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In what universe is this question not constructive?
I posted this question in 2010:
What is a good starting platform for a teenage game programmer?
Since then, it's had 22 up-votes, its answers have had at least 86 up-votes, and 5 people have marked it as a favourite question. It's had a wide variety of answers, which have been well informed, well presented, and incredibly useful to me, and, I would suggest, other people as well. A variety of potential introductory game development platforms, have been suggested, including one the day before it was closed that alerted me to Greenfoot - an Oracle-backed, Java-based platform that I hadn't heard of before, but looks ideal.
A few days ago it was closed as "not constructive", as far as I can tell by the unilateral decision of one moderator, rather than because anybody had voted to close it. Apparently my only appeal (according to the moderator who closed it) is to post here "if I really want to".
Well, I do want to. How can this question be viewed as "not constructive"? It does involve facts, references, and specific expertise. It hasn't elicited debate, argument or extended discussion, and it's not a poll. Is the gamedev board really better off with this question closed?

Related kind of question on a different site http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/1624/are-im-looking-for-x-questions-on-topic

I agree with the decision to close.
The biggest problem with the question, from my perspective, is that it is a "best" question. It is a question that has no answer that you objectively measure as being the correct one and is quite open-ended (look at the variety of responses), and is therefore unsuitable for the site. It's also a question facilitating a set of answers that create a "list of" options, which means the question should be a community question if it allowed to live at all. Making a question a CW isn't really a desirable option, as they don't serve the focus of the site. They're basically a last-ditch way for a "bad" question to hang on a little bit longer.
Due to the combination of both factors, I don't see a real need for the question to remain open.
This isn't to say that the topic isn't interesting, valid, or useful to you or anybody else -- just that's it's not appropriate for this Q&A site.

First off, popular doesn't always mean good for the site.  Closure also doesn't mean "this is a bad question", it means "this is a question that isn't a good format for our site".
There is an answer to another question that another user on this site wrote that I think encapsulates part of the reasoning:

Is that answerable? Absolutely not. Any answer given will be based entirely on opinion, because there is no best way to learn anything. I, for one, believe that the Superbible version 5 is not a particularly great learning guide because I disagree with its teaching methods. Does that make me "right"? Is anyone "right"?

https://gamedev.meta.stackexchange.com/a/647/51
There has been a lot of discussion by the moderators on the various SE sites on how to steer the sites' content towards what SE sites are good for, and that is expert answers to specific problems.  http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/the-wikipedia-of-long-tail-programming-questions/
More to the point I felt that your question, namely "which is the best way to learn", is a "bad subjective" kind of question: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/
And "which technology should I use" is a "gorilla vs. shark" kind of question: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/gorilla-vs-shark/
And there is flak associated with steering the site away from one type of post to another by closing questions.  But at the end of the day, even though it's an interesting question, in my opinion, it just isn't the right fit for the site.   http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/11/question-closed-and-its-probably-best-that-way/

Stack Exchange is about objectively correct answers that stand the test of time. There is little room here for questions that ask for something less correct or less permanent.

It hasn't elicited debate, argument or extended discussion, and it's not a poll.

Oh really?
This question has sixteen answers. They are all different and vary in quality. Each of them is just someone putting forth their opinion on the subject. Virtually none of them justify their opinion with anything approaching facts; the best that happens is that someone says that they've personally used it.
It has elicited nothing but debate. Oh yes, people aren't talking to each other (outside of comments). But they're all putting forth their unsubstantiated opinions about learning how to make games.
And despite having sixteen separate answers to choose from... none of them are accepted. How could they be? The question cannot be answered. There is no objective criteria by which someone could state that an answer was "correct". If it cannot be answered, then it is not a legitimate question for a Stack Exchange site.

Not Constructive is "This question is not a good fit to our Q&A format. We expect answers to generally involve facts, references, or specific expertise; this question will likely solicit opinion, debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion.",  NARQ is "It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form."  Personally I think NC is more applicable, but at the end of the day it doesn't really matter that much.

@Tetrad: Fair enough.

This site tends to police these types of questions too heavily IMO. While some of them are too chatty, the members tend to blur their eyes and when they see type of content, it's automatically too subjective. This question, while it could have multiple answers, came out to be useful and should have received no further close votes. The FAQ may look like its against these questions but if you look at the questions in the beta, it was founded on these exact types of questions. Just because older members get tired, doesnt mean we should always close
All of that in respect of course, where I disagree on that, some of these closing are completely warranted, I just think if the question ends up being helpful, it should be locked so this exact situation doesn't happen. The only time this question detracted form the sites usefulness was when it was closed

"The FAQ may look like its against these questions but if you look at the questions in the beta, it was founded on these exact types of questions." That's a problem with the beta, not the FAQ. Explain how the question is not entirely subjective.

I might have missed it but I think he asked for a good platform not the best. That's subjective by definition, but is easy to answer in a general enough way to be useful. You're getting caught up in semantics and not the meaning of that aspect of the FAQ. The most active members of this site posted similar questions to this as far as subjectivity in their first posts to the site. Which in area51, the first posts are intended to define the types of questions acceptable for a site. They defined it and since, many questions of this level have been asked and have been ok.

"Which in area51, the first posts are intended to define the types of questions acceptable for a site." Says who? There have been plenty of older questions closed and deleted on Stack Overflow for not being good questions. And questions are only "OK" to the degree that the community and moderators allow them. The moderators are trying to make the site better by not allowing these non-questions from existing.

Also, that he didn't ask for the "best" platform doesn't make the question "not entirely subjective". What constitutes a good platform?

Beta... The earliest questions set the tone and topic of the site for a long time. [ http://area51.stackexchange.com/faq ]
Again you're caught up in semantics. Saying avoid subjective questions helps get rid of questions like "What's your favorite", which has no use on this site for sure. Asking where a good starting point is technically subjective, but is very useful for others coming to this site, hence the 8 favorites on the post.I agree some posts are useless that are subjective, I am just saying dont be so black and white when subjective terms are used and look at the content instead.

Anything can produce useful information. "What's your favorite" questions can produce useful information. Stack Exchange sites aren't about producing any kind of useful information. They're about asking real, actual, answerable questions, and getting real answers. This question cannot be answered, so it has no business being here. That is the way of Stack Exchange, period. And if the tone of gamedev.se was set so poorly, then that's the site's problem, a problem that should be fixed. Otherwise, the place is no better than just another forum.

I think any game programmer could accurately answer what a good starting point for game programming is. I'm done though, other people may read my statements more objectively. Edit: not meant as blunt as it comes off, i realise it's hard to come off rules when they're set in a black and white manner. Just my opinion that we are missing out on some questions by closing (some) useful posts without much thought

Yes, we are "missing out" on some questions. I don't think that's what's being argued here. What is being argued is that some questions, while not entirely devoid of merit on their own terms, don't fit here. I also think that the discussion in this particular topic (the whole question not just your answer) and in chat that goes on re: the same subject indicates that we aren't closing entirely without thought.

The question might be borderline. But does that really warrant closing it more than a year after it is asked?
There is often little use to use to moderating old questions. If it wasn't closed back then I'd say there need be a pretty strong reason for closing it now. For the question in question, no such strong reason exists.

I would disagree, on the basis that the policies and practices of a site change over time, and new users can still find their way to the site via old questions. Plus they remain as precedent, open or closed, so they should be updated if possible to reflect the current focus of the site.

That is, you are for retroactive enforcement of rules?

Mm, I wouldn't generalize it that far (I wouldn't for example agree that a user should be banned for a post in 2010 based on a rule enacted in 2012), but in the case of what questions are considered appropriate or not, yes.

Try to look at it from gkrogers's point of view. He writes a question, get some answers, and everything is fine, then more than a year later his question is suddenly marked as "not constructive". This does not make a lot of sense to the commoner. Of course, decisions has to made to benefit the site as a whole, but closing a question always has a negative impact on at least one users experience, to warrant the closing there has got to be at least an equivalent positive impact on the rest of community.

Part of the reason for moderating it after the fact was that it was one of the more popular questions.  Consider this question on SO, which was closed almost two years after it was opened.  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1711/  If it was a question that had a small subset of answers then yes, I agree with you.  But if it's on the front page of questions sorted by votes then we need to pay special attention to them.


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When the title doesn't agree with the content
Once again today I've seen an instance of a question that isn't what it seems. FYI in case the title gets changed, the original one was "How to implement server side caching with PHP".
There are a couple of things this question is NOT:

It is not what its title states it is.
If the title were true, it would not be a candidate for gamedev.se, but rather for SO.
It is not a focused question.

