag from http://shop.stackexchange.com

Suggestion - maybe change the FAQ to allow announcements (at least from the management)? While I certainly have no problem with this Question (partly because I'm on page 2 :) I would say that it's an announcement (with feedback), not a true discussion. But there's not really a better place to put it, so I'd agree it belongs here.

Damn, if only I had started posting here a few weeks earlier I could have gotten one of these

@Jeff Atwood, is there any news on this? It is almost two month now.

@Jeff Atwood, any news? It has been over two months now.

@hendrik afaik everything was mailed out about a week ago?

Mine arrived yesterday. Ahoy!

Mine too! Looks good.

Arrived. <3 And yes, it worked as designed, i.e, I haven't been active here for a while, but now I'm visiting again..

Yup, mine arrived too. Nice pens!

@Jeff Atwood, Yay! I finally got it.

and page 3 gets maybe just the shirt ;)?

Mine arrived a few days ago. Thanks! :)

Still haven't got mine :( I'm fairly certain I filled out the form. Any way to check?

Very cool, thanks so much! It's fun being part of this community.

I just noticed that I should probably flag my own "answer", since it is more of a comment. But technically Jeff didn't post a question either :)

Everyone is using answers for feedback ;-)

The form asks for user-name, but my user-name is not unique.  How are you going to match it all up?
Neat way to get the real names and addresses of your users

you can use the full URL of your user page if you like, that is unique

cool, I'll just submit again to be sure eh? how many goodie bags will I get?

I will not up-vote or down-vote anything from you Will while you have 1337 points!

You can upvote him here on meta, it doesn't effect his score.

This is great. I was writing meta post about something like this: "hey why don't to make some promo t-shirts and send it to top users for free" a 3 month ago. Than i told myself to not be annoying and did not post anything.
And now! You just made it :-D. Great!
Also i would really appreciate some another color of t-shirt than classic "I'm typical IT guy black color" :). But still awesome. Thanks.

Well, the store has SO shirt in white, but the gamedev shirts don't even seem to be on sale. And I was thinking of getting another one - guess it's an exclusive :(

I might just be a little paranoid here but there is a voice inside saying something along these lines:

When the internet offers freebies (with free global shipping and no strings attached) through an email which states that I must give out personal information to a link which goes to "spreadsheets.google.com"... I should proceed with caution.

I would be suspicious of this too, but it's StackExchange/Overflow we're talking about.

Just got my package :) I don't know if I'm one of the first, or one of the last, but at least I can confirm they're shipping. Apparently the fulfillment company is called ST Associates, if you see a strange package in the mail. :) (Though there's also a "ref:Stackexchange" note on the label).

Yup, got mine too today. Sweet.

And I thought that my score wasn't that high. Thank you guys! :D

One of the few advantages of being in a smaller community... On SO, there are 12K pages of users, I'd be somewhere around 11K.

@Cyclops If you look at a lot of them, they have 1 rep and no questions, no answers, no nothing. or maybe one poor question. There's about 5k pages of them.

@The Communist Duck, yes, I know, it was an exaggeration. :) In fact, it's actually 6K pages, roughly half of the users are 1-pointers. I once counted, to compare with UnityAnswers, to see if UA was just unlucky. But in both cases, it seems half the people just sign on once.

Oh wow this is awesome. I am so glad to be a part of this community.
Is this going to be available for global shipping? Just found the email, so it is.
Is there going to be a confirmation of order?

Got my package today, thanks!  At first I thought, "I didn't order anything from EBay, did I?"

It's hard to find, but if you look closely at the label, there is a ref:Stackexchange line, even if it's an unknown 'from' address.

Anyone in the UK got theirs yet? I'm still keeping my fingers crossed that "global shipping" included such backwater places as London, England...
Mine came yesterday! Wooo (Sep 24 UK)

I'm in Germany, and I got mine today.