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Should we split the chat into on- and off-topic rooms?
A user has proposed effectively(*) splitting our site's chat room into on- and off- topic sub-rooms. A grassroots attempt to populate or otherwise prove obvious utility of the room was given about two weeks or so to show something for itself.
I'm posting this question to get a feeling from the community as a whole about the idea in order to help determine whether or not we should do it.
Note that if we do split the chat room:

we'll probably make the existing one of on-topic room, as it is the target of [chat] quicklinks all around the site, most of which should be for on-topic purposes
we'll normalize permission settings across both rooms as much as possible
the same rules for what is appropriate off-topic conversation will still apply; this is not a follow-up experiment to our first "almost-anything-goes" style of chatroom split that went so poorly

If we don't split the chat room:

we'll just convert the experimental room into a regular "conversation between X and Y" room (this means renaming it) to preserve its discussion in the archives

Please post your thoughts!
(*) in this particular case I say "effectively" primarily due to the chosen name of the room; irrespective of the intent behind creating the room, it looks like and acts like an on-topic-only room for the site. This is still a question I feel we should have documented on meta regardless, as this comes up more often than I'd frankly like it to come up.

Potentially relevant discussion (as requested by @AlecTeal): http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/24628846#24628846

Hi, now I can comment I just want to say I don't endorse nor did I propose any of what is here. I have inquired and my consent isn't needed to post this, but I feel compelled to say it. (Also the top answer had 5 upvotes before any others showed up. I have questions with the procedure) - awesome pony show though.

I don't like the idea. I hang out in the room to be social. Then real gamedev questions come up, and I'm there to answer them. I won't hang out in a strictly on-topic room... I would just go there when I had a question.
The split would reduce the utility of the room greatly if others feel the way I do about it.

I agree with Almo completly. It would be a great hassle to be in both chatrooms at the same time, which is why I don't really use any other rooms in the network.

Agreed.  Splitting the room into 2 is not appropriate.  You create bonds in there by socializing with others with similar interests.  Having two rooms just makes it a hassle to have to go between both rooms to accomplish the same thing we have been doing in the one.

We've had at least one, possibly two (I don't recall the details) attempts to split the chat room before. They both, obviously, did not work out.
Like Lasse commented on Almo's answer (which I am mostly agreement with), I find it distracting and tedious to have to monitor both on- and off- topic chat rooms (even as a user, forgetting for my moment my obligation to do so as a moderator). In my experience they never work out well, because people tend to clump up in the more social-oriented rooms (people being social creatures for the most part), and that's where the people are so that's where the discussions end up happening.
So I am not in favor of splitting the site's chat room, preferring instead that we adopt a model whereby on-topic conversation should in general take priority over off-topic banter. I'd rather we strengthen and elevate the level of discourse in our existing room rather than fracture the reasonably-small chat community further.
But at the same time I recognize there is a need for people to create side-rooms for the purpose of specific, directed discussion for some length of time. I'm not opposed to doing so, provided that those rooms aren't named in a way that might suggest they're official site rooms; after discussion with some fellow moderators I think the best way to do this is for such rooms to named something like "'s Pathfinding Chat" or whatnot (the key aspect being the inclusion of the username, which mirrors the functionality provided by the chat system for 1:1 rooms and comment imports).

I agree with Almo's answer and I would like to add that I think the social aspect of the room is one of the more important aspects that makes it run smoothly.
Being a more social room on a niche SE site keeps it populated and active. The social environment also helps newcomers feel that they can open a conversation (on and off topic) encouraging engaging conversation.

I hail from RPG.SE (we do tabletop, pen and paper RPGs), and RPG General Chat. I've not been here actively for quite a while (just in and out as an observer sometimes), but your chat room seems to be pretty similar to ours: similar levels of activity and chat regulars, and a generally sociable atmosphere which ebbs and flows between being on- and off-topic with priority given to on-topic stuff.
I don't know your exact situation, but given the similarities I might be able to offer some insight and suggestions. I've read this meta, and the attached chat. I note Alec's complaint that the room is very casual, and that there are large amounts of time devoted to topics he's (she's?) unhappy with.

If we're discussing the matter of chat's casualness, I need to bring up that chat was created to be a "third place" (see the SE blog and wikipedia). Third places are those places away from home or work we congregate and socialise, and among their hallmarks is that the mood is playful:

The tone of conversation in third places are never marked with tension or hostility. Instead, they have a playful nature, where witty conversation and frivolous banter are not only common, but highly valued. — Wikipedia

Chats are always going to be casual and social because it's what we're in chat for.
We're also here because we like game development, so that's always going to be one of the fun topics. That means an "off topic" room is not going to be very good at staying that way. It's always going to drift back on topic, and probably just look exactly like what your main chat looks like now.
Which means other rooms are just going to be... other rooms. And actually that seems to be our answer here.
On creating extra rooms to facilitate whatever people need
We've gotten pretty good at this on RPG Chat. I'll share what we do about this.
Primarily we talk in RPG General Chat. This place looks pretty much like your main chat room: we socialise, go on- or off-topic, discuss advanced or simple stuff, etc.
We try to keep General Chat a safe place where anyone can join in. To those ends we created Not A Bar (the name's a joke). It's our pressure valve for unpleasant conversations and arguments. Those get moved there wholesale from General Chat when it's called for. It also makes for a pretty good side-conversation room when General Chat's busy.
We also have some purpose-built rooms that just naturally emerged and may fade out of use later:

The Campfire is where we share stories about our tabletop sessions. It started a few weeks ago to do just that while General Chat was busy, and has stuck around.
Genesis is where we do random character generation, usually for fun. We created it recently once we started doing a whole lot of that in Not A Bar.

Before that we were using a room just for deadEarth, which is one of the worst designed RPGs ever, and on top of that offensive in most ways: sexist, homophobic, racist, you name it. (So, trigger warning, the material we quote from it might offend.) Characters are extremely likely to come out of character creation crippled, dying, or already dead, but that also makes character creation amusing and strangely relaxing.

Some users also have their very own rooms we've taken to calling spoil-lairs, which they'll use to plan their upcoming RPG sessions so that their fellow players (who are also in chat) don't see it.

And so on. The list has changed over time.
This is what it sounds like you need to be doing.
You might need a professional version of Not A Bar: a pressure-valve side-room where people can go to discuss advanced topics while Main Chat's busy. Main Chat can't do all things, and it will always be a social place. You might want an AI Guild room, or an AI Chat, or a Super Advanced Stuff chat, or a Super Basics chat.
You might want a "move it when someone asks" rule, you might not. (Our General Chat upholds a general rule that anyone can ping the room's owner and request a conversation be moved to Not A Bar, and it'll be moved. This has only ever been invoked for conversations that were genuinely unpleasant for that person: it's genuinely overstaying its welcome. We've only had to do this a few times, so your mileage may vary.)
You may want to just create chats about topics as they're needed. Is someone busy talking about pointers in the main room, but you want to talk about advanced physics for in-motion collision detection of soft bodies? Create a room, link it in main chat (if you paste just the URL, it oneboxes all fancy-like). If you find you're needing to talk about advanced mathematics often, maybe it's worth having an advanced mathematics room to be available while main chat's busy, or to just be the go-to place for that stuff.
If you need a place where "people know their stuff" (quoting that rationale conversation), it'll come about one of these ways.

Alec was unhappy about a discussion about C and pointers. So his opinion of what is and is not appropriate is suspect. Game dev involves programming, so we accept that there will be some programming discussion.

@Almo I don't really mean to suggest programming discussion would be off topic. Does something convey that impression? (Also revisiting this this morning, I see this was wordier than it needed to be, so I'll do some heavy editing.)

No, not you, but one of the people involved in this whole thing got mad at me about talking about programming in the chat room.

I've rarely seen more than 10 people active in it at a time.
Splitting anything with such a low amount of traffic is pointless.
It might make sense if people were trying to discuss topics but too many folks talk about their cats and tv shows - but thats not the case.
I see it as over-zelous move.
If you force everybody out, you'll have 1 empty room and off-topic will again start spilling between one way or the other.
Grass roots?! Get serious he is not trying to overthrow the government here. Just fussing about a room usage vs NAME that is not being 100% ocd certified for the content that flows through.
I certainly don't see the main contributors of the room in question having any complaint about it. They respond to people with questions - right on point, and talk about gamey stuff to fill the gaps.
"There are other rooms, with 80 users currently talking in 52 rooms."
- What do you think maybe we should get each person a room right?