I'm sorry to say this, but... There seem to exist some elements of our community who consistently abuse the system by making it appear as if their question they are putting forward is one thing, when really, it's a whole lot things which they are either too lazy to think about enough to break into smaller problems/questions (the all-too-common "Do it for me" syndrome), or which they refuse to post on a discussion forum (like, as I always comment, gamedev.net). And don't try to tell me they don't know. They are well aware of the Q&A format -- they've used this site and that is how they know to come here in the first place. These users reckon that if they can just slip it in there under a title which describes just one small portion of the discussion they wish to have, then they will get someone to give them assistance, and have a nice old chat to boot. And sadly, given the rush for upvotes and desire to assist those who know less amongst the established users of the site, these discussion-instigators are usually correct.
The problem, as those established users all know, is that this devalues the site by making the search for relevant content that much harder. Content is no longer clear-cut. It becomes less of a community resource, and more of a mess pandering to individual users' problems. Why then have a Q&A format at all?
I am guilty of answering such questions from time to time, in fact two days ago I answered just such a one. And I am sorry that I did. In fact I voted to close it, not long after answering it. In my experience, it is rarely worth bothering to answer those kinds of questions. There are several reasons for that:

It takes up a lot of time because the OP doesn't even begin to understand the problem, such that after one has written a lengthy answer to address the various possibilities, the OP will tend to ask extensive further questions for clarification... in other words, the question is too broad to answer effectively on the first try, and perhaps even thereafter;
Other users will (I think) in the first place often avoid making their mark on questions that don't seem out-and-out poor, but are just not very clear;
It sets a trend for newbies to come onto this site and post questions that really do not belong here, because essentially an unclear question is a discussion-oriented one, and belongs on a forum, not a Q&A site.
If the question is framed as a programming question as stated above, it is taking relevant content away from SO (if it isn't there already) and duplicating it here.

I love SO. And I love gamedev.se. They both clearly serve different purposes. Is this so difficult for some people to understand? I guess so. I guess all they see are potential handouts, and they come running without thinking twice.
I think there are ways to overcome the number of poor questions we receive on this site. I'm not sure that the measures already in place to filter poor questions are sufficient. And I certainly think there are issues of "game-balance" that may work in the interests of those who are savvy enough to play the "game" this site provides, but that definitely work against the stated goals of the site. Capitalism eats itself, or so I've heard it said.
I'd like to hear your opinions on this.

I agree with what you're saying, bad/misleading titles are a problem, but this post seems more like a rant than asking "what do we do when there's a bad question and title". It might be good if you clarify what you're asking or suggesting the community should do.

Hey, it's tagged as discussion-oriented. Really it's a continuation to what I was saying in my last meta-post about how better to assist us in moderation tasks, via better automated approaches than we have now. I'll add that in.

If the title doesn't match the body, edit the title to match the body.  Even if the question should be closed for other reasons.

I agree with you in general, but before I elaborate on that I think you're being overly critical of the class of user that asks these questions. In my experience they typically come from users who are new to GDSE or have such a low activity as to suggest they spend very little time here. Our traffic to meta and chat, where issues of policy and appropriateness are discussed, is quite low.
So that said, I think the best thing to do is just downvote these questions, vote to close where appropriate, and leave a comment explaining why. The last part requires the most effort and I admit I'm guilty of not bothering with it many times. But when we don't do it, we miss the opportunity to educate the user and direct them to places like meta or chat where they can learn more about how our site works.
Voting to close is pretty important, too. We don't have that many active users who can vote to close, so sometimes bad questions end up living long enough, just by a thread, for a user to get answers they (think they) need and then go on to ask more overbroad unanswerable questions.

Re the number of users who can vote to close, good point.

While I agree that it's not a focused question, I think you're exaggerating with your reaction. First of all the question is not about "Do it for me". The poster just gave a lot (probably partially not relevant) information about the game he's developing.
But overall the question is about caching with the goal to reduce DB lookups. At least that's how I read it. While the title could probably be improved, it's still not entirely different from the content of the question.
As for the on-/off-topic argument: A web-application might require a different approach than a game, therefore GDSE seems to be the better place to ask this. We're always going to have question that could be posted on other SE sites, but it's just the nature of game-development that so many different disciplines and techniques come together.

Given the title of the question though, we immediately see issues. If that was literally all the OP wanted to know, then that question definitely would have belonged on SO. Again, OP's title was a decidedly poor one, and the question IMO contained more elements than an elegant one would have. If they were more careful before posting the question, posters like these would benefit more as would everyone else - because they could get the answer systematically to each of their problems instead of  clawing their way out of a knotted mess of issues. OTOH breaking it down mayn't be easy for them.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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What to do with a question that has a fitting question/answer on stackoverflow?
This question just showed up. It's about reading sprites from a sprite-sheet using Java.
In the comments, another user pointed to the following questions on stackoverflow which pretty much answer the question:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/621835/how-to-read-sprites-from-a-spritesheet-in-java
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/297426/whats-the-best-way-of-reading-a-sprite-sheet-in-java

What should we do with the question here? Should it be closed? Migrated to stackoverflow? Or should we answer it here as well?
Edit: The questions on stackoverflow are tagged game-development.. so they would actually belong here :)

Move the SO question here, and mark the one here as a dup possibly. Shouldn't all these questions be migrated?

There is no such thing as a cross-site duplicate.

@JonathanDickinson No, they shouldn't, your front page would become a mess, with new questions being buried under all of those.  There's also no guarantee that all of those are good questions, you'd be left sorting through all the crap.

Here's a perspective from a Stack Overflow mod, all of this assumes that the question is on topic here:
1) If the question is an exact duplicate by the same user then inform us over at SO, we'll close the question as "Off Topic" as the user is spamming the system (intentionally or not) and we need to shut it down at one end.  Because it was asked on a specialized programming site, it's more a matter of getting what you wish for (and keeping the network relatively free from splitting organic search results on that question).
2) If the question is old, but does not have any answers, then I'd flag it for moderator attention and request that it be moved over.  Since it didn't have any answers on Stack Overflow, it might get more love here, and produce better content overall, which is the primary goal of the Stack Exchange network.
3) If the question is old, and has an accepted answer, massively upvoted or has answers that are massively upvoted, then I wouldn't bother to request to have it moved unless it's specifically off topic for Stack Overflow (meaning it deals with a specialization dealing with game design and really isn't a language/non-game-specific framework issue).  If it's off topic for Stack Overflow, we simply don't want it.  But if it's on-topic, we generally don't want to shake things unless it's really worth it.
Remember, if you take really old, highly upvoted content from Stack Overflow, you think it might be great, because you are getting a valuable piece of content.  However, when you see it lingering around on the front page for months, and your site becomes associated with those singular questions instead of the nitty-gritty of game development, you'll find those questions can be more of a burden than a boon.
This exact thing happened at Programmers.
That said, in these specific cases, let the question live here, the person obviously is or is interested in getting the perspective from a game development point of view, and it helps to build your community.  Remember, we like dupes, as asking questions in different ways helps increase the organic search hits on a topic.  If those "dupes" happen to be across sites in the network, then so be it.
Of course, there are always special-cases, but they are exactly that, special, and should be considered on a per-question basis.
In regards to the questions above on Stack Overflow, I'd say some house cleaning is in order (some dupe closing, some not a real question) but all in all, I don't see any reason why these couldn't be moved, but the gamedev mods should speak to the SO mods specifically about that.  I just wouldn't expect everything related to game development to be moved over.
And if they are moved over, please make sure that the appropriate questions are closed as duplicates.  Remember, it's not necessarily the age of the question that makes it the "non-dupe", it's the one that has the best content.

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


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off topic flags could point to sites Other than meta
well today we had a question really suited for Stack over flow in gamedev. But when I tried to flag it I could only suggest it belongs to meta site. I guess we add Other related sites to that list, like SOF, programmers, or maybe mathematics.
side note: I just asked on meta.stackoverflow to add Gamedev to their off topic list, and some moderator said it only has enough space for 4 other sites which are already occupied. So I guess a moderator could do the job.

+1 Yes; this absolutely needs be addressed. I'm guessing it would take someone, somewhere about 2 minutes to add this into the off-topic panel.

Just flag it for moderator attention.  We can migrate to any site.

I know, but it was nicer if other sites were in that list

+1 for "just flagging," that's what I do (pretty extensively) and it's much better, in my opinion, than bothering with links to other SE sites because inevitably we'll get a question that belongs on some SE site that we don't have direct links for, et cetera.

@JoshPetrie I'm sorry, but I totally disagree with this. There are many questions here (eg. this) that should go straight to SO, and some on eg. CS, Math, or programmers SE. Why waste mods' time when we can simply do it ourselves?

@NickWiggill As far as I'm aware, no amount of migrate flags will cause the migration to happen automatically anyway (especially not a year ago when I wrote that comment), so a moderator will need to be involved in any case.


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Same questions, different contexts. Are they duplicates?
The title say's everything, but let me explain:
Some questions are the exact same problem, but just in a little different context and a different language/engine. Are these duplicates?
Example: Get points on a line between two points and Moving from A(x,y) to B(x1,y1) with constant speed?
I mean, even the asker giving the language, most of the problems are game logic based. So they can be solved no matter which language you're using. You can see that a large number of answers to this kind of question are in "pseudo-code".

Proper Handling for Different-Question-Same-Answer

If the questions are completely distinct and not duplicates then the correct response would be to answer the question on the question page. You should also link to your previous answer and copy out the relevant information.

As for your example, the questions boil down to the same mathematical problem, but you'd only be able to realize this if you can at least partly answer the questions.
The difference between the questions may seem trivial to us, but the questions themselves are also trivial to us, though that doesn't invalidate them. The point of the matter is, are the questions sufficiently different to their intended target to warrant having both? It's close in this case, but I'd say yes. If nothing else we advertise more keywords to Google.


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Why can't I edit on Meta?
I've noticed that no posts (questions or answers) on Meta have a link to edit them. I highly doubt every single one I've looked at has a pending edit, so why can't I edit any of them?
EDIT: Apparently I am able to edit my own posts (good thing, had a pretty blatant typo in the title).

