text:
Where can I ask this question?
So, I am somewhat annoyed now:
I ask a question on Stack Overflow.
It gets heavily downvoted and locked.
So, I try asking a question on GameDev about converting a mathematical formula into actual working code.
It does not get downvotes, but does get locked.
Now this would be fine, but then in the locking message I am specifically told to go to stack overflow?

So, either GameDev knows nothing about StackOverflow, or the person who locked it is badly informed.
(And, not that I should be talking about SO here, but their locking reason is "Questions seeking debugging help ("why isn't this code working?") must include the desired behavior" even though the question does list the desired behaviour! Jesus, why cant people make up their minds?)
So anyway, with that tiny rant/constructive criticism over, I would just like to ask: Where CAN I ask that question? Considering it is a programming question, I have no idea where else I should actually ask. I could potentially ask on the mathematics forum, however that would be severely offtopic and would definitely get locked.

You may (emphasis on may) find that that question is on topic over at https://codereview.stackexchange.com/

So you are new around these parts. That is ok, first, let me say welcome!
Second, please stop and take a look around, there are rules and guidelines for this place and you have been breaking a few of them.  I would strongly recommend you get started with a tour of the particular Stack Exchange site relevant to your topic:
http://www.stackoverflow.com/tour
Afterward, if you are still confused what you should be and shouldn't be asking, make your next stop the help center:
http://www.stackoverflow.com/help
Here you'll find specific QA for keeping you on-topic "What topics can I ask about here?", and the rules we try to follow here on the Stack Exchange.
The Stack Exchange community can be your best friend if you abide by a few of these rules. There are hundreds if not thousands of people willing to help answer your questions, but this community is firmly rooted in the mindset of happily "providing fishing lessons", but absolutely "no free fish".
Your problem is not that you were asking a question in the wrong place. It is that you were asking an unproductive question. By asking that question, you come very close to just asking for a solution, without showing much troubleshooting effort.
If you are truly here to learn, prove it with some effort.
Do not expect to show up with a problem, put in zero work, and walk away with an answer from someone else who solved it for you.  You will see this time and time again, on Stack Exchange: "What have you tried?"
Ask better questions
In your first question, you ask "What is the error in this code?", take a look at that sentence.  This is your code! You should have run it, and seen an error, if it exists. If it doesn't, and your getting weird output values, now you know its a logical issue; you can turn on your debugger, and start walking through the steps.
Follow these guidelines, read the manual and I think you will find Stack Exchange is an amazing community. We are looking forward to having you aboard; If you are up to the challenge.

It's closed here because it's about turning a mathematical function into code. That's not something that's specific to game development. It could also be closed as a "Debug my code" question. Those questions are not a good fit for the stack exchange sites. "Debug my code" questions only benefit the person asking them and don't help the community at large. You should ask it on a site that's more oriented for discussions, like a forum.

Fair enough. Found a forum which seems to be being helpful.
Thanks!


text:
Was my question closed for the wrong reason?
How can I smoothly rotate a joint to an angle?
Maybe I should have been more clear, I was asking what torque to apply (each tick) to a joint to achieve a rotation to a specific angle. (Using Box2d)
I think they interpreted my question as "how do I interpolate between two different angles".

I can see how one might interpret that as a duplicate.
If the linked duplicate does not address your question, just edit your question to include the clarifying details necessary to disambiguate it. In this case, those details would at least include what you just mentioned, that you were "asking what torque to apply (each tick) to a joint to achieve a rotation to a specific angle," rather than how to interpolate the rotation angle.
Editing the question will place it into the re-open queue for review and handling.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
How can I make this question more measurable without making it too complicated?
How can I make this question more measurable, without it becoming more complicated?
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/79506/oculus-rift-and-super-resolution
For example a good test could be a character fixed in position in a simple game-world, at a given low resolution, with for simplicity as it might mane a big difference no full screen AA, looking around with mouse-look and asked to describe an object pointed at in the world that is much smaller at the distance it is away from the player than a pixel (block of pixels as part if simulating the low resolution) of the conventional screen.
Then repeating the experiment with the rift and head-look.
However ideally there would be a sample of at least a few people, perhaps different sorts of people as well, for practicality I wanted to use just 1 person.