I remember the old days where I used to chat on IRC and there was soo much talk in the channels that it was very hard to follow a conversation.
I hang on the official chat from time to time, and I would say there is not enough volume there to justify a more 'serious' game-dev only chat room. There is currently plenty of room for many conversations to happen at the same time.
I do agree with most of the previously given answers; I just wanted to highlight another reason not to split :)

I'm kind of split on the idea, sometimes I want to get some focus on a problem and its hard when people just want to "socialise".
Having a room that was purely "business only" would enforce a certain attitude towards the conversation, but I do like to use the existing chat to hang out and see what others are up to.
I would propose that perhaps a little more focus on game dev be the priority for the chat but still allow "other" more social chat when people don't have a technical question.
I have been a little put off coming to the chat by certain conversations and having flagged 1 or two comments I didn't feel were appropriate in the past got  met with a lot of ranting from certain members as they didn't agree with the fact that I flagged the message, maybe all the room needs a slightly more ... um ... active moderation group / process that keeps the conversation a little more on topic without actually enforcing it as a rule.

Tip regarding flagging: Flagging is anonymous, you don't need to say anything, I've done the same.

"I would propose that perhaps a little more focus on game dev be the priority..." We changed the room description recently to try to emphasis this, that game development stuff should have priority.

@KevinvanderVelden yeh I flagged someone once in the room, my point here was that for the next month any time someone got flagged I got blamed because the message I had flagged was obviously targetted at me and some unprofessional admin decided to declare to the room that it must have been me.

@JoshPetrie I was thinking this recently when I asked a clearly game dev related question and the room went silent for a bit then someone started posting random drawings and took the conversation in to a completely other direction ... got me thinking ... why am I in there again?

@Wardy Well, conversation isn't obligated to defer to on-topic talk if nobody can participate in the on-topic talk (that is, if nobody knew how to answer your question). I don't think splitting the channel would have any real impact on that (it might make it worse?), that's more of an issue of the chat having a very small population in general. (That said, you should flag or contact a mod/room owner if you see instances of off-topic talk drowning out the on-topic.)

@JoshPetrie flag how though? The regular chat-flag to all 10k+ people on the network would just be invalidated because, well, they don't know the rules on that specific chat room. =[

Yeah, fair point, I guess @-pinging a moderator or room owner is probably the safest option there.


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Relevant part of a question removed, now my answer gets downvoted
For my first answer on this site, I had found a question where only the first part had been answered, and the second ignored. I answered the second part. Now, the question has been edited to remove the second part, and my answer is getting downvoted.
What do I do? Should I delete the now-extraneous answer? Can I recover my negative "game industry" score?

would you consider posting a link to that question? or your answer?

My guess of what happened: You answered a very old question that was off topic. It showed up in the activity log. It has been flagged as off topic. It's been been edited to be brought back more on topic; the most off-topic part has been removed, and unfortunately, it's on that your answered, making the answer off topic. And that resulted in your downvotes.

I would assume that deleting the answer should revert the reputation, but I can't confirm.

Three of the downvotes on your answer occurred before or while I was editing the question itself, so I don't think that the portions of your answer that address the part of the question I removed were really the basis for the those downvotes (which as I write this constitute the majority; your answer has +1 and -4 overall).
I removed the portion of the question asking how one becomes a gameplay programmer because that's off-topic. The entire question itself is fairly borderline in my opinion, but as we do have a precedent for allowing questions about the definition of terminology I didn't close it unilaterally. But since part of it was off-topic and we don't generally want people to ask two different questions in the same post, I removed it.
I think the removal only invalidates two or maybe three of your paragraphs. That said, if you delete the answer it should refund you the reputation (eventually). Although I'm not sure if there is a statute of limitations on that or not, so if you're thinking about it you might want to decide soon.

What @Alexandre suggests is true. The question itself had two problems:

It was two completely separate questions with different answers
The second part was "How do I get started" kind of question which is not welcome in this community.

So @Josh (one of site moderators), truncated the second part fixing both issues. Obviously it rendered your answer unrelated. and hence you got down-votes.
This was what happened, but to answer your question, you can delete your answer, and you'll get your lost points back. But it might take a while, till the site crawler sees that deleted answer and give back your points. So if you don't get your reputation back instantly, just be patient.
Also as a notice, you might sometimes lose points because of answer/question deletion too. The most likely scenario would be you answering a question, and get a few upvotes for that. If for some reason OP decides to remove that question (or the question is migrated to other channels or ...) you end up losing all the reputation you earned for your answer.

OP can't delete their own questions when there are upvoted answers, btw.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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Why is this question undergoing rollback wars?
See here.
This question had several reasonable edits made, which were then reverted entirely by the original poster in favor of transforming the question into something completely different. Attempts to restore the post by several users were met with rollbacks from the original poster. I'd like to know why?
Keep in mind that this is a collaboratively edited website, and by posting here you relinquish certain control over the content of the questions you post. Among them is your right to be the sole authority over what the content contains. Rolling back improvements (or attempted improvements) without comment is rude.
Further, editing a question to completely change it to a new question is never okay.
I'd like to be able to remove the lock on the post as soon as possible.

This user has (since?) posted a bounty on a similar question.

I had flagged because the post gave the impression that the OP was trolling.

@Josh Petrie Now, I would like this question to be deleted since it's poorly written, has no answers, and because there's another similar question with an answer.

@Anonymous The system will delete certain poor-quality questions on its own; we don't generally do this proactively and I don't think this question qualifies as a case where we should. If it is duplicated by another question it should be flagged as a duplicate.

I'm posting because I've kind of been involved in the 'war' you link to.

According to what I know about the practices of SE, is that the questions and answers rule. I noticed the question was changed so much that it 1) completely changed from it's original scope, and 2) was now completely out of scope of the question we like to have here.
Feeling that it was not correct, I felt that the correct thing to do was to roll back the edit and notify the OP via comment of why the rollback was done; it was all done under good faith that the OP of the question was not aware of this kind of 'rule'.
I was about to flag for mod intervention after the OP changed the focus of the question again when you rolled back the edit again.
This is what happened on my end, and from my point of view.

I'm not a moderator here, just a enthusiast who likes [gamedev.se].
I'm aware that I don't have the authority to tell users what to do, but I'm also aware that there are tools offered to the community to help maintain the philosophy of the site. I used the tools offered, up to a point that I felt it was time to leave the situation into a moderator's hands.
I'm well aware that I'm not perfect (and some might find me annoying). Have I done something wrong in this situation? If that's the case, I strive in my life to improve my behaviour, so I'd like feedback.
StackExchange offers a great way to reward users with the Reputation system. Unfortunately, however, this system only applies to Questions and Answers, not to other community maintenance features, so one is kind of lost when trying to know if he does well or not (with some parts of the moderation features).

I don't think you did anything wrong. Editing a question to make it a completely different question is unacceptable, especially if the question already has answers, so rolling that back was valid. The other edits made to the question were fine, I think, I mostly want to know why the original poster keeps trying to roll back the edits.

@JoshPetrie All right, thanks for the comment!

Note that gamedev is visited by over-proportionally many newcomers among the SE forums, and hence, the SE philosophy of a collaboratively edited website that supersedes the original intention of the post, may seem strange at first. Certainly there is a lot of ego involved, where people feel that their game/project is their 'own' and thus the question itself. Possibly a solution could be to limit the number of rollbacks or edits until a certain reputation threshold, e.g. 100 points is reached.

In my own experience when trying to solve an unfamiliar problem and having tutored many, when people do things like this it's because they don't know how to appropriately ask the question that they need answered. Especially given the disparity of the edits, it seems that the user in reference is confused.
I'm not suggesting that either party is wrong here, just making an observation. On one hand, the SE rules for not changing the nature of a question is perfectly valid. On the other hand a poorly worded question that does not address the user's intent is of no value to that user and likely not valuable to anybody else either.
I can see how this is frustrating to many posters who are already struggling to put into words what they inherently don't understand. It's clear that this nature of SE is one of the key causes of double-posted and/or abandoned questions, particularly when the question is locked/put on hold. The idea that SE is not a forum or a tutoring site is fine, but it can also be rather dismissive and discouraging.
In this particular case I would suggest the question be put on hold, request that the user refrain from making further edits for now and offer some avenue of assisting them, either by asking probing questions in the comments or referring/inviting them to the chat rooms.
A mentor system would be a welcome addition to SE for this type of situation, both for orientation with how SE works and to assist with specific problem domains. Regardless of the revision conflicts, it would help to raise the quality of many naive questions and improve user satisfaction.

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I'm done. I miss you
Or is it I miss you "I'm done"...?
Sometimes a new question pops up in the active (or newest) questions list, I flag it because it's off topic and get on with my life.
Sometimes, that question pops up again in the low quality review queue. I'm offered choices: Loos OK, Edit, Recommended Close, Skip.
Off course, I though it should be closed the first time I flagged it so I hit "Recommend Close".
I get this dialog:

Sorry for the wide screenshot.
I can't chose anything from that dialog because I have already made my choice ("Wake up Neo"). Now I'm left with Loos OK, Edit and Skip, none of which feels right.
If I remember correctly, other review queues have the I'm done button available because it detects that you have already done something on the question.
I guess it's a bug and an I'm done button should also be available when you have already flagged the post.

nextime you come across such a review make sure to copy the URL...