After digging around on various Meta sites, I found a link on SuperUser's Meta to this answer.
To summarize:

Mostly because the per-site metas are generally low traffic -- some of them count daily visits in the dozens.
That means the moderators will have to do the work, since the 10k site users are the only ones that can even see this queue. And on many sites, like say Bicycles -- there are exactly zero users at this rep level, even after many months.

According to this answer, not allowing suggested edits on meta sites is by design.

I see, but I don't understand it. What's the difference with allowing it like on the main site, since the rep is the same? Makes no sense, as most decisions around here.

The main site gets much more traffic than Meta, so the edit queue is more likely to be handled in a shorter time (still seems to me to take a longer on this site than others)

Fine, it would be longer. So...?

BTW it wouldn't be longer, since less users --> less edits. As much as less users --> less edit reviewers.

Fewer users might mean fewer edits, but the decision was made to prevent all the work of approving/rejecting edits from falling solely on moderators.

Still doesn't compute. It would be just like on the main site, only with both less edits and less users able to approve them. Unless there is data showing the "users able to approve them" decrease much more than the edits themselves, it makes no sense.

There are no pending edits on this meta site, though.

@Tetrad that's because suggested edits are not allowed

Oh, well your link didn't explicitly point to the question where they said this is "by design".  http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/78223/per-site-metas-dont-have-ability-of-suggested-edits/78319#78319

I will add that link.

Notably, if a post is Community Wiki (a checkbox just below the post-input box) then anyone can edit. This is part of why some really important discussion posts (such as FAQ editing) are CW in meta -- to allow any user to edit the post!


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Dealing with spam
I recently flagged these three answers as spam because they

Linked directly to a specific product/site/etc
Provided a link but didn't give much (or any) explanatory context to answer the question
Didn't address the question being asked (simply assumed an answer of "use Lua instead of Java" and provided links to tools to do so)
The users who posted the answers had no other activity on the site, or their name was non-linked and I could not find such information (and assumed that to be the case)

Since one of the flags was marked helpful, and the answer wasn't deleted, I did some searching and found out how spam flags are handled. It seems that 3 flags are required to remove the post from the front page (completely irrelevant at this point), and 6 are required to delete the post. These flags all must come within 48 hours, or the flag count is reset. Considering the newest of these three answers has been around for 7 months, and traffic on GameDev.StackExchange seems to be lighter than StackOverflow, I don't expect these posts to get the required 6 flags for deletion within the 48 hour window. Will they be left there to plug their link (2 of the 3 linked to the same thing) simply because not enough people flagged them at the same time? Or is there another course of action that can be taken?

I'm pretty sure spam flags also show up in moderator tools.

Yes, that was my understanding. What sent me on this search, though, was that I noticed my flag had been marked as "helpful", yet nothing had changed. If the post was acknowledged by a moderator to be spam, why is it still there? I now see all three have been removed...

@jim FWIW, not all things you flag will require moderator attention.  Just because a post exists with a single link doesn't necessarily mean it's spam.  It's a bad answer due to lack of content, sure, but not necessarily worth deleting on its own.  I'd recommend voting down instead of flagging as spam, unless it is actually somebody seemingly promoting their own product without any applicability to the question at hand.

I understand that, my question arose from the fact that the flag was marked as helpful, with no action taken. Had it been marked declined or disputed, I would've shrugged it off as me flagging something not really in need of it.

@Jim Saying a flag is helpful (at least based on what the moderator tools explains) is in the no further action group, it says the flag has merit and doesn't penalize your flag weight. Where as not helpful flags would penalize your flag weight.

To add to what Noctrine said, generally speaking we dismiss flags as helpful unless they're malicious.

@Tetrad: I nearly don't dare to speak up, but is that really a good idea? I mean, flags which are wrong should not be marked as helpful...or did I misunderstand you there?

@Bobby usually the thought process is "okay I see why they flagged that, but I don't think moderator attention is necessary, but I can see where they're coming from and appreciate the effort".  Plus declining flags has a negative effect on that person's flag weight.  The actual text on the tool says "the flags have merit but no further action is required".  This could ether mean because the action was already taken, or no action is required at all.

@Tetrad Actually, since this change, there is no flag weight, and (I believe) no negative effect for declined flags. There is simply a count of helpful flags


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FAQ Slightly Confusing?
The second bullet under "What it's not about" states:

what language/engine/SDK you should learn next, including which technology is better, which technology to use, or what technology some particular game used

The word "including" is what really throws me off. If I'm skimming I may look at this and say "Ok. No what should I learn type questions! Got it!" and skip the rest because the including implies types of "What Should I learn" type of questions when I really don't think "Which technology is better, which technology to use, or what technology some particular game used" really fit into.
I know I'm being a little picky here but I think either separating them out into separate bullets, or removing the "including" would make this much more clear which with the number of closed topics we get may actually justify this. If people don't agree that's fine. It's just an observation I made.
Thoughts?

I agree. I propose it be changed to something along the lines of "technology selection, including what language/engine/SDK you should use or learn next, which is better, or which was used for some particular game"

I based it off bullet point #3 from the programmers faq https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/faq but I guess it got unwieldy. I just made them all separate points.


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What to do with edits that add new content to an existing question/answer?
I try to review edits as good as I can. Mostly these are corrections in spelling or formatting changes, which is fine. But now I just encountered an edit where another user added completely new content to an existing answer.
I'm not able to judge if this new content is really useful or accurate (it could even result in downvotes of the answer if the new content is bogus). How should edits that add new content to an answer be handled? Should I just approve it and let the OP rollback if he desires? How do the mods handle edits like this?

twitch twitch * "as good as I can" where is the edit button?!? ;)

I usually stick to approving edits that make changes to and improve formatting, spelling errors, and grammar.
If an edit is adding significant new content that was not present in an existing answer I most often would deny it and suggest that (if they want to provide context or something) they do it in the comments or by posting their own answer.

+1; I usually reject these as "too radical."

An explanation of what should and shouldn't be edited can be found here.
Quick summary (not exhaustive list)
Allowed:
- Spelling/grammar improvements
- Embedding an already-linked image into the post
- Moving relevant, meaningful content from comments on the post into the post
Not Allowed:
- Adding a comment to the post (ex "I have this problem too!")
- Adding, deleting, or changing anything that might change the intended meaning of the post
- Trivial things like changing British English spellings to American English
Basically, if it is a meaningful improvement that doesn't change the intended meaning (or what the intended meaning of the post will be understood to be), it should be accepted.
Meaningless edits or edits that change the meaning of the post should be rejected.
In cases where it's not clear whether the meaning may be changed, I'd err on the side of caution - don't approve the edit if it might cause someone to read the post as meaning something different than what it would mean without the edit.


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tags: security vs. anti-cheat
I've added security to two questions tagged anti-cheat, then I realized there is no clear question which addresses "anti-cheat" without being also more in general related to "security".
I'd like us to either produce some guidelines about when to use these tags, or to remove anti-cheat altogether if it is a duplicate or a subset of security.

In my opinion anti-cheat is a subset of security - in the same way that, say, xna is a subset of game-development. Using hyperbole: if we removed subset tags we would ultimately land up with exactly one tag (game-development). Security could further be broken down into things such as: authentication, in-game-purchases, encryption, privacy and, yes, anti-cheat - all of these help an answerer discriminate between questions where her expertise might lie. So I would say: update the wiki of security to include other tags like anti-cheat.

+1 Anticheat is a specific topic worth having a tag for, and you provided an undefeatable case for subset tags. c(:

I agree. Every anti-cheat tagged question is security related, but not every security tagged question is anti-cheat related!


text:
Feature Request : Tracking all the game development competition
What about having a new feature here in GameDevelopment that track all the upcoming and to-be-announced game developers event/jam/competitions.
A interactive horizontal bar at the bottom of the page or a different page dedicated for tracking all these events.
Mockup :

This will show all the important dates and milestones for up-coming or running competitions. In this mock up I am showing two deadlines. But this bar could include many more.
Why : Because most here are students or working on a full time job somewhere. Its not possible for everyone to track all these competitions. And there is no place where all these are listed and always up to date(correct me if I am wrong). So, why no do something here?
I think this will be a great addition to this community.
Update:

who would be gathering and maintaining the data

The CHAOS team?

stackexchange is really focusing down pretty exclusively on generating answers which will be valid for years/decades

Wholeheartedly agree. I thought that it would be nice to have a nice feature for only this SE.

HERE IT IS!

Perhaps you might like to propose a community ad for this site. (It would be neat if the ad was itself a chart like you originally proposed, but I see ads are required to be static images.)

Yeh, too bad that Community Ad only supports static images.

@iamcreasy: The static image is just to take you to the actual site, which would be dynamic. Also "CompoHub" is a terrible name. If I were looking for a site about game development events, that's not what I would be searching for.

@nicol-bolas I didn't find either, hence started this question. Anyway, added to the community ad question. But, the banner isn't sharp enough to be descriptive.

I think this would definitely be a useful bit of data to be able to access.
But I'm not certain that it's really appropriate for the stackexchange network, particularly since it's not clear who would be gathering and maintaining the data, and how that data would be managed;  it's very different from the Q&A things that we're doing here now.
I could easily see a bit of data like this being presented at (for example) gamedev.net, or perhaps tigsource.com.  But stackexchange is really focusing down pretty exclusively on generating answers which will be valid for years/decades, not on the continuous production of infographics which become outdated in only a few days time.