It looks to me like what you are asking for is a survey of other people's experiences with a particular visual artifact or effect on particular kinds of hardware.
Unfortunately, this kind of survey question is both too opinion-oriented (since there is no objectively-answerable question) and too broad (since there are an infinite number of "correct" answers, since you are just asking for descriptions of experiences.
That's not the kind of question the StackExchange network is dedicated to collecting. You should probably seek out a discussion forum, such as GDNet to ask about this topic.

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


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Why was my question about window shaking in XNA closed?
Update: Finally figured the answer out on my own. Updated question to reflect the cause of the twitching/flashing.
I asked about XNA Window Shaking and it was fairly quickly closed as too broad. In thinking about it, I realized I gave a false impression by saying I didn't know where to look in code (giving the impression this question would be an on-going discussion over debugging), which I've since edited out.
My question was not about help debugging my code, and I think in its current form it reflects that. What it is about is help in understanding this problem, its causes (and possibly potential fixes). I don't think this is too broad, as these specific problems often have very well defined causes.
To take an example from StackOverflow I ran across recently, someone asked about a connection pool timeout exception they were getting in MySQL. No sections of code given. No further details than that their code was hosted in IIS. Yet someone was able to give an answer by explaining the cause and general tips for solutions. I feel my question is in the same vein.
Update: I ran across this forum post where others were having the same problem. The only pertinent info missing from my question, which I guess I'll edit to add, is that the problem does indeed seem to only happen after minimizing, something I hadn't connected with the issue.
It's fairly clear this isn't a broad problem space where speculation is the only possibility. Speculation is possible if you don't know the answer, but that's not the fault of the question, and it shouldn't be closed for that reason. There is a definitive answer out there somewhere, but I guess now people won't be able to find it on Stackexchange :/

To me there is a big difference between asking people to help you understand the cause of an observable behavior and the cause of a system generated error. Had the person removed their error from the question and said something like "The browser just hangs sometimes and it's fixed when I restart IIS. Help me understand possible causes of this." it would have definitely been closed as too broad. You don't seem to have any data to back up or help explain specifics on the behavior you are observing so we can only guess what some causes are. This is what your example provided that you didn't.

@SpartanDonut That really depends on the situation in question. To make a silly example, "Why does the window close when I press the X in the upper right?" has a definitive singular answer but is still observable behavior. The problem is, like I first commented on my question, the closer does not understand the problem and I feel cannot make that judgement call that this observation has broadly many potential causes. It very well might have a singular answer that someone with an in-depth knowledge of XNA might recognize.

Ask yourself this: in theory, can someone come along and answer my question with a single answer explaining the situation? If the answer is a hypothetical yes, then the benefit of doubt should be given to my question, and it should be reopened.

Still sounds like a problem you're best suited to solve. Start removing things until it doesn't shake any more. Or maybe you can attach event handlers to the window position changing to see what's causing it? Does it happen with a vanilla hello world application? Does it happen with your game on other computers? There's a lot more debugging/troubleshooting you can do on your own to narrow the scope of the question.

If you provided more information that could actually lead to an answer not based on a lucky guess then I would agree as long as the question didn't evolve into a debug my code type question. As it stands, I feel that your question likely has more than one possible answer under different circumstances. To be a good question we need to understand YOUR circumstances so that there can be a single right answer to YOUR question.

To reiterate what Josh said on your question, if you want to spend some time in chat I'm sure there are a few of us there who would be willing to help you work through your issue.

@Byte56, SpartanDonut I think you two are in the same boat as me, in that you're not familiar with this problem and therefore have to troubleshoot the same as me. This doesn't mean everyone in the world is unfamiliar and needs to troubleshoot. How do you know there isn't someone out there with a clear answer? This is why I asked the question in the first place, hoping someone was familiar with this and could give known causes and pointers. It's not exactly fair to close my question and prevent the help I'm seeking.

@SpartanDonut I'm currently at work but I'll try chat later, thank you. I still don't think my question should've been closed, however

To clarify, it's not fair because the close reason is based on a false equivalency: someone unfamiliar with the problem thinks "I personally need to troubleshoot" then equates this with "question is too broad". They don't know that. It's a judgement based on a lack of knowledge. If in doubt, why not leave the question open? I'd be okay if someone very knowledgeable closed it with a reason of "There's literally hundreds of possible answers, please provide X, Y, and Z info to narrow it down". That I could've lived with.