Just hit "Looks OK."
The review queue interface tries to focus on only letting you do certain "valid" actions for a given queue type, or something. I think it's pretty annoying, but it is what it is. In the cases where I can't do the thing I want to do, I usually open the question in a new tab and hit "Looks OK" on the queue (interpreting it as "looks okay, none of the four actions you want to let me do right now apply).
Then I do what I wanted to do in the first place in the new tab.


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Is Game-Design tag being misused or was there something that auto applied it?
Being a game designer, I've been looking in the game-design tag to see if there are any questions I can help with.  Most of them seem to have nothing to do with the game-design tag.

Game Design is the creation and balancing of game systems and mechanics. Not for programming questions about "design" of features, engines, etc.

Should the "design" tag encompass architecture AND game design questions?
So that question looks to be the inspiration for creating the game-design tag. I've gone through several questions and edited the tags, trying to add appropriate ones as I can.  But I was curious if there was a mass change as suggested in the meta question, or if it's just really being misused that much?
I'm happy to continue editing tags and looking for true game design questions in the tag list. Just wanted to check in here before sending a large list of tag edits for review.

It's almost certainly being mis-applied, which is somewhat understandable given it's extremely broad nature.
There have been no bulk tag edit operations (these are fairly obvious when they occur, as they tend to flood the active questions page with old questions "last modified by" the user who made the edit), merges, or automatic processes applied to the game-design tag that I'm aware of. It's just badly managed.

Alright, well then I'll continue making tag edits when they seem appropriate. Issue is I will most likely be filtering out, rather than filtering in. But hopefully keeping just examples of good questions for the tag, will lead to more quality questions being posted.


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Suggestion to rename the tag 'delta' to 'delta-time'
I'd like to suggest we rename the tag delta to delta-time.
Other than being a Greek letter, and being associated with the concept of 'triangle' (and a load of other things), the term delta is often used to represent a quantity that varies, for instance, "delta x" could represent the difference in a value on the x axis.
It is used in this context when talking about delta-time in a video game: the time that has passed since last frame.
My point is that simply using the term 'delta' is too vague, and to use 'delta' to tag what is actually 'delta-time' is not precise enough. Even Wikipedia has a page for delta-time!

I'm not sure this tag is even useful. What does it mean to be an "expert in delta time?" As of now there are only three questions using the tag, and all of them are well-covered by higher level tags, I think.
I think we should add the tag to our useless tag list.

Is "expert in [tag label]" the proper way to see what a tag is for on SE? If it's the case, well, you're right, maybe we should stop using it.

It's a useful guideline; tags are for search, and you'd want to make things searchable along axes that users filtering the question list will actually use. That tends to mean tags should focus on potential areas-of-expertise, and tags that don't generally need a fairly compelling domain-specific reason to stick around.


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Why has this question been marked as duplicate?
See here.
I find it very surprising that this question has been marked as duplicate and its user suspended (for one year!), which means that he cannot reply to any of his future answers. This question had already 2 up votes before it's been marked: it would for sure help other users as well as me. It also has one favorite. The user shows clearly what he needs and is explicitly showing the community what he has already tried by providing us with code. Secondly, I don't understand why this question has been marked in the first place. The supposed "duplicate" is not about the same issue encountered by the user. For the people who still didn't compare the two questions: on the linked question, the user is talking about keeping a GameObject "attached" after collision even if it changes scale. On the supposed duplicate, the user is asking for an alternative to his personal code so that he can properly attach objects to each other. It appears that the question has been falsely marked as duplicate. Another person is also expressing his disagreement: see here. Personally, I am also seeking an answer to this question because it would be extremely useful for a project I am working on. I believe that I am speaking for other members of this community as well. We would really appreciate this question to be "unmarked" as duplicate and its user "unsuspended", by our fellow moderators,  because it would benefit us all.
Thank you.

This question was marked as a duplicate because of it's similarity to the original and because both the original and the duplicate question were under the control of the same user through duplicate accounts. Therefor the appropriate course of action would have been to not create two questions but rather amend the original question.
If the community feels that there is a compelling enough difference in the two questions to keep them unique, they can flag it for reopening. Thus far no such flags have been raised, and only one comment to that effect has been posted.
The user posting the duplicate question was suspended for a year not because the question is a duplicate, but because the account is a duplicate and was being used to evade the suspension of the user's primary account.


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Is "actions" a worthwhile tag?
actions has 14 questions as of this writing. A quick survey of the first few suggest that the tag is being used when people are asking about some kind of cause-and-effect system, e.g., I would like to "do this" when "condition occurs."
Is this really a useful tag? Can you really be an "expert" in actions in the general sense?

My position, if it wasn't implied strongly enough by my asking the question already, is no, we shouldn't have this tag and we should add it to the bad tags list.

Totally not useful.


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What topics are actually on/off-topic here?
(Yes, my question comes after reading The official help and I'm still not sure)
I am IT engineer, and usually conceive games like other programs. When I have an issue, I try to ask myself questions from the programmer's viewpoint, and as engineer find the solution. Such topics relate to:

Database engine choosing, model design, optimization, cache, and app layer.
Networking and stuff related to... lag (our worst enemy in online games: the lag; I make exceptions in this point if I think someone has specific experience with a commonly used protocol, service, library, what's the experience in already built-in networking libs in game development environments...).
Software architecture (say classes, utilities, libraries).
Algorithms, complexity, evaluation contexts.

At the end, I come to this website and have less topics to ask about:

Specific game creation tools (say: Clickteam Fusion, YoYo Game Maker Studio, ...).
Stuff regarding game concepts (edit: this one would fit in the first item in the official help, which actually confuses me). Since I am not a game developer, most of the questions I ask could be related to the UX side of the game (although from the IT solution I would have a possible answer, most of the times it implies a differente UX which could not be applied to games, and that's why Game Design is another degree career separate from IT).

But happened to me that when asking about A good MMORPG battle system for android devices, it was marked as off-topic because it is being primarily opinion based.
I may be wrong, but I always had the idea that everything outside the technical issues (which mostly belongs to IT somehow and could fit in StackOverflow, Security, Code Review, even Ask Ubuntu) was about being a craft: techniques, design decisions, trade-ff between several UX topics, ... and most of those topics are opinion-based (e.g. Lineage II handles lag and UX in a totally synchronous way, while Argentum Online in a totally asynchronous way, and Tales of Pirates (Pirate King Online) in an intermediate of both).
So, topics aside specific game development environments (say: Game Maker) and libraries (say: Starling for Flex): What's considered ontopic to ask here that could not be asked in IT-related sites and does not fall in primarily-opinion based category?
More specificly: What is valid to ask, in the scope of the first point in the official help? In particular related to the closed question.

This is a really broad question that's generally what the [help] is supposed to be about answering. It's not clear to me what parts of the help center's explanation of our policies are confusing you in general... could you clarify? Or are you really just trying to ask why that specific question was closed?

Actually, would like to know the second point, and not to fall in it again.

Added more details to the question

The basic formula you should use to see if a question is on or off-topic is primarily one of testing for rejection, not acceptance. This is because the StackExchange network is not a discussion forum, it's a network of sites dedicated to provided concrete and objective answers to questions (with some minor exceptions for some sites devoted to more "softer" domains).
So, after looking at a question and verifying that the question is at least in some form related to game development, you then check the question for criteria that would disqualify it from the site:

is it asking "what should I learn" or "how should I start making games" or "which technology should I use for this problem?"
is it an open-ended discussion that will primarily generate responses that are the thoughts or opinions of the answerers (as opposed to statements that can be backed up by facts)
and so on

That's why the help center presents it's information in the order it does: first it tells you what the subject domain is and then it tells you what disqualifies a question (even if it passes the first set of criteria).
Some amount of subjectivity is allowed, because as you noted in your linked question, game design is not an absolute science. But we're still a site on the StackExchange network and so we still expect questions to have some level of objectivity to them.

As for your specific questions, there are a few key points that render it off-topic in the form it is currently (or was when I closed it):
"I need a tip..." is generally a preface that suggests the question is too broad. It usually means the question is going to end up polling for ideas from the userbase, and poll-type questions (which are asking "what do you think" or otherwise forming a list of items of equal or indeterminate value) are off-topic.
You go on to use qualifications like "good balance," "mobile-device-friendliness," and "pain in the ass," to frame your request. All of those are highly subjective criteria. You further assert that "suggestions" are acceptable (suggestions are generally not objective answers).
All of this makes the question you posed more a subject for discussion and debate -- an interesting discussion and debate, I'm sure, but not a debate that fits well within StackExchange's guidelines (or indeed, the technical workings of its software).
Your question meets the basic initial criteria being on GDSE (it's about games), but it almost meets a lot of the later criteria that subsequently disqualify it. It would be better on a real discussion forum, such as GDNet.

I would like to agree with "Some amount of subjectivity is allowed" by what the content of the link suggests, and my last question in the site, but that's not the case  for the last question I did (even when the relevant parts of the question were technical and not subjective).