The other tricky one is triage - how do we decide on what to include?

I updated my question on your answer. @trevor-powell I regularly go through gamedev.net(dont know about tigsource) but didn't really see any regular updated news on these events? Its more like you-will-find-it-only-if-you-are-looking-for-it. That's why I am a bit frustrated about this data. And the data wont be static it they get updated if this widget changes itself with the event. Yes, I know its messy, but isn't thats why the accumulated information will be valuable.

@jonathan-dickinson I was thinking it more like a notification for two things. One, shows us the event and two, gives us a time range to submit the game. i.e. IndieCade is accepting game throughout Jan,1 to May,1. More like a Gantt chart.

@iamcreasy I really like the idea, I did upvote - I have the same concerns as Trevor though; and additionally how we decide which competitions are important enough to feature on the timeline (triage) - possibly only ones with monetary prizes? I am not sure. Maybe I should answer instead of spamming this answer with comments.

@jonathan-dickinson If you ask me i would be able to tell 10-12 worth mentioning competition. But I am sure there are more then 50(wild guess). So, maybe why not jam all that we know of? Is it gonna be way too difficult to maintain when you have a pre-made list? Firstly, we can remove the regional competitions. That would shorten the list a great deal.


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Wolfram Alpha Results in Chat (Possibly Q&A)
We were chatting about faster alternatives to sin(x) in chat and invariably a few equations started cropping up. A few links to Wolfram Alpha plots (example) were pasted into the chat and I was a bit disappointed that we didn't see the graphs directly in the chat (like you see questions etc.). This would be a clear winner on at least 3 StackExchange websites (Math, SO and GD).
In addition it would be helpful to be able to use Wolfram Alpha results in questions and answers, for example if I was elaborating on the difference between O(n) and O(log(n)) I would be able to provide the graphs directly: very important for critical topics like premature optimization.
Wolfram Alpha does have an API available.

The biggest issue I see would be that they charge for their API service. Still +1 as I've been wanting it before.

Wolfram|Alpha does have an API, but it's pricey, so this is probably unlikely to happen.

You also can't really past code snippets or anything involving real formatting into chat either. In a discussion medium that you can't post source code, even on a programming website, posting plots is completely out of the question. Chat formatting is very limited, on purpose.
Chat is for chat, not serious discussion. Stack Exchange does not have a place to engage in the kind of discussion where you would want to post plots or code or anything more than 600 character bits of dialog.
In reality, SE chat is nothing more than a ghetto for people who want to discuss things on a Q&A site. It's a way to shut those people up; it's throwing them a bone. It gets their attempts at discussion out of the way of the primary purpose of the site: Q&A.
What you want is a forum, not chat. And there's no way that Stack Exchange will ever have a web forum attached to an SE site. SE is not going to be all things to all people. So either move the discussion to a web forum or accept the limitations that SE imposes on its sites.
It's not a bad idea, necessarily. But it is outside the realm of what chat is supposed to provide. It would be more appropriate for actual Q&A.

I actually thought the Q&A idea would get more friction - still I did leave the suggestion open to that, thoughts on Q&A (if I had suggested only that in the first place)?

@JonathanDickinson: If they can work something out with these Wolfram Alpha people, that's fine. But I don't think they're going to use a service they have to pay for. If they can get it, great. If not, it's not something I'll miss terribly badly.


text:
Can we answer "Is It Legal to <x>" questions authoritatively?
We've discussed "legal" questions twice before, here and here.
I'd like to drill down specifically into the "Is It Legal" questions that we often seem to receive, such as these:

Legal Lego game
How closely can a game legally resemble another?
How legal would it be to use some elements of the Half Life universe in my non comercial, indie game?
Legality of using names in a game?
How closely can a game legally resemble another?
Could I make my own pokemon game without running into a copyright issue?

I'm not questioning whether these topics are on-topic for a game development site.  The boundaries of legal and ethical behaviour certainly are legitimate things that any creative professional needs to know.
What I'm questioning is whether we, as a site that builds up static knowledge as a future resource, are an appropriate place for that knowledge to be generated, stored and then provided for decades into the future to random internet strangers.  Unlike the mathematics behind quaternions, laws change over time, and our answers will eventually become invalid, even if those answers were correct at the time they were posted (which doesn't even seem to be particularly common).
Are we willing to live with ourselves if someone acts on an answer we, as a site, have published -- perhaps decades earlier -- and is sued/imprisoned/etc as a result?

The bold part I don't think is particularly relevant.  There are SE sites that deal with matters much more troublesome than copyright infringement issues if they don't know what they're doing.  Case in point: http://security.stackexchange.com/ and http://parenting.stackexchange.com/

For reference, SO doesn't allow legal questions, but Programmers does (as far as I know):  http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/89961/consult-your-lawyer-answers  and http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/1655/what-types-of-legal-questions-are-on-topic-here

With respect, Tetrad, I don't think that expressing concern about generating bad legal advice and republishing it in perpetuity is "irrelevant".

Trevor: is your concern with people giving legal advice, or with people giving legal advice you disagree with?  I notice the only non-downvoted answer on the recent Blockbuster question was the 'you could in fact get sued for this' one...

Hi, @Steven, thanks for the question.  I only downvoted the legal advice which was recommending people do something that could result in the questioner getting sued or imprisoned if the advice turned out to be wrong.  ie: the "dangerous" advice.  If the asker took action based on the "don't use that name" advice and the advice was wrong, the asker would not be sued;  the advice was non-dangerous.  Still probably incorrect and bad.  But until we reach some sort of consensus on this issue, I didn't want to downvote or closevote legal questions or answers on a "policy" basis.

@Tetrad: likely SO doesn't allow legal questions because Programmers does.

I personally am more than happy to see legal questions providing they are directly relevant to game developers.
The idea that only lawyers can possibly have a useful opinion on law is incorrect in 2 ways: firstly, many regular citizens know how their law works, and secondly, many lawyers make mistakes anyway as nobody can possibly know every law on the statute books.
"Are we willing to live with ourselves if someone acts on an answer we, as a site, have published -- perhaps decades earlier -- and is sued/imprisoned/etc as a result?"
Yes, definitely. People need to take responsibility for the advice they accept. When they post on gamedev.stackexchange.com they know they are not asking a legal professional, but even if they were asking a legal professional, the final decision for their actions lies with them.  Our best answers are timestamped, sourced with references, and backed up by the community, so the asker can make an informed decision, and what they choose is their responsibility.

+1.  I'm still deeply uncomfortable with the conclusion you reach, but this is really well argued.

Another +1, especially for this line: People need to take responsibility for the advice they accept.

I'd just add that there are lawyers in the gamedev community, for example on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1zfrm0/askalawyer_part_three_let_me_law_you/

From meta.programmers.se

In the context of legal questions, common sense is always, always consult a lawyer. Asking a site devoted to non-lawyers who do not have an attorney-client relationship for definitive legal advice is obviously dangerous.
But that's not to say you can't ask about legal issues: it's akin to asking a colleague or a friend about their experiences in a similar situation.
...
I think there is always going to be a fine line between what constitutes regular, professional advice (on-topic) and what constitutes personal legal advice (off-topic). The standard should be, "would a reasonable person consider the question to be asking for personal legal advice?" If so, it's a candidate for closure.
One footnote regarding common sense: there are askers who appear to have the wrong set of expectations when asking legal questions, and both of the questions you listed appear to have this problem. A person who appears to think Programmers.SE substitutes a lawyer needs to be educated that he cannot use the answers given as a way to circumvent legal council.
To this end, it's similar to questions on Stack Overflow where someone asks how to do something insane, and the only correct answer is "Don't do that. Do X instead."
But the purpose of the Stack Exchange network is to build up questions and answers that can help others, not just the asker. So a misguided asker isn't reason enough to close a question.

How does the "But that's not to say you can't ask about legal issues: it's akin to asking a colleague or a friend about their experiences in a similar situation." analogy hold? I though asking a questions on the stackexchange sites were supposed to be the equivalent of asking someone who is an expert in the specified niche or field?

Well ignore the "friend" bit and assume that "colleague" means someone in the same field as you are.

Tetrad:  Care to comment about why http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/24471/is-this-feature-copyright-infringment was worthy of closing, but not http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/1653/how-closely-can-a-game-resemble-another-game-without-legal-problems ?  I think I know the reason, but it'd be nice to have a mod say it explicitly, somewhere that we can link to later on  (I find it interesting, though immaterial, that both have accepted upvoted answers which make the same incorrect legal claim.)

That question is really old and moderation philosophies change and 2) I think "personal legal advice" for the recently closed question is different from "professional experiences and general knowledge" of the second.

Makes sense, Tetrad.  Would it be reasonable, then, to say something like "Legal questions/answers are okay as long as they are not requesting/giving specific personal advice, but are instead dispensing concepts which -- in broad strokes -- apply to everyone?"  Or would the older question also have been closed if it had been asked today?

I don't know if I'd break it down to that.  I pretty much agree completely with the quote I posted in my answer.   "would a reasonable person consider the question to be asking for personal legal advice?"

I'm just missing the difference between http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/24471/is-this-feature-copyright-infringment (closed), and http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/24171/how-legal-would-it-be-to-use-some-elements-of-the-half-life-universe-in-my-non-c (not closed).  Both were asked within the last week, and both seem to be asking for personal legal advice, from where I'm sitting?  (I'm actually tempted to do heavy editing on the second, actually, to make it a generic "using copyrighted elements from another game" question, just so we can close dupes of that in future)

Again, not criticising or complaining.  I'm just trying to get an idea of where we're imagining the "okay" vs. "not okay" line to be.  :)

One was asked before this question and the other one was asked after and 2) "Can I use these characters" is an easy question to answer ("no, don't do that"), whereas specific features are a bit murkier.

Since nobody else has spoken up for the negative yet, I'll take a stab at it.
"Is this legal?" questions do not belong on gamedev.stackexchange.com.  We are experts in game development.  We are not qualified to publish advice about matters of eternal worldwide legality.
From meta.programmers.se

My opinion: No. They don't have a place here.
If any answer is, or should be, followed up with "... but you need to speak to a lawyer" then the answer is immediately irrelevant.
  A lawyer, who knows the situation/location (which potentially already
  makes them too localized as questions) could easily contradict
  everything in the answer.
All someone is saying is "I think [this], but I'm not a lawyer, so I don't actually know." which is not an answer. At best it's a
  hypothesis based on experience. At worst, it's bad advice that "sounds
  right".

From the About Stack Exchange page:

You wouldn’t shout out a calculus question in a football stadium,
  right? You’d go to the math department of a university. That’s why
  instead of allowing questions on any topic, we have brought together
  separate communities of experts on very specific topics.
(...)
All questions on Stack Exchange are expected to be objective and have
  concrete answers; we’re not a place for conversation, opinions, or
  socializing. We also expect questions to represent real problems, not
  just imponderables, hypotheticals, or requests for opinions.

Stack Exchange is about experts sharing their knowledge by
answering questions in their fields of expertise and thereby making the Internet a better place.
Stack Exchange is not about random people making up answers to questions on topics about which they have no expertise, in an effort to earn popularity points, badges, and access to moderator tools.

Questions of legality do not belong on gamedev.stackexchange.com.  In almost all cases they cannot be answered objectively or concretely, and they require expertise which is not possessed by professional game developers;  the people we nominally want to attract to the site.
As a practical matter, we cannot provide objectively correct answers to these questions, so we should not permit them on our site.  If we keep them, we are only further cluttering the Internet with bad, ill-informed, and silently USA-centric legal advice.
And we're doing it knowingly.

No downvote comment?  If you disagree with the above, I'd really be interested in the reasons.

I didn't downvote, but I will make one point.  Unlike programming, it's hard to be "objectively correct" about the law.  It's all about what you can prove to a judge, whether or not you have the resources to find something, and so forth.  Programmers especially have a tendency to see things as a series of rules that must be followed, where potential loopholes and such could be found and used without impunity, and the legal system doesn't really work that way.

I completely agree with all of that, Tetrad.  I imagine that everyone else does as well.  I think where opinions begin to differ is on the "and so therefore..." clause which needs to follow on from that statement of fact.  With some of us preferring "and so therefore we shouldn't try", and others preferring "and so therefore we should give the best answers we can, even if our answers may do harm in some instances".  And, I imagine, some who have given less thought to the problem, and just want the easy rep that always comes from advising people that they probably won't get caught.

Well I don't remember any specific egregious examples of rep farming of specifically bad advice.  I would imagine most people who know anything will vote those kinds of answers down in lieu of the (more correct) "that's probably a bad idea, talk to a lawyer" type of answers.

For legal questions if they are general enough
This includes trademark, copyright, and patents.
I think the fact alone that the majority of undergraduate computer science and game development programs cover copyright, trademarks, and patents somewhat bring it into our realm. This site is about voting for correct answers, not determining a type of answer is wrong because of our lack of qualification. The many very useful members who are under 18 here may have a lack of qualification in general, but their experience has proved useful to others.
The voting system exists for a reason. I think we need to realize that we are deciding legal questions are off limits because of our understanding of the law is somewhat odd. We need to avoid "yes you are perfectly safe because you are not breaking copyright of X". That's given.
I learned the basics of copyright, trademarks, and patents in my computer science undergrad, why should I not share this knowledge on a site devoted to game development where it's very relevant. If my answer is wrong, there should be enough people here who also took these types of classes who can down vote me. If it's right, the answers here will likely be the only ones these members get because they can't get a lawyer, even for such trivial questions.
Maybe forcing a disclaimer would be a good idea if it's such an issue. Answering questions about our experience of the business, legal, and marketing side of game development, even though outside our expertise, is not outside our experience.

You learned the basics of copyright, trademarks, and patents. According to the laws of which jurisdiction of which country?  When a poster asks a trademark question, how do you know that the laws you learned match the laws that he lives under?  They are not the same across the whole world, the way that (for example) quaternion math is.  How do you know that your "basics" are applicable at all, or are even still the same for you as when you learned them in your own region?  Have you been taking refresher classes in law since graduation, as lawyers are required to do?

In that respect you're right, maybe a request to tell users to post which country they live when posting such experience.

Against "Is it legal to X" questions:
I like how you spam answers with "your not a lawyer" because of your understanding of the law, nice touch. I do however agree is some respects, just not to the method of spamming answers with -1 and statements like "your not a lawyer (so youre automatically wrong in this case)."
I think the approach of saying every person that answers these legal questions is wrong is a bad idea and such tactics coming from a more veteran member is likely to turn others off from the site because it feels like naive moderation. All of that in respect, I'm just saying what spamming like that looks like for the sake of this site.
I do agree with you, just not for the same reason. The problem here isn't that there is no experience in the copyright and trademarking of games, I along with some other members likely have it and have paid people with qualifications and taken course which explain the legality of software without the legal disclaimers that you're saying are necessary. The problem is that our site as a whole is incapable of determining if the given legal advice is right or wrong. Given the requirements of a stack exchange site's success. Good questions, good answers, and good ratings.  This fails the third qualification. So they don't know enough to +1 or -1.

I put two answers just to attempt to show both sides. The points contradict somewhat, but if only one of the answers is right, this is unavoidable.

I do not "spam" answers.  I upvote or downvote, and I provide comments with all downvotes, as is recommended.  If we have a whole group of users in a single question who are all giving the same dangerous advice, then I'm going to downvote them all for the same reason.  I'm sorry if my opinion of what constitutes dangerous advice which is worthy of a downvote differs from yours, but I'm entitled to give my own downvotes based upon my own criteria.

They still look like spam to me.

The proper response to spam is to flag it as spam, not to respond to it and thus give it further exposure.  It's the little 'flag' icon under the comment upvote icon. Stackexchange, in general, has a very low tolerance for spam, and I imagine that it will quickly be cleaned up, if the moderators agree with your assessment.

It's important to distinguish between asking legal questions and answering them.  People ask them because they want to know the answer to something they don't know or understand. And given the frequency that they occur, legal questions are a fairly common part of the development process for some developers.
From that perspective, people asking questions is very legit in my mind.  A question being asked frequently is a symptom of some kind of underlying condition, challenge or issue common to many.  To deny people the ability to ask is to deny that there is an underlying issue they are trying to address.
Answering questions, on the other hand, is a whole different matter.  That's where you get into the IANAL realm along with the "but you should really ask a lawyer before you decide" caveat.  I guess that's an area I'm not sure about.  It's almost like you need an official disclaimer for such answers that everyone must use.

There are lots of commonly asked questions which we've decided don't provide lasting value to this site, though.  "Which game engine should I use to make my platform game?", for example, is treated as off-topic according to current policies, even though it's an almost absurdly common question.  While it's a legitimate question from the asker's point of view, it's not one to which we can provide definitive answers which will also help future visitors.

I agree Trevor.  However in the case of the engine question, there's not per se a "wrong" answer.  There are definitely wrong answers to legal questions, as well as right ones.

That's a fair point.  But I'd argue that judging from our history, our community is spectacularly bad at recognising and down-voting 'wrong' legal answers, particularly surrounding Intellectual Property laws.  So the interesting question to me is:  does it matter whether or not a question could be given a wrong answer, if most of the people voting are not equipped to recognise a wrong answer if/when one appears?

Yea that's really the catch - we don't know for sure if someone is necessarily really (legally) right or wrong with their answer.

It should be noted that providing legal advice without a license to practice law is illegal in most jurisdictions. I'm not certain whether international law has settled which jurisdiction would apply (posters, servers or site owners), however I fear that answering legal questions in any way other then a statement of the law could expose both the site and the user involved to potential criminal action in potentially three different jurisdictions (in a worst possible case scenario).
My vote would lean very much towards shutting down the type of questions - as much fun as they are for me as a law student to look at and speculate over, understanding that to answer them could do damage my future career. At the very least, the questions should be marked by a disclaimer when tagged "legal".
If not shutting them down, StackExchange almost needs to get qualified legal advice itself to see potential for exposure.

This point has been discussed before: http://meta.gamedev.stackexchange.com/a/284/51  I don't think there's any issue with discussing personal experience with legal problems or providing general statements about the law.  The problem arises when you pose as a legal professional when you aren't one.

Oh, the irony, the wonderful irony.