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I would like to reopen this question (and ask people to actually read it)
The question is here where I ask about the status of ActionScript 3 and Flex, asking whther there is, somewhere, a maintainable port (compatible). Where and how is that an opinion based question? Even when an answerer had an upvote for interpreting my question like they did (and I edited the question according to, say, got upvotes and thought it would be helpful for future users).
Please: The question body is clear about the issues & questions I have: they are technical and ask for 3rd party compatible ports with current Flex and AIR. There's no place for subjectivity in my question: either a maintained and compatible 3rd party exists port, or it does not exist.
I reedited the question. Could this be opened again?

I picked the close reason based on the title, fwiw, even though the body is (I think) off-topic due to asking for tech recommendations. I wouldn't be opposed to reopening it if the rest of the community agrees though, especially if the title is edited as it doesn't seem to quite match what you ask for anyhow.

The rules suggest:

To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking subjective questions where …

every answer is equally valid: “What’s your favorite ______?”

And here is essentially your question:

Is there a (trusted 3rd party) community making a good port (good stands for compatibility) of those newer versions to Linux-based OSs? Or is Flash/Flex/AS3 actually dying?

IMHO, this is basically asking for a list of one very specific resource, where each answer is equally valid. In the long term, this has not much value for the site as 1) the technology is dying and 2) the community can change and thus make the would be accepted answer irrelevant.
This is why I believe this question should remain closed.


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Can I ask a "what tech to use"-question if I have specific desired features in mind?
The question I'd like to ask (no, did not ask it yet) is regarding searching a technlogy which:

Lets you program with OOP (actual OOP, i.e. code with abstraction, classes, methods, inheritance, information hiding, and stuff defined to be in OOP theory).
Has an assets management system (images, sounds, particles, interacting objects and, perhaps, even level editor).
Is actually maintained (an active community, at least one release each year).
Has Android/iPhone deployment options (included or by plug-ins).

This question has a specific description and has no place for subjectivity (no place for best technologies here). Is somehow this question suitable as Community Wiki?

When you say "regarding searching a technology" do you mean you're looking for recommendations for some technology that fit those provided criteria? That's not (currently) a thing we consider on-topic.

Found it.
Searching a technology is on-topic on Software Recommendations. Making sure the appropriate purpose is stated (in this case: game development), and appropriate constraints are stated as well.

I would say no, because it's still a technology-recommendation question which we don't currently consider on-topic.
I think a better place to ask this question would be the chat or (as the chat is relatively low-population) a site like GDNet, which is a more general discussion forum and not hampered by SE's "Q&A" rules and policies.

Chat is never useful for polls.

Already found that as on-topic on Software Recomendations. But Chat is a /dev/null for such kind of topics.

Several people have come into the chat to ask about technology recommendations over the lifetime of the site, it's seemed to have worked for most of them, but YMMV of course. The Software Recommendations site sounds like an excellent place as well.


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Isn't it a bit odd to have top 4 are closed in a site?
I just wanted to check "which questions have the highest votes" out of curiosity, and found out that top four voted questions are all closed.
I think besides the strict rules of the side, the viewers should be considered more.

Although reasons for closing the questions are clear, I believe that exceptions might take place for such situations.

Votes are not a measure of the on-topicness of a question on SE.
So to that end, it's not that odd at all. Those questions earned a significant number of votes early in the site's lifetime before the policies really settled down to the relatively-steady-state we have now. As time went on it became clear that despite being popular they were the kinds of broad and discussion oriented questions that are better asked elsewhere on the internet (on forums, or maintained on wikis).
You don't really seem to have suggested an alternative option or clear policy on how we might address the issue, other than "based on the viewers" which I presume means you're suggested that we use some arbitrary threshold of score to re-open a question regardless of the close reason? I don't see that as viable at all.


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Are joke answers valid answers?
I handled a not-an-answer flag for this answer this morning.
This is not "not an answer" by the strictest sense of the flag. It does attempt to answer the question, although it does so in a joking fashion. "Not an answer" flags should not be used to report incorrect or poor answers, that's what votes are for.
However, jokes are a different case and as far as I'm aware we've never had a community consensus on what to do about this. StackOverflow has a storied history with "funny" answers, this one in particular. How should we handle them?
In this case I accepted the flag but took no action other than downvoting the actual answer (sorry, Chimeara, I'm a grump).
In general, should we consider joking answers valid answers, or should we delete them in the future? Or what?
For reference, some related topics on MSE:

What do I do when my joke non-answer is accepted?
Why do Stackers consistently vote down humorous responses?
Using comedic styles or Jokes in Answers
Should humorous, clever answers be removed?

I would say yes. What if someone's answer says to use Java as a solution. It might be removed as a Joke.

@AidanMueller to be really meta (on Meta, no less) you should post that as an answer. ;)

There's not one type of "joke answer". There are answers that are (attempts at) humour, and there are answers that address the question. Often the two are disjoint but when they overlap, when answers address the question, they shouldn't be flagged as not an answer, regardless of whether they are jokes.
The answer you mentioned falls squarely in the second category. It boils down to "you can prevent cheating by taking this action to retaliate against cheaters". It may be funny, it may be highly flawed (read the comments), but it answers the question. The famous parse HTML using regex answer also falls into this category; it begins with good reasons why regex and HTML are incompatible.
One example of a type of answer that doesn't answer the question is all the variants of "how many <type of person>s does it take to screw in a lightbulb" joke. All of them rely on creatively interpreting the premise of the question, so that the answer provides no practical advice on how members of <type of person> can effectively screw in lightbulbs, and instead provide humorous commentary on <type of person> itself. These are not answers.
So if the answer addresses the question, regardless of whether it's incorrect or a poor attempt at humour, they shouldn't be flagged as not an answer. They should be downvoted.

Except by the fact that they are always (sometimes highly) upvoted . Besides, I fail to see how the linked answer even remotely tries to, in the most stretched, abstract, rhetorical sense, be minimally useful to that OP or to anyone with the same doubt. It couldn't be clearer that it's only purpose is to be funny trough "addressing the question", not to try to propose any real help. If a post aims on being funny-only, it's not an answer. It's so clear that it's the case that after the movie becomes widely watched, the pseudo-suggestion wouldn't work even hypothetically.

If they're highly-voted, that's fine. The reason what congusbongus posted here is a good policy to adopt, I think, is that it moves the subjective decision of what is "enough humor" from one person and distributes the decision to the community through up and down votes, which is a core part of the SE philosophy. All of the criticism you are leveling at the specific answer cited (and we should really be talking more generally here instead of nitpicking particular answers) makes the answer worthy of a down vote. Not a flag, nor a unilateral delete.

@JoshPetrie I only mentioned the cited answer above, and because congusbongus did and I was addressing his argument. That said, probably everyone would agree with you that the philosophy of SE is distributing decisions and that is awesome. It should be always the 1st choice. When it's working, it's great and no problem exists. The real question here is if community indeed downvotes joke-only answers or upvotes them for being funny, as others have reminded. I think that's what we should look after both in past cases and in future cases to see whether this newly defined policy works. Let's watch

Why jokes should be accepted?
Being part of the SE community made me realize that we all to the very last one of us share at least one thing in common, that thing called Happiness. Can you really imagine yourself in life without sense of humor? Humor leads to happiness which plays big role of our life, it also prevents mental disorders such as depression, stress and anxiety - which obviously most of us developers suffer on everyday basis. Developers with mental disorders like those mentioned earlier can lead to  suicide, murder and most of all, invent the most devilish crime in history with over billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years. Ha.
Why we are here? The StackExchange community is really the place to be serious about things. People get stuck, confused and frustrated heading here to shot out their problem hoping someone overseas have the precious solution. People actually come here and expect to get the most accurate answer relevant to the question. Without playing games.
Why it should be implemented? Life is too short. Let's not take away the joy out of our life, if you wish to make that corny joke into your post, DO IT! That smile that pops on your bearded head could comes up on another, but let's not make circus out of it.
TL;DR Allow the humor but not the joking. As long it's not abused, of course.

My thought on this issue, after thinking about it most of the day, is that we shouldn't do anything with them: they're regular answers that are subjected to the regular voting gauntlet and flag handling rules.
This means that:

we won't delete or censor them (which solves the whole issue of subjectivity regarding humor, and also removes an additional burden on the moderators)
we will reject "not an answer" flags on them unless they apply for other reasons (that is, the joke in the OP is an answer, a unrelated knock-knock joke is not an answer)
we expect that down votes will be used to indicate that the answer is not very good or helpful if indeed that is the case (which solves of the issue of when humor crosses the line of utility)

I would use caution in allowing joke answers.

What makes an answer a joke answer?
How many joke answers are we ready to have?
What if the question OP finds a joke funny enough to accept that joke question? (I'm thinking about if a duplicate question eventually pops up, would we mark the newer duplicate and point to the accepted joke answer?)

Since it's not really possible to have a definite answer to these questions, it will make moderation harder, and may cause undefined behaviour from passing-by users; I'm afraid every question would get jokes as answers, that these answers get up-voted 'cause they're funny' and obfuscate the more serious content, ultimately leading to a joke Q&A site.
I don't mind jokes in the comments, though.

This one joke answer is the only one I can recall seeing recently. I don't think we have a "drive by joke" answer problem. I'm more interested in how strict and fussy we want to be about this. We're already pretty exceedingly strict about things.

Also "what makes a joke" is still relevant; if we're going to say we don't accept jokes, that means somebody has to decide if a thing is a joke and delete it, or edit out just the joke.

As to your third bullet point, on MSE, the consensus seems to be that "if your answer was helpful, it was helpful." So that's something to think about as well I guess.

@JoshPetrie About that last comment, the accepted answer is the opinion of the OP (and 18 users), but it does not seems to be the community's opinion: the highest voted answer has 35 votes and the answerer felt that joke answers are not welcome.

@JoshPetrie Take a look at this hilarious answer: http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/a/112293/72423 Even if it was indeed great fun to read, it does not address the OP question at all.

@MAnd Yes, I've seen it, but I'm not sure what your point is as far as bringing it up?

@JoshPetrie I brought it up in reply to you saying "This one joke answer is the only one I can recall seeing recently".

My vote (if there was such a thing) is for not allowing joke answers. They muddy the waters, and make finding the real answers more work. Stack Exchange is a Q&A site, not a forum.
However: humor in comments is just fine. Humor in answers is even ok with me, provided it's still the answer that's the main content, not the humor.

They should name a subway sandwich after you... because you are full of baloney!

I think that good humour should always be allowed. Some puns and jokes kill no one, it can even make your day. But, joke only answers, that helps in nothing the question, should meet the banhammer.
The first example you gave even got locked because "it is not considered a good, on-topic question for this site". I think it's good, helps avoid newbies earning rep only trough jokes and bloating the site with unuseful answers.
And what about the "if your answer was helpful, it was helpful.", well, that's actually a few years ago, I don't think it's valid anymore.

"that's actually a few years ago, I don't think it's valid anymore." It's valid until there's a newer discussion saying otherwise, which I could not find.

Answers with jokes VS. joke-answers
I think we should start by differentiating the following. An answer that tries to address a question but has an incidental joke within it is very different from an answer that is only a joke - for the only sake of being funny.
The first case should be allowed because of the obvious reason that the primary function of an answer is trying to answer, no matter if it uses an academic, an informal or a funny tone. However, the second case should not be allowed simply because, well, if it's not even trying to answer, then it's not an answer (an example of a fairly hilarious answer like that is the following: How can I create borders in an open-world game that don't feel artificial?).
It's subjective. But just as always
Of course, in practice the boundary that separates answers with jokes from joke-answers can become less clear. However, it is just as subjective as the similar decisions that are enacted when questions are flagged as "too broad" or when someone thinks a given answer looks more like a comment and then flags it as "it's not an answer". When it happens, a decision has to be made on whether in fact the answer was just a comment (i.e. related to the original question, but not trying to answer it). I don't see why that is so different from the case where jokes were what motivated the flagging.
Sure, one person deciding that is always a hard call. There is where the voting system for deleting answers would theoretically work the best, since multiple people summing up their interpretations about a given answer being or not an answer (due to whatever the reason) is always the ideal due to the highly subjective nature of the decision. However, the problem is two-folded.
In practice, moderators are the only barrier against joke-answers
As @JoshPetrie has brought to my attention in the comments (I admitedly forgot that), only answers scored -1 or less can be voted for deletion. Considering that funny answers tend to be often upvoted, that alone puts them more often than not, outside the helm of possibly being voted for deletion.
If that barrier was not enough, we have to also recall that only users with at least 20K can vote for deletion. It means that in the rare event of a joke answer to have negative scores for long enough to be voted for deletion, even then, considering that gamedev.stackexchange currently has only 10 members with such rep (two of them are the moderators) and not all are necessarily active in reviewing tasks, that additional barrier to delete joke answers makes it virtually impossible that any joke answers ever get deleted.
This would open up a risky possibility. Therefore, it seems that in the vast majority of the cases, the moderators themselves are the only option for not letting a joke answer endure. In such a case, I sustain that yes, the moderators should have to make such decision when joke answers get flagged.
TL;DR
And to sum up, as I argued above, the minimum criteria for it should be the same used in all other cases of "not an answer" flagging. I.e. deciding whether the answer really tries to usefully answer the original question, despite of the joke it carries.

As far as I can tell, you are effectively arguing the position of "do nothing, let votes decide," right? Because if you're arguing for the position of "disallow" based on some criteria, I'd point out that I'd keep that open-world answer around because I do think it answers the question just fine, even if it is over-the-top. Which is why I think more-and-more than putting any kind of policy in place that requires moderators to think about deleting a question isn't worth the effort.

@JoshPetrie Well, that's just a regular case of "is it even an answer" decision - just motivated by a rarer event. As in any other case, if moderators happen to understand that an answer clearly is not an answer, (for whatever reason) it's plain normal and fine that they take action upon it. If they feel the contrary or are not certain, give the answer the benefit of the doubt and let votes decide.

@JoshPetrie For the records, as we are discussing precisely how to behave in each case, I would vote to close/delete the linked open-world answer in a second. There is no effort at all there to provide an useful, fine answer. It's more like making a joke to show the OP that his question could have multiple answers - what, if that was the case, should have been a comment to the question and/or a flagging.

FWIW, you can't vote to "close" an answer, only to delete (and only when it's at -1 or lower).

@JoshPetrie Yap, I knew it's a delete-only, I just got caught in the habit of using the word "close". But indeed I hadn't realized that deleting answers could only be voted for when they have a negative score and, as it seems, only by users with at least 20k rep. In that case, considering that funny answers usually get upvoted (so they are frequently going to be non-negative) and considering that the gamedev.stackexchange has only 10 members with such a rep (2 of which are the moderators), I think it changes things. I will edit my answer here accordingly

I post this as a second answer because it's not in the same track as my other one (and the other one had already a vote).
After taking a look around, and thinking a bit more about it:
Moderating joke answers by removing them when they occur seems to be a hard and ultimately not really important thing to do.
From the links you posted and some more research, the consensus seems to be that joke answers are bad (mkaayyy?), but the common reaction to it is to not care much: the (down)votes will talk. The community seems to be aware enough that joke answers are not that good for the site. However humour in real answers or joke in comments are welcome.
To be honest, I don't think it's an issue (yet). As you said in your OP, you did not deleted because it was a legitimate answer to the question, a legitimate solution to the issue at hand. It might not have been a good one, but it did not deserve a flag. The results: it's way down in the answers list.
It still worries me that these joke answers could be accepted because in these case, there is nothing much to do about it, but then we'll have to rely on the readers' common sense to realize this and keep on reading to the second answer, which should get more upvotes. (This is the same situation than when an accepted answer suddenly becomes irrelevant because of a fix in an API or something.)
In conclusion
From a moderation point of view, we should consider joke answers as valid: there is no need (yet) to handle joke answers in any particular way.


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Community Promotion Ads - 2016
It's 2016 now, and we've made some changes to the sidebar size. As such, we can now restart the Community Promotion Ads for 2016!
Keep in mind, we have updated some of the guidelines compared to previously - the changes are marked in bold in the Image Requirements section.
What are Community Promotion Ads?
Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.
Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?
This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:

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

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

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

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

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

Image requirements

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

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

This is a demonstration post to indicate how this should look when an ad is posted, now with 80px more width! It also doubles as your twitter ad, but it's up to you if you wish to promote it by voting.

Did you try to see if some questions that were asked here for the tags [tag:maya] and [tag:3dsmax] would be a good fit?

@Alexandre I'm not sure what you mean by a good fit. As in for posting example questions perhaps?

Yes! You seemed to need some example questions the other day; typically, the questions with these tags are those that we receive and that we'd probably send your way when (I hope) your site gets in beta.

For more information about this advert, please see this Retrocomputing Meta post.

Proposed Q&A site for those interested in maps and map-making, historical or contemporary, real or fictional.  I believe this would be a good fit for the GameDev community for resources on maps and map-making ideas and methods.


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How do I find my past posts?
Where is the advanced search on this site, or where can I look up my questions?
Having asked this question I realize I might never see it again!

Click on your image at top-right corner

Click on your icon in the top-right corner of the page.
Bellow the site banner, there will be three items: Profile, Activity, Settings; click on Activity.
Below the summary boxes, there will be an additional menu; click on questions.
Explore the other menus to see a lot of information.

In theory, you could look up all of your stack history from there.

You may also find the how do I search page useful. There are various search axes you can use to narrow down searches, for example searching for user:me xna will find all posts by you including "XNA."


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Is this the place for game community engagement questions?
The question I have is not regarding game development nor design but gamers community / engagement. Topics would involve:

Understanding a regional gamers community (In my case, I would like to know about well-known/proven* techniques to research / scrap data about the gaming trends in a specific region).
Designing engagement mechanisms.
Integrating them in the game.