Any reason for the -1 such that I may come up with better answers to questions like this?

Lochok, first, because I believe this answer is wrong, or at least highly misleading - one of the issues here is whether answering questions, is legal advice. And I think the correct conclusion is that as long as the person doesn't pretend to be a lawyer, it's not legal advice - just possibly useful information regarding a legal situation, that the reader can consider as a starting point. As further proof that we're not providing legal advice illegally, the link in @Tetrad's comment, shows that Oregan specifically considers

"internet discussion groups" to not be violating the law. Plus, some jurisdictions (like the US, which is a fairly major part of our readership) have free-speech laws that do allow us to talk about legal issues without needing a government certification.

Second, as a side-note - downvoting on Meta sites isn't quite the same as a downvote on the main site. On meta, it's frequently used to indicate being opposed to a course of action - for instance, someone asks if questions of type X should be closed, someone answers "yes" and someone answers "no" - so people upvote or downvote the one they agree with. You stated that legal questions should be shut down, which I disagree with (and so voted against their being shut down).


text:
Possible account merge?
I'm not sure if this should go here or on the meta meta, but since it applies specifically to gamedev.stackexchange, I thought this a good place to start?
I recently stumbled upon this question and answer, which were asked and answered by these two users:

diede apers
diede apers

Based on the text of the answer, and the fact that neither "user" has any activity other than that question and answer, it appears that it was just one person who didn't bother creating an account for their one issue (although they were persistent enough to come back and share their answer). My question here is two-part:

Should these accounts be merged?
(Probably more suited for MetaMeta) how should this situation in general be handled? I feel like merging inactive users that seem to be the same user isn't something we want to do blindly, and should be considered on a case-by-case basis. However, is consolidating their accounts/activity something that is worth the time and effort involved in doing so?

If you see a situation like that just flag it.

Exactly what I should've done. Don't know why I didn't think of it...


text:
A non-question acceptable as post?
Seeing how Stanford University is offering their Game Theory course online for free, I figured that the place to post it on would be gamedev.SE, but I'm unsure if that's okay or not. Is it?
For those interested, the course starts Monday next week (March 19th), and you can find it here: http://www.gametheory-class.org/

No.
But you could probably add it here:
http://meta.gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/675/community-promotion-ads-2012

Making an announcement in chat and/or on meta (@Tetrad, sanity check me on this? :)) would be fine, but it's definitely not appropriate for the main site.

I agree that an announcement here on Meta would be allowed - at least, when I asked about an Announcement tag, the answer was that the discussion + featured tags were sufficient. Which implied that it is also allowed to have announcements on secondary meta sites. :)

It would not be acceptable on gamedev.stackexchange. The site is for asking (and answering) specific questions related to game development as defined in the FAQ.
Posting it here on meta would be more acceptable, especially as an answer to this question Tetrad linked to in his comment.
The most acceptable place, I think, would be chat.


text:
Can we get a cocos2d-x tag?
This port is growing by the days and a lot people unsure about it just uses cocos2d and cocos2d-iphone, whose implementation in essentially different.
I would create it but I'm still working my way to 300, asking and answering 2d-x questions mostly.
Thank you.

what questions specifically need it

Anything related to selectors just for starters, and the specific implementations of delegates and certain functions based off which platform we are in.

Also, there are a lot of non documented or non implemented functions nobody in the community speaks about, that in cocos2d are basic or trivial.

I meant which questions on the site need the tag.  You can't just "add a tag" without applying it to a question.

I think somebody else already did it :) http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cocos2d-x

Yes, we can!
This question felt lonely without an answer.


text:
Require a waiting period and rationale for down-votes
I have been a member on SO for some time now, and have had to almost fight my way to break 100 rep, and then when I come to GameDev I ask one question. I get a comment to review it with what application I am intending to use the answer for, and that person did come back, and refine, but I get an answer that I like (or at least mostly helps), but I get 4 down votes, and no comments.
I think that there should be more of a requirement on placing a down-vote onto a question:

require to have that question open for X amount of time (this insures that the person wishing to place the down-vote give it a good deal of thought before just going down the line, and hitting down-vote on whatever they don't like)
require a reason to be given for a down-vote. (this would require either extending the meaning of a down-vote, or at least having the user specify what part of the current meaning applies)
require that in order to leave a down-vote a comment must be added by the user wishing to place the down-vote (this might require a little moderation to avoid "posting comment to down-vote", but that can be done with flags) comment flagged, and removed means down-vote is removed

EDIT: after some discussion, and thought perhaps just point 2 would be a good step toward allowing users who receive down votes to know what it is they might have done wrong, and that would allow them to either correct it in the current question (to show continued effort), or in future questions.

point 2 could be done with a small question box that appears, and then that list is shown beside the question so that the asker, and other users be able to see it as well

Its hard to swallow some down votes; and I agree that GD.SE has a lot of users who are quick to down vote, even more than SO. Just don't take it personal, move on, and try to make your question more clear.

Point 2 has been brought up and declined MANY times on meta.stackoverflow. It will never happen.

From ye faqe:
"You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face."
GameDev.SE has a little bit more flexibility in that some theoretical questions about design are necessarily less tightly scoped than "I'm having trouble with x programming language structure," however, it's still a Q&A site.  The things that are repeated with great frequency are What have you tried? and, if one is not presented in the question itself, Can you provide an example of your problem?  If you can confidently address both of those questions, you're off to a good start.
The tooltip for the vote down button says "This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful."  It doesn't say "I don't like this person" or "I don't agree with this person's opinion."  As Shog9 mentioned, the tooltip doesn't say anything about the user who posted the question, because the vote is cast about the question.  So don't take it personally!
Byte56 had a good point when he advised that you read over your question, and maybe attempt to rewrite it.  One thing that's tough with games that's easier with programming in general is that games are all made up.  They're all in our head.  Sure, there are some conventions that we share and speak about, but your method of storing terrain data and your scene graph architecture and your resource manager, intimate as they may be, are completely foreign to everyone else.  Try to read your post as though you were a friend who knew nothing about game design, or a relative.  Or read it out loud to a rubber duck.

but technically vote down has 3 different meanings, and I think they should be recorded separately. yes the question can still receive a unified score, but when I see a vote down on one of my questions I always end up asking myself the question "which reason did they do that for" I gave the question a deal of thought, and I will try to do research if i know where to start, because I have had questions that could be helpful to others (they have to be asked kind of abstractly, but still answerable I think) so maybe just asking to add an extra click of "why the down" vote might solve this.

I doubt it would gain any traction, but you're right, there is the question, left unanswered without comments, of whether a question was voted down due to lack of clarity, perceived lack of effort, or perceived lack of utility.  It wouldn't be such a bad thing to see which of those three criteria a downvoter thought was applicable.

@gardian06: Downvoting doesn't have three meanings. It has one meaning: I believe people should not bother to look at this. Someone can think that for different reasons, but the reason why doesn't matter for someone looking for a question to answer.

Votes - up and down - are not primarily for the benefit of the person posting the question or answer. They can provide some benefit of course: up-votes offer positive reinforcement, and down-votes negative... But as you've noticed, they're fairly impersonal. The true value of voting is to quickly communicate to other readers the value placed on a question or answer by those who've already read it.
Comments are intended primarily for the benefit of the author. Sure, they can provide useful auxiliary information for other readers. But it is the author who is notified of them, whose post hosts them, and who is thus their primary audience.
It is perfectly appropriate for a voter to vote and move on, saying nothing to the author. Not that we can force anyone to write down a reason anyway - indeed, if we made voting contingent on commenting, a likely result would simply be fewer votes.
It is also perfectly appropriate for someone to leave a comment without voting. It may be that a reader does not feel strongly one way or another about the value of a post, but offers constructive criticism on some aspect of it anyway.
In short, these are separate tools, with separate purposes. Let's not combine them.

though isn't it supposed to be common practice (I have also seen it stated on several meta's about downvoting that a comment should be left when casting a downvote. to use a simplistic metaphor leaving a downvote, and then not giving a reason is like giving a child a spanking and then never telling them why, and saying "oh they know why" even if in their mind they don't know they did anything wrong

but isn't telling the author of the question that this question is "unclear", "no research", "not appropriate" (the reasons for down voting) a means of "correcting bad behavior"

Sure - if you're gonna tell the world, "This guy's question is unclear!" then it's just polite to tell him too... But there are all sorts of reasons why someone might not want to do that, or why it might not even be appropriate. Conversely, some might well consider it more polite to tell the author first, and then down-vote only if he fails to respond. We try to encourage good behavior, but what that means in any given situation is really up to those involved.

@gardian06 It's usually a good idea (and kind of a nice thing to do) to leave a comment explaining why you've downvoted a question or answer, but there's no reason to force people to leave a comment, and often, someone might have already left a comment that covers what the problem is (usually, that comment will receive upvotes by people in that case)

I get 4 down votes, and no comments.

I see multiple comments, all the comments left within 35 minutes of the question being asked. One of the comments specifically says "You're asking a lot of questions, and they are pretty vague questions."
If you put the effort you put into writing this complaint into better scoping the question, you'd be getting upvotes. When you open your question with "This is a conglomeration question when answering please specify which part you are addressing." you are literally asking for downvotes.