Specially the first point.
Are those topics allowed here?
(* there's no place for favorites here, but recognized in academic world / biography)

Can you provide an example of the specific question you want to ask? Your general bullet points can be addressed, but only in similar generalities, so if you're concerned about a specific question you should describe it.

"Community engagement" as a general topic is definitely appropriate here I think. However, as the domain tends towards subjective discussions I do think that some questions would end up being off-topic for various other reasons.
Questions about designing engagement mechanisms and integrating them into the game, provided they are suitably game-specific, seem like they have potential to be okay, as long as they don't lead into broad opinion-based discussions.
Questions about demographics in a particular region I'm less confident about, as that data is likely very time-sensitive. Questions about techniques on how to accomplish research into demographics yourself don't seem on-topic at all.
However, the above is just a general idea. As always, a specific question may or may not be on-topic on its own merits, regardless of the generalities in play, so it can't hurt to ask the question. The worst that can happen is that it would get put on hold.

In my particular case, I would like to know what already-used-and-documented/exposed techniques were used in the past by successful game developers to reach the community by their first time.

i.e. If I have a product, I will know how to get feedback. But if I have no product yet, I would like to know how to undestand them the first time.

I think that specific sort of question would be off-topic currently ("successful" is subjective, it's asking for a list, and that information is unlikely to be available to the general public anyway -- why share your success secrets?). However, perhaps the discussion on this question will change that.

@LuisMasuelli I'd agree with Josh Petrie - after seeing a few questions of the form "What is a proven/standard way to accomplish X" in games, where X is anything fuzzier than "implement this specific common tech feature," the answer tends to be "games are so diverse, complicated, and rapidly changing that we don't have one single standard or academic demonstration of success" - you'll attract a few answers about someone's personal go-to method/example, but achieving any objective consensus is unlikely. You may do better searching postmortems on the GDC Vault and the like


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How should we handle Minecraft/Bukkit questions?
Every now and again a Bukkit question pops up.
In my opinion, these are off topic on this site.
This is supposed to be Game Development and not Bukkit plugin development for Minecraft, or is it?
How should questions like this be treated?

Can you provide arguments as to why they are off-topic? I'd be especially interested in how you'd contrast Bukkit questions to modding questions.

@JoshPetrie, well, actually, I didn't/don't think that game modding in general is on topic, since significantly less thought and effort has to be put into making a plugin or mod (talking from Minecraft experience only). These questions are also asking to learn about a specific game that already exists and not for game development in general.

We've already established that modding is on-topic, however, which means the onus is on you to provide compelling enough arguments to convince the rest of the community that we should change the policy (if that is what you're going for).

Minecraft is a game.
Modding a game is developing new experiences for the users of the game.
Modding is thus game development.
Game development is the core of GameDev.se.
We can conclude that Minecraft/Bukkit modding, and game modding in general, has its place here.

A thing to keep in mind: even if there is not a lot of users that are able to answer questions about game mods (or any very specific domain question), it does not mean that the questions must be considered off topic.

If I'm not able to help them, I tend to direct them towards the Forge (or Bukkit) forums, as they are more likely to get an answer there than here (and often they didn't know the resource existed).

Telling them that these resources exist in the comments is fine, but we don't want to prevent them from asking here :)

That's what I mean. The last time I made the comment (likely over on SO and over a month ago) my comment on the question was along the lines of, "You may also want to try the Forge forums, there are more people there that will be better able to answer your question."  I happen to frequent said forum and knew that the question being asked absolutely would get answered (as I could think of two users who would know the answer), but I lacked the requisite knowledge myself.

As far as I'm aware, Bukkit plugin development is functionally equivalent to developing mods for Minecraft.
We've had two threads already (originally here, and a re-hash here) that led us to the conclusion that mods are on-topic for Game Development.
Consequently, I think Bukkit questions are (generally) on-topic here.

You beat me by 45 seconds!


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Would this question be on-topic here?
We had a new user ask an interesting question over on Arqade: Differences between real-life motorcycle racing and that of video games like MotoGP, Ride, and the like
It's probably off-topic for us because it's focused on development, and it might be too broad for SE in general.
I suggested that perhaps this SE might be interested in tackling it. They don't have enough rep to ask questions on your Meta, so I'm doing them a favor and asking for them.
Would it be on-topic here, and could you give them any advice on molding it into something answerable?
Thanks a lot.

No, in the question's current form it's not on-topic here.

The answer to "what are the  simplifications used in motorcycle road racing video game physics" is
"it depends (on the game)," which is generally too broad, and even if
a specific game were in mind, it'd be off-topic because we don't
answer questions about how specific games implemented specific
features.
The answer to "are these different from game to game" is
"yes," and yes-or-no questions are generally frowned upon as they are
implicitly too broad (as the implicit follow up is "how" and the answer to that is "it depends").
The  answer to the third bullet point is... you guessed it... "it
depends." It's basically the same as the first bullet point.

A question about modelling the physics of a motorcycle that arose from a problem related to some specific (perhaps ultra-realistic) attempt at simulating those physics would probably be on topic. That is, "I am simulating a motorcycle this way, and it always falls over on corners I think it should be able to take" or something like that.
But I'm not sure that's really at all related to what the OP wants to have answered. I'd suggest they ask off SE, on a place like GDNet.

Yeah, that's what I figured. Thanks.


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How does the site (or how should it) handle the "little-effort" or "no-effort" questions?
Out of curiosity, what currently is and what should be specific policy of gamedev.stackexchange to handle the "little-effort" or "no-effort-at-all" types of questions?
Today, what motivated me was the asking for closure in this question: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/116103/unity-app-accessing-gps-on-a-mobile-phone It is not the first time I see that, however, and it always raises doubts in my heart.
So, I did some research and didn't find specific conclusions on the subject in the past meta discussions, although a few months ago the following question basically touched the subject: How to handle trivial questions?
There, Josh Petrie, one the current moderators, said that "Trivial questions aren't off-topic or banned or any of that, simply by virtue of being trivial". I tend to agree. I  tend to think that "low-effort" or "zero-effort" questions should not be closed down, but just down-voted. However, I would like us to have a clearer definition on that.
Specially, because the issue at hand seems to be quite controversial in many of the sister sites (and I don't think it's different in our case). Different positions can be found in discussions on the subject that were already held in sister sites. Se for instance the debates on Meta.Stackexchange and Meta.Stackoverflow: How to best handle no effort questions? and Do we need a close reason for zero-effort questions?. For a seemengly harsher position, see the answer for that in the Meta.Physics: Closing “Insufficient Effort” questions.

Keep in mind that we can't add an actual close reason for "zero research effort." I've seen a few comments mentioning that, and that's not really something that would be practical at this point. Discussing whether "zero research effort" questions should be closed is one thing, but we can't add any more formal close reasons to the site's user interface.

@JoshPetrie Fully agreed. And don't get me wrong: as I stated in the question above, my position is for just down-voting questions - not closing them. Therefore, I would not advocate for having a specified close-reason for "zero research effort". If nothing else, I think that would open the gates for voting all sorts of beginner questions - which would certainly harm more than help the site

"This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear, or not useful."
That's what the downvote tooltip says, and I say that's just fine for dealing with these. People don't like getting 5 downvotes; it makes them feel bad. So they'll either fix the question and learn how to do it right, or leave the site. Either way seems ok with me.

As it's been stated here or in one of the links you posted, donwvotes should encourage bad questions posters to either delete or modify the question.
These questions don't technically fit in any 'close' categories, but as DMGregory suggested in this situation, a close vote with a 'custom' reason could take care of it. At this point, it's in the hands of the community. If the community feels that the reason given is valid, I believe that it's fair, up to that point. If the question gets closed, then edited (and improved enough), the community will get the chance to re-open it.
At the moment, I don't think there is enough of this kind of question on this stack to overly formalize what should be done with that, but off course, as a community it's good to ask ourselves this kind of question once in a while :)

Well, I think that it's quite regular to find low-effort types of questions, but I agree with you that it might be premature to formalize a solution to it. Sure thing, a custom reasoning for the closure-flagging can work great, that's what I myself thought about that. I primarily ask this meta question, though, exactly because when deciding how to vote on that flag, I thought I lacked some discussed reference on which we could resource to.

@MAnd Your reasoning is reasonable :) I must admit it's very rare that a question gets closed because 5 non-mod voted to close it, so it's not a 'drastic' approach. And the site is roughly what the community chooses it to be, so if we end up adding a close for "not enough research", good! But I don't think we need this yet :)

@AlexandreVaillancourt This makes sense to me. I'll keep that in mind on future questions. For now I'll leave my vote where it is and see what happens.

You have good points. I like the idea of down-votes remaining as the primary defense against low-effort or zero-effort questions and then if someone thinks a question got to the point of having to be even closed because of that, then the person can just customize the close-flag like DMGregory correctly did. My only issue with that is whether users would have it clear enough from the beginning, I mean per the rules of the site and not only expected common good sense, that their low-effort questions could end up like that. What do you think?

@MAnd To fully grasp how a stackexchange site works, you either live it and make mistakes, or read a lot. The explanation of why a question would be down voted a lot can be seen on the mouse-over on the down-arrow button, and can be understood at least from here and here. This should take care of the "you should know" part. After this, I would expect the common sense to take over, and if they're interested, they'll look around or ask on meta if they need more help.

@AlexandreVaillancourt Oh yes, but notice the important detail: you talk about the explanation of why a question would be voted down. With that I agree from the go. I am more concerned about the official explanations for why your question might be closed for new answers and eventually deleted. That's a different thing. But still, yes, there is the general line "Have you thoroughly searched for an answer before asking your question? Sharing your research helps everyone", which although not saying your question risks being closed, still is a good warning for "do your research, please".

@MAnd Oh hmm. Well if it gets to that point, I would believe the official explanation will be the 'custom' vote close message, which, in theory, will have been well written enough, because more than one person will have selected it as a close reason.

As I've stated before, trivial questions aren't off-topic simply by virtue of being trivial. But that's different from questions that show absolutely zero research effort (or rather, the two concepts are orthogonal).
I'm not sure it's possible to set a broad policy on this, as I think the issue will come down to the kinds of analysis of the question that's best done on a case-by-case basis. For example, in the case of the GPS question, there's two ways we could interpret the question as written:

"How do I access the GPS in Unity?"

This form of the question is asking us to plug "access GPS unity" into Google or whatever on behalf of the OP. I think that's worthy of downvotes on the question, personally, but I don't think closing it because of "lack of research effort" is the right interpretation. Rather, look at question differently:

"I want to accomplish  in Unity?"

This is almost certainly what the asker really wants, and in any event is a much better question for posterity than the original. Does this look familiar? It should; what we're looking at here is an XY problem and we have a solution for dealing with the XY problem already: vote to close as unclear, and ask for clarification about what is really trying to get accomplished so we can provide a better, higher level response that's better suited to our unique perspectives as game developers.

Makes sense. However, think of it by the following angle. If a question happens to be also unclear in what it is asking, then well, we don't have a problem: it's unclear in what it is asking. If a question has any other flaws already described as flag-cases, for instance if it's a duplicate, then ok too: it's just about flagging it accordingly. However, that does not tell anything about the issue at hand of whether questions should be flagged/closed down due to having zero research effort per se.

In case it's not clear, my position here is that "zero research effort" isn't something we should say, unilaterally, must be closed. They can be (that is there's nothing wrong with voting to close them as such), but it would be better to first consider ways in which the question can be improved rather than just dismissing it.

That's what I thought when citing your answer to the other meta in my question. And I tend to fully agree.

I mistakenly thought these were already officially off-topic, hence my (potentially misplaced) vote on the question MAnd links.
On one hand I think there is value in discouraging using StackExchange as a Google proxy. We expect users to search this site for existing questions before asking and close duplicates, so it doesn't seem unduly onerous to ask them to at least skim a Google search.
As an absurd example, if someone systematically worked their way through the Unity API, asking "what does the gameObject.AddComponent method do?" "What about gameObject.BroadcastMessage?" - technically each of those is a question about game development with a concise correct answer, so although trivial they could be on-topic. But it seems silly for StackExchange to mirror the contents of an existing official API documentation. (Which will generally/hopefully be kept up to date better than SE answers)
Although the scale of that example is absurd, I think "How do I use GPS location in Unity" is this kind of question that amounts to duplicating the manual - searching the API for "gps" or "location" both turn up a useful result at the top of the list.
(Then again, making "how do I get started/which technology" questions off-topic hasn't exactly stemmed the flow of those questions either. Users who don't do their own research before posting don't seem to read the tour either, so maybe any benefit of such a deterrent is moot. ;) )
The downside to considering these no-effort questions off topic is that it might pose a barrier to users who have difficulty with even these basic searches - say someone who speaks very little English, or because they're just getting started doesn't know enough of the gamedev jargon to locate the answers they're looking for.
I still feel like that's solvable though, by the user following the usual advice of "describe what you've tried so far" to show they've tried searching and need specialized help understanding.
So, for those reasons I'd lean toward closing questions that can be answered by the top hits on the product's own documentation, as in this particular case.

I think you have some valid arguments there. Although I'm inclined toward just downvoting those questions, I think it's important to somehow point that it was of little effort. When I found the answer at the Meta.Physics (the one I linked to), I thought that the guy was not unreasonable in claiming that yes, there is an use for closing zero-effort questions. So, I thought we should discuss it a bit more on how to proceed

Much appreciated, @MAnd - I think you're right that it's worth discussing, and I'm perfectly happy to accept the consensus if it's "keep open." :) As an aside, I really appreciate how much research you put into this - reading the related discussions on the other SEs you linked has been fascinating, and they cover a lot of interesting points that weren't immediately obvious to me.

I think your vote to close that GPS question was fine.

@DMGregory Thanks for taking the time to read those. I myself enjoyed it quite a bit. In fact, I decided to post this on meta because when I searched after commenting to you at the GPS question, I started to question my own position on the subject and then felt it ws worthy of some reading/talking :) I am also fine with closing them down if that happens to be the consensus. There are good arguments for that, no doubt

@JoshPetrie the votes to close the question as being unclear were perfect. The issue was raised in regard to the original close-vote with the custom reasoning that the question should be closed because of not showing research effort. Not that this one was not fine, of course. Just to clarify.


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Why did my question get edited?
Why was my question (now deleted) edited?

Meta is the place to ask these sorts of questions, not the main site. Furthermore, it is very possible to ask the question you have without insulting other users; such behavior is not tolerated. I've removed the offending parts of your question as well as the gibberish.

The original title of your question was "Pixel formats are hard! Getting the color of a pixel in SDL2." The title was edited to remove the "pixel formats are hard" prefix, presumably because the editor (correctly) considered it noise.
Titles are a key factor in the searching of questions and are thus better when they are concise and accurately describe the problem at hand.
The other edits to your question consisted of minor body edits to similarly focus the question on the problem of needing to access pixel values in SDL.
Remember that on StackExchange, you don't "own" the content of your posts in the sense of having exclusive control over them; this is a collaborative site where anyone with sufficient reputation can edit your posts to improve them, correct minor issues, or otherwise align them with the goals and policies of the site.
The correct place to raise questions about this when you are unsure about it is here, on meta. You shouldn't do it on the main site, and you shouldn't do it by insulting other users and filling your post with unrelated poetry. Please remember that.
The help center has more information.


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Why the question I did answer with 2 vote ups deleted?
Why the question I did answer (accepted answer) with 2 vote ups deleted? Related to the trajectory path. Isn't this against humanity? :D

You should try to spot that faulty user and not answer his questions. This encourages him to keep on posting.

It was deleted in conjunction with the suspension of an account engaged in serious misconduct throughout the site, misconduct that includes (among other things) abusing the good nature of our legitimate users.

ohh.. so in short.. I am in loss.. after all :(

Maybe; when I get to a real computer instead of my phone I'll untangle some of it.

I undeleted the question.

thanks bro.....


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How should we handle users who never bother to click on answer tick?
Some people here in community must exist who never bother to accept answer as answer. How should moderator deal with them? They always gets an answer and disappear. Now more response, never mark answer as answer, but ask next question instead. Moderator should consider these type of users. I think?

What is the issue? Why is it so important for you that OPs accept/upvote answers?

Buddy, I Saw this in stackoverflow, so I asked it here.. Nothing important it this

Nobody can mark a question as answered except the asker, not even moderators, and that is by design.
The checkmark means, from the perspective of the asker, "this answer solved my problem or helped me solve my problem." Nobody but the asker can make that judgement. Consequently we do not (and will not) attempt to moderate, scold, encourage, cajole, badger or coerce users into marking questions as answered. It's entirely up to them.
There's nothing bad or incorrect about never accepting an answer on a question.

But he told me in his next question that previous answer was useful and he forgot to say thanks.. So he thanked me on very next question for the previous answer, but still he didn't mark that

So? That's not a "problem," in the sense that that's not something that can be moderated. What are you proposing we do in these cases?

At least remind him to do the formalities so next time at least people don't leave your question or don't answer you quickly because of your past reputation

That's not going to happen; it's very possible and correct that no answer helps an asker and thus none should be checked. It's also possible the user just never comes back (in which case the reminder is a waste). You (or any individual) can suggest to a user that they might consider accepting an answer, but that's not going to be a site policy, and furthermore abusing it (that is, badgering somebody too often to choose an answer) is not allowed.

Actually I saw this at stackoverflow. What can I say...