I think many people on the different sites are taking for granted that people should know what they are trying to do.
I'll explain what I mean, in every other post people require that OP has tried something.
But for many people this is impossible because the very reason they are asking are that they are beginners. I know from my own perspective sometimes I don't even know where to begin.
It doesn't happen everytime and most of the community is very helpful, but then there are those guys that take the rule of not writing someone elses code a little too seriously.
And a reason for down-vote is actually a good idea, it can prove constructive, and teach people how to structure questions or answers.

Agreed.  IMO there are definitely, "I voted down because I think you're dumb/lazy" votes.  Not enough, "But once I was like you and so maybe I can pass on help along.


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Why do we have a daily limit of 200 reputation?
Obviously I don't run into this limit too often, but I'm disappointed when I do. What is the reasoning behind having a daily limit of 200 reputation?

Because it's a very badly designed system overall.

I think it's just there to provide a throttle for reputation gain, which has a few small benefits (beyond the obvious of helping curtail abuse). I don't necessarily believe these to be true (I think it's mostly just an abuse throttle), but they're interesting to think about:
First, it means that a user with higher reputation has perforce earned that reputation over a span of days, visiting the site over several days and actively participating during that time. Second, it helps enforce the idea that reputation (and consequently, things you do to earn reputation) isn't the sole focus of the site, that there are other ways to participate which don't necessarily result in reputation gain (but might have badges associated with them, or no "reward" at all).

+1 I believe the main focus is to build that continual relationship with the site. Making users more nested in the community and help develop and help others over a course of an extended time frame not just one day that someone went around answering questions.

I guess it's to stop people to take unfair advantage using their friends, so that they can make it to leaderboard in less than two days.
You won't want a newbie to have thousands of rep per day ;)

That's a good point. It prevents abuse

Who has that many friends? :)

I thought that's what the 15 rep to up-vote was for?

@JoshPetrie I got 500+ frnds in facebook, thanks to MafiaWars. They can do anything for free weapons :p


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Merge temporary account with actual
I have a registered Stack Exchange account (gamedev.stackexchange & meta.stackexchange) https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/users/1424/cobalthex
but I also have an unregistered  another gamedev.stackexchange account (https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/users/13448/cobalthex) that I would like to merge. This account was originally created on my phone because I browse Stack Exchange on opera mini which screws with the login page (the openID panel). I was wondering if someone could merge the accounts (the email address & names are the same).

I merged your accounts. In the future, feel free to just flag one of your posts for moderator attention. :)


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Serial Upvoting
I got hit yesterday with "Serial upvoting" yesterday - a whole bunch of my older answers voted up.  Any insights into what this is?  Just some random person deciding to vote up a bunch of stuff?

Looks like it all started with http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/a/6506/9366 I guess they thought +10 wasn't enough

I was going to comment that it's likely to be reversed, but looking at your history, it already was reversed... Definitely a bummer.

I just did a cursory check but it seems like that was the case. Someone took notice of some of your older posts and up-voted a bit too quickly.

Yea - kinda weird the way they all flooded in.

All this voting and scoring system is terribly designed, so much is't pretty much pointless to care about it at all.


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Stack Overflow Worldwide Meetups 2012: You're invited!
We're having a Stack Overflow meetup to get together with fellow programming, web, and other technology enthusiasts. But not all of our programmers and technology enthusiasts live on Stack Overflow, so this year we're explicitly expanding the Meetup Everywhere to include the whole Stack Exchange tech family. As a Game Dev participant, you're invited, too!
We recently announced the Second Annual Stack Overflow Meetup Everywhere day. This year, it will be on Saturday, April 28 (though local groups are welcome to pick any other day that week if a Saturday doesn't work for most of your members).
What: Stack Overflow worldwide meetups
When: Saturday, April 28, 2012
Where: your city!
Who: All users on Stack Exchange technology sites
You can visit the official Meetup.com page to find existing groups near you (or start a new one). Keep an eye on the Stack Exchange blog for more information as we move closer to the event - I'll post tips on what we learned from last year's event and some things to keep in mind when organizing your local meetup. See the blog announcement for some ideas about what your meetup can look like, why we're doing this, and some help navigating the meetup.com interface.
We'd love to see as many of you as possible participate in our Meetup Everywhere. We had over 2,000 people meet up around the world last year, and we've grown a lot since then. Help us spread the word by sharing info about this event through your blogs, social media accounts, lunches with coworkers, etc.
As always, if you have any questions or comments, do not hesitate to get in touch, and I hope to see you there!


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Where's the most appropriate place to post a general graphics programming question?
A recent question about raytracing recieved a comment that it had nothing to do with game development. While that may be true, is there another place where the question would be more appropriate?
I feel that of all the disciplines covered by StackExchange, game development is the one most closely related to graphics programming, and that general graphics programming knowledge, whether real-time or not, is most useful to the game development community.

Stack Overflow. There's no reason they can't answer graphics questions. Indeed, their OpenGL tag gets much more volume than ours.

that general graphics programming knowledge, whether real-time or not, is most useful to the game development community.

If I want information about raytracing, I wouldn't go to a game developer. Yes, they might know, but there are a lot of graphics programmers who don't touch game development. And most game developers, even those who specialize in graphics, don't know much about raytracing beyond the basics.

Roger. A search did reveal many questions related to raytracing on StackOverflow already. I guess I don't know know too well what's the intended scope for StackOverflow, as I only tend to use it for general programming questions. So in that sense, I wouldn't normally go to StackOverflow for a graphics question, but that might have been my misconception.


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How to unvote great comment?
I have accidentally clicked on "this is a great comment" arrow. But I can't find any way how to undo this (it was unwanted click).
Is there some way? If there isn't, can I ask why? If so, can it be added to the system (at least for such cases - accident)?
Thanks.

As a general rule, you should check the main Meta before asking a question here. :) They have been asked nearly everything possible...
In this case, the answer to Can I undo a comment upvote? is:

You can un-upvote a comment within the first 60 seconds, provided you did not navigate away.
Once you un-upvote a comment you can not upvote it again.

Not only the correct information, but a good practice to follow.

you can simply click on that arrow again, it will ask you if you want to undo the upvote. but later you can not upvote that comment again.

Worked for me! And I could also not add the upvote again, as you said. It gives me a message: "You already upvoted this comment in the past and undid the vote, you can not upvote it again"

Not working for me. I can click arrow as many as I want, but nothing happens. I'm using Google Chrome.

@zacharmarz I'm using chrome too, so i'm not sure what is causing that problem.


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Tag for the “Minecraft genre”?
I see a lot of questions which (implicitly or explicitly) are about making Minecraft (Infiniminer, Ace of Spades, Cube World, whatever) style games — to be more specific, let's say games where the game mechanics include modifying a voxel terrain. I am personally interested in the topic, so I would like there to be a tag for such questions.
What should the name of such a tag be?
I figure minecraft is inappropriate since the questions are not about Minecraft per se; I mention Minecraft merely as the most notable example of such games (and likely the cause of people being interested in the topic). Furthermore, Minecraft is a trademark which we should not use generically, and some might be annoyed by effectively lumping all such games to “Minecraft clones”.

Can't we just ban every "minecraft clone" question? I'm not serious, but the number of these things (not just here) is really absurd. Somedays it makes me wish Minecraft had never come into being, just to not have to deal with, "I'm trying to draw a bunch of cubes" questions.

The existing tag voxels seems to be mostly used this way, and it seems like a reasonable tag. The question is then whether we wish to avoid conflating “chunky voxels” like Minecraft with small detail-less ones like Voxatron.

As far as I'm concerned, what you're looking for is the minecraft tag.  It's the most succinct way of expressing what you're looking for (large open worlds made up of boxes that are procedurally generated) without getting too nitpicky about what the tag actually is.

@Tetrad: I don't want to suggest the oversimplification of “everything here is a Minecraft clone”, which I'm sure will annoy some people — and using someone's trademark generically isn't especially great either.

@Tetrad I don't really agree since, well, Minecraft didn't invent the genre (although it clearly popularized it.) I would keep [tag:minecraft], but for Minecraft-related questions (plugins and such, which we seem to get a lot.)

While I don't necessarily disagree with those points, you have to remember that if a random person off the street (who is somewhat versed in game development) wants to come in and ask a question about these types of topics, and can't find an appropriate tag because it isn't obvious enough, then the tag isn't very useful.  I don't think it's worth getting too pedantic over the outcome of folksonomy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy  The only place to really crack down is when tags are overused/overloaded (within the context of the community) or are "meta" tags.

That said if you want to suggest synonyms for the existing minecraft tag, or retag some minecraft-specific tags to something like minecraft-mods, feel free.

I notice now that the tag wiki for [tag:voxels] already mentions games-like-Minecraft. I'm thinking that pretty much settles my issue — there is no reason to take any action (other than maybe adding the tag where applicable).

The problem is just that Minecraft does not use voxels. Unlike Minecraft blocks a voxel is not textured. Apart from that the actual technological problems of voxel engines are vastly different from those of a Minecraft-clone. I know that this is a really common misconception, but does that really mean that we should encourage its continued use?

Previous discussion: In The “these tags are useless” thread, Jonathan Dickinson suggested “boxvoxel or boxworld”, in the context of eliminating minecraft entirely.

Arising because [tag:minecraft] would have to do with modding Minecraft and not actually a game that looks like it (I didn't really want to eliminate it, I think I suggested renaming it to [tag:minecraft-mod]; or neglected/forgot to suggest that).

Boxel actually sounds quite nice.

I don't see that there's a common phrase used for this. Browsing through the "minecraft" tag gives two common questions: "how do I generate/render a voxel landscape," and "how do I do this minecraft mod?" With a few questions of the sort "Minecraft has this game mechanic, how do I clone it?"
I think it'd be useful to have a tag to refer to a voxel landscape, ie to distinguish between sparse voxels (eg Qubicle models) and full landscapes (eg Minecraft). Yet "voxel-terrain" and "voxel-landscape" seem like too many syllables to me, especially for the audience that typically asks these questions.
I think "minecraft" is still a useful tag, in that sometimes people really do mean "like in Minecraft".
I suggest: minecraft-mod, minecraft, and ... uh... boxworld? And leave voxel to sparse-voxel and cellular-automata questions.


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Should "Did not do the research" questions be answered or penalised?
Question
Questions such as this one show a gross lack of even basic research. (My answer to the question is in fact an almost straight explanation of Google's first result.)
So far, I tend to answer these questions (here and on other stackexchange sites) and point to the appropriate resources. However, many members simply downvote with a "RTFM" / "Google it" comment instead.
Should these questions be answered or should they be flagged and removed from the site?
Answer
The consensus seems to be that Yes, questions with almost no research should still be answered. This is because the gamedev SE site is designed to be a comprehensive and authoritative source of answers on the topic of game development.
As an addendum, it probably wouldn't hurt to let the question's author know that his question was trivially answerable with a modicum of research, and point them in the direction of the following resources, in order to drive the quality of the questions and answers up:

Writing the perfect question
Spotting help vampires
How to ask a smart question
How To Ask Questions The Smart Way

That question in particular should be closed as "Too localized."

@NicolBolas That particular question isn't too localized with the edit somebody added to make it about the general case.

I edited it after his comment! :-D

It's worth noting that when things are purplexing, your confused, pushed for time and Google searches find nothing because you don't know how to word them, or how relevent each page is anyway. That uniquely, Stack Exchange can still help.

I can understand the sentiment of your statement alan2here. I have many times been in the position of looking for something on google, or even an SE, and find nothing because I was looking for the "wrong" thing. this is where the comments of "similar to postX" a common action by moderators, and high rep users. sometimes I have written some questions only to find that the answer was the first result on Google (if I had done the right search)

For any question involving 'incorrect wording' made from a beginner, there's a nice Search feature to use. Incorrect wording will still involve some words to fill a search query with. That will also give you the correct wording, if you are willing to spend a few minutes to actually read what you found. After that, if something is unclear rinse and repeat until a new question is acceptable. I think that's the whole point.

Just my 2c, I think both. They should be answered, so that the answers can be a part of the next person's research. Authoritative source of knowledge and whatnot.
But, I think they should be penalized as well so that the asker learns from the experience and does more of their own research next time.

@Suds: err...that would make sense if they DID the research in the first place, wouldn't it? It's useless to answer to create a 'knowledge base' when the users asking those question are proven to NOT search for a knowledge base. Let alone reading the FAQ.

I agree with Dave it all depends on whether the intent of the site is to follow the "no question too simple" model of StackOverflow.
I must disagree though with "But you shouldn't just give them the answer only how to work it out" - whether this site should have a lower limit on simplicity is open for discussion but it has already been decided that it is for straightforward, answerable questions - it says as much in the FAQ.
GameDev is not a 'learning resource'* it is a 'reference resource' - if the question has one 'right' answer then giving clues as how to find it will only annoy all the people who find it on Google etc. and are looking for a quick answer to help them with their real problem, and reduce the usefulness of the site.
(*Not simply because 'that's what the FAQ says', but to help someone learn requires a continuous open dialogue which this model is designed specifically to avoid.)
Personally I think this site should follow SO in allowing any question no matter how simple. I've always envisaged the StackExchange network as being a dynamic encyclopedia  where the 'facts' are revised as the community knowledge becomes more refined.
You wouldn't get someone at Encyclopedia Britannica saying "Everyone knows water has hydrogen in it. We cater to a higher class of encyclopedia readers and will not waste our page real estate on that!" - if everyone thought like that two generations from now everyone will think water is just liquid oxygen.

But on StackOverflow simple/obvious questions are often penalized.  Hey, as CUDA programmer, I've seen silly beginner mistakes by some posters lead to vicious down-voting which always saddens me.  I mean CUDA isn't exactly intuitive to a beginner...  In my experience SO is anything but a place where no question is too simple these days.  Rather than help beginners by editing/massaging their questions to eliminate mistakes/silly errors, people simply blast them and post "answers" mocking them... that's been my experience at least, though it's of course not always the case.

Agreed - in fact I wanted to update my answer with regards to the behaviour of posters towards 'too simple questions' (but didn't feel it appropriate after the answer had already received votes).
I think down voting and commenting 'rtfm' as brice said many do should be penalised. It creates a hostile atmosphere not just for the new user but for everyone who browses the site. There is no excuse for it - vote to close and leave it alone - and if there is no fitting 'close' reason to choose I think that says quite a bit!
Perhaps my post should have said: "follow the intended model of SO".

Good suggestions, I definitely agree.  Users like you make SO great.  We're all learners, I'm sure even some of the most uprated posters' questions would be chuckled at by the authors of some given language standard.  When I see beginner bashing I try to encourage the person and admonish the snobs, as appropriate.  Of the criticism, I suppose the Is this homework? is probably the most valid, but even that gets somewhat annoying, given than there's often a hazy line between hmwk, class projects, independent study, research, and entrepreneurial ventures for beginning SW engineers.

@JasonR.Mick I have to disagree there. I'm a newbie CUDA and Scala programmer myself and posted some silly (at least somewhat silly?) questions. They weren't downvoted. Actually, got quite a few upvotes (many more than on other legitimate questions I made) because I did some research, even if it went in the wrong direction. The problem is not lack of knowledge, is lack of research intentions. If you research and fail doing so, you deserve a legitimate answer even if it's perceived as easy. If you encourage ANY question, the site will become too noisy and therefore not too appealing/useful.

Easy questions are OK, no-research questions are not. It's that simple.

@Lohoris, but that assertion is what the whole discussion is about ;D. I would say they are, because SE is meant as a repository of 'timeless Q&As' (I can't remember where I read the use of that expression but I think it sums it up perfectly). Besides what happens when 'common knowledge' on the rest of the internet changes? I.e. right now Windows Media Foundation is brand new and "how do I load a filter?" is a reasonable question - 10 months from now it would be getting closed it if was that cut and dry.
I guess my question is, what use is a factual reference with only half the facts?

@sebf well, you have a point :)

Ok, this seems to be the consensus. It reflects my behaviour anyway, it just means that I can point people here. Thanks guys. will change the accepted answer if the consensus changes.

Depends - if we want this site to have the answers to everything and thus be the go to place for any and all questions or only the answers to slightly more researched questions.
I personally have no issue answering questions if some one has not done the research, asking here is no different to asking a teacher or a parent for help or any one else. Could argue, asking here is their way to research on their own accord.
But you shouldn't just give them the answer only how to work it out. So that they can then figure it out themselves.

As per SO rules, unresearched questions are allowed, but I tend to make a not too subtle difference: I will downvote questions if a similar search inside the corresponding SO site gives at least one very similar question in the first two pages. That would indicate that the user didn't bother searching or even reading the array of similar previous questions SO offers when creating a new entry.
Case in point: "How do I load [asset type] in XNA at runtime?" questions.
Otherwise, I'll refer to the external resource and offer a simplified explanation, but clearly state that a web search would have been the way to go.
Case in point: "Normal for surface of cube in XNA"

As a person who has had the 'google it' answer thrown at them I would like to answer - 'what am I googling?'
There are times when I have a question that I just can't word correctly, or a technical name I don't remember or, when learning a new language, I simply don't know the terminology.
Nearly every question I have asked on the stack exchange websites hasn't been answered 100% correctly but has put me in the right direction - and then I can 'google it'.
In one question I even asked if people could tell me what to 'google'.

My biggest thing is that I often happen upon these kinds of question when I am researching something.  So to see "Go Google it" is not very helpful for all of the other people that may find the question while searching for answers themselves.  As long as the question is valid and appropriate for the site I believe it should be answered in as much relative detail as makes sense for the situation.
Now, if it happens to be a standard repeat question then detail is not necessary.  Just provide a link to an answered question of the same issue.  And at all times try to remember that "beginners" don't always know "what" to search for and may have problems finding similarities in other answers themselves.


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Are the entity-system and component-based tags describing the same thing?
We have these two tags: entity-system and component-based.
I am under the (perhaps mistaken) impression that an entity system is exactly the same thing as a component-based system, and that they are two different names for a system which revolves around having entities which store a collection of components in the style described in Evolve your Hierarchy.
Is this true - are they exactly the same thing? I've suggested the tag synonym, but I want to bring it up here to check that it is actually valid.

I don't think all entity systems are component based. Common consensus at this point in time might be to steer people who are asking about non-component-based entity systems towards component based systems, but I wouldn't call them synonyms.

+1; and it works the other way too (one can have a system that is not an entity system but that is built upon the aggregation-based principles of component-oriented design).

That's enlightening then. Thankyou!