Welcome to the Internet.
Internet is full of people

that come and go
that come and stay
that are intelligent
that are stupid
that can read rules and guidelines
that bother to read rules and guidelines and don't bother abiding by them
that don't care about the rules and guidelines
that enjoy using a service by the rules and guidelines
that act like [boy|girl]-scouts
that act like bullies

Stack Exchange is on the Internet, and, by default, there is all sorts of people using the site.
Stack Exchange suggests to mark the answer as accepted. There is a reward for the OP and for the answer author. You'll find people that will enjoy doing it, and you will find some who don't know or don't care.
And it's ok.
At the end of the day, it's only 15 reputation points.

Currently going worse than that

@HamzaHasan I'm not sure I understand what you mean here..?

It was about 15 reputation per day :D

Fifteen reputation is trivial; even if reputation gain is your primary motivator for answering (and I find that unfortunate, if true), a decent answer will generate far more reputation over time from votes than it will from acceptance.

Agreed. And m not here for that. Don't be like that for me :D

I just saw a question get updated by Community where the asker answered their own question and didn't mark it as accepted.  Given that the user only has 11 rep, I doubt they'll ever return.  It disappoints me that this question will forever rise to the top as a result.


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Rename tag [gameplay3d] to [gameplay3d-engine]
I have created the tag gameplay3d yesterday, but I realized shortly after that I should have named it gameplay3d-engine to reflect a bit more what it is and improve users who search stuff based on the "engine" keyword.
Is there a way to re-name it?

I can merge it sometime today.

I've renamed the tag as requested.


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All these Crossy Road questions
Ok, I gotta ask.  There've been more than a few Crossy Road related questions recently (with some others I probably can't see because they'd have been deleted).
I happened to notice that that third one (posted a few minutes prior to this meta question) was posted by a user who has no other posts anywhere, yet has already been temp-banned for rules violations.  So I looked at the three other Crossy Road questions I could find, which were also posted by 1-rep users (two of which are also temp-banned).
Is this actually one (really persistent) person?

It's a future millionaire, creating a backstory about how he had to overcome numerous challenges in creating his perfect flappy bird clone that made him rich. Or it's a person creating multiple accounts to avoid their initial suspension from asking off-topic questions. Our site is just that good, that people would rather go through all the work of creating multiple accounts, rather than ask somewhere else.

@Byte56 I like the future millionaire idea. ;D

Josh has most of the actual details, I've been mostly out of the loop on this one.

The accounts in question are all suspended for serious breaches of terms of service that aren't directly related to the public content they have individually posted.

I figured as much, I was curious if they were controlled by the same human being. Just sheer curiosity due to the prevalence of questions regarding the same publish game title.  e.g. I know that getting around a ban is itself a bannable offense, but it requires knowing that the user accounts are related.  Should I flag future questions for this reason?

If you have reason to suspect a user's up to no good, whether related to this scenario or others, then yes, you can flag posts for moderator attention, it will certainly help.


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Bug while reviewing the queue
I was processing the first post review queue this morning and this question poped up. (A link to the first-post page.)
So reading the question I felt it should be closed for a reason, and clicked on the close button, only to realize that I could not because I had already flagged it a while ago.
There are a couple of issues here:

This seems to be the first post of a user, but I don't get why it pops now in the review queue (6 days later).
The close vote count did not show up. Maybe this is normal because the vote has been deemed irrelevant and deleted.
Since I could not vote to close the question, the only option let to me was to skip or No action needed, and since I already voted, I would have expected I'm done would also be available.

Here is a screenshot of what I was seeing:


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Is the 'languages' tag useful?
languages has 40 questions as of this writing. Is this tag useful?

Looking over the questions, I'd argue that it's not useful within the context of this site. Questions about "languages" here, based on the 40 question sample pool we have today, are either:

questions about human or natural languages, which is not really specific to game develop and for which there would be better, more specific tags anyway (mainly, localization, possibly something like natural-language-parsing in the future, et cetera).
questions related to picking a language, which is off-topic.
questions related to functionality or capability of languages, which is off-topic.
questions related to the theoretical computer science aspects of programming languages, which are off-topic.

I think this tag is bad and should be removed.


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Is the 'pre-processing' tag useful?
pre-processing has a single question of this writing. Is this tag useful?

I've removed all occurrences of this tag.

I don't think this is a useful tag at all. Preprocessing is a type of solution, not a specific problem or solution per se. One is not an expert in "preprocessing things" in general, one is an expert at some particular task done with or during pre-processing, and in those cases the more specific tag related to that task should be used.
I think we should blacklist this tag.


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Semi-alarming reputation statistic
This morning, I noticed that I'm listed as "top 4%" for this month despite being inactive/offline for months and, just this week and last, posting some answers to a handful of questions.
Has this site been experiencing a consistent drop in its'... momentum? user-base? activity? I don't know what the most telling indicator actually is. I look around and see activity happening, but... top 4%?

This is probably not as alarming as you think.
The "top 4% this month" is reference to your position in the ranking of users who have gained reputation this month. That's somewhat under 700 users this month (and that 4% range covers almost 30 users).
Also, the majority of users exist and operate well below the thresholds the reputation leagues bother to count; for example the statistics ignore the 56,000+ users who have under 200 reputation. Of the users who gained reputation this month, several have gained less than 200 this month (in fact only about 15 have gained above 200), which means that all 56,000 of those untracked users could have gained 198 reputation and still not be counted in the stats.
Essentially, the working set of leaderboard-eligible users is massively small compared to the set of all users participating on the site.
Further, you don't actually have to be actively logged into the site at all to earn reputation, since people can vote on old questions and answers. Glancing through your recent reputation gains, some of them come from positive votes on questions or answers that are almost a year old.
As to your question about the site momentum... voting recently is actually currently higher than average over the last year. As least in terms of the 7-day average of positive votes over the last 365; we had a big spike around November to December, which is normal, and we're currently on a downswing back to the levels that we're usually at for the middle portion of the year. I don't think there's anything worrying about this at all, it aligns with most expectations for traffic and activity spikes (that is, it gets higher around the holidays when people are on vacation, etc).

The first 6 pages of users increased their activity this month. The next 3 pages are less-active. The last 7 pages are, presumably, new users who are not yet ranked. So, comparing approximately 6 pages to 3 pages indicates that the site is actually being used more? And, when the last 7 pages become ranked next month, its likely to be about 50/50(ish), not including the 7 new pages of new people?

@Jon Which "six pages" are you looking at? The six pages of the monthly rep leagues? The six pages of one of the "users" views?

Was just browsing http://stackexchange.com/leagues/13/month/gamedev/2016-02-01?sort=rankchange&page=9 scanning for when + changed to - and when - changed to unranked. Multiplying by 30 per page = approx 180 users increased their use, 90 decreased their use, and 210 are new

@Jon The last seven page of users there are ranked, because their total reputation is over 200. Users with a total reputation of less than 200, regardless of their reputation gains for the month, don't show up at all. The users who were "not previously ranked" were those who crossed the 200 threshold during the month. You may want to look here instead; although this does not order users by total rep, it does show you that a huge majority of the site userbase earns a relatively small amount of rep per month.

I gotcha; my view doesn't include, among others, the 10000000000000 pages of "came, asked duplicate, got closed, and never came back" people. Thank you; never saw that other rep page either. I'd always assumed a list like that would have Byte on top.


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Weird stuff in "Top Questions"
I've learned to check first because this happens frequently. This is the first question listed under active.
"modified 16 mins ago Community" -
Generate random position within object
The question, however, appears to have been edited the day after posting (2015), answered "Oct 29 '15 at 9:12" and has not been modified since.
"Active: Today" - really? There are only 4 dates visible and they're all from 2015.
What exactly is @Community up to??

This is the expected, correct behavior.
One of the roles of the Community user (which is not a real person) is to periodically bump old questions that are considered "unanswered" so that they get visibility.
It does this without actually editing the question in any material fashion. The bump doesn't even show in the question's timeline. I'm not sure, not being an SE developer, but I'm pretty sure it just writes a new timestamp into the question's "last updated" column in the database, or something similar.
Note that "unanswered" is defined in this context as "having no upvoted or accepted answers."

I suspected as much and accept. Is there absolutely no reason to indicate that it was bumped? Also, is there an actual expectation that the user simply forgot (for two years) to accept any of the listed answers? After two years (probably more like 2 months), isn't it pretty likely that they've either found an answer elsewhere and/or abandoned their project but forgot to delete the question? If I spend an hour making a diagrammed answer, will Community also evaluate and accept my answer for them? (As un-sarcastically as possible.. :D)

"Modified by Community" is the indication it was bumped; that message generally won't appear in any other circumstance. A user is not under any obligation to "accept" an answer. Maybe they forgot about the question, or maybe none of the answers actually solved their problems. "Acceptance" shouldn't be the end goal of an answer: correctness and quality should. And other users can vote on the correctness and quality of your answer, it doesn't require the OP. As soon as a question gets an answer and that answer gets an upvote -- from anybody -- it's considered "answered" for this algorithm.

"having no upvoted or.." - I missed this, on first read, as being an attempt to address the "forgot about my question" people. Gotcha; thanks again.