I do know quite a lot about XNA (certainly enough to know that it does almost nothing to manipulate the window in the way you have described except during, for example, fullscreen/windowed transitions). And I did tell you the kind of information that could be useful to narrow it down.

@Josh Petrie I'm sorry for my tone. Just frustrating to have my question closed for reasons I don't agree with, and I took my frustration out in the wrong way. You very well may know a lot about XNA, but it seems like you've never heard of this issue before, or anything like it (am I wrong about that?). Because of this, I feel like you may not actually know if this is a broad question or not. Perhaps it's a known issue elsewhere in the world (maybe the XNA team knows about it).

I'll try to capture a video of it somehow, and try chat, but I still protest this being closed

That the thread that you posted goes on for so long is kind of an example as to why the question might not be the best fit for the site. Without us being you, more information would need to be collected to actually answer it definitively, or we would have to count on someone listing all of the possible reasons to actually answer it / find the one that could be a cause for you.

Meta visitation is low, the best place to protest is chat. Many of the users that stop by there have the required rep to re-open questions.

@Noctrine Again, that line of reasoning is borne from a lack of understanding of the issue. Without understanding the problem we can speculate that there's many possibilities, or very few. But it's not very fair to default to "too many possible answers" and close my question. It's pretty likely this is a specific issue with one or two possible causes, like Josh eludes to in his answer (calling my question "too specific"). Last I checked, specific questions are desired on stack exchange, making closing my question all the more baffling.

I didn't expect loads of people to know an answer, nor did I want anyone to speculate or go through back and forth with me to get information. The whole reason I was asking was a hope that the "rare beast" Josh mentioned would show up and be familiar with the problem, as it seems extremely likely to be an issue with a knowable and definitive cause, even with the amount of information I do provide. I just don't understand why my question can't remain open with a hope of a knowledgeable person finding it.

On StackExchange, we close questions that are too broad:

There are either too many possible answers, or good answers would be
  too long for this format. Please add details to narrow the answer set
  or to isolate an issue that can be answered in a few paragraphs.

First: this doesn't mean they are bad questions, or that the people participating in the close vote are trying to be mean. I am genuinely interested in the cause of the bug you are describing, but it would be wrong of me (especially as a moderator) not to vote to close your question as it was asked.
Second: precisely what constitutes "too broad" varies somewhat between SE sites. SO's definition may be more lax than ours. Or it could simply be that nobody with sufficient voting privileges on SO's far more massive site saw the question in a reasonable timeframe. It's generally not a useful argument to point to another borderline-poor question and say "but this one is still open," because that usually just means you call attention to a question that should also be closed that just managed to slip through the cracks.
Third: the argument that a broad question should be acceptable because one of the many potential speculative answers might lead you to, or actually be, the correct answer doesn't hold on SE. That isn't the kind of question SE is dedicated to archiving (with the outlying exceptions of some of the "softer" sites like Programmers). On SE, we want to keep specific questions with specific answers; for everything else, there are forums. Your question isn't specific enough.

You haven't provided much information. Potential answers that tightly bound the limited information you have provided are many, even if most of them are wrong.
XNA itself does not have a commonly-report bug regarding the window "shaking" on Windows builds (there many reports of things shaking, but they are almost exclusively having to do with things like half-pixel offsets of window content, which don't fit your description thus far.
One doesn't need to know anything about the specific issue to know that the reported issue is too broad. "Why does my game crash?" is too broad a question regardless of if I've ever seen your source code.
A question that requires intensely project-specific knowledge (such as a bug known to an internal or former XNA developer) is too specific, relying on the assumption that such a rare beast will happen to stumble across the question. We do have a few people here who have worked on XNA, but this isn't a site to ask them questions specifically. Since we no longer have the "too localized" close reason, we actually tend to (amusingly) close these questions as "too broad" since they fall under the umbrella of "everybody else without the specific knowledge would have to speculate."
Finally, a question with so little information could have a straightforward answer; for your question that might be "the window shakes because of bug #6182 in XNA," as you initially hypothesize. But for another user searching this site for "why does my XNA window shake?" the answer might be because they adjust the position of the window themselves, accidentally, somewhere in their render function. The lack of scoping information in your question makes it hard for that future user to disambiguate your problem from theirs (because they were very different problems even if they have similar symptoms). An important goal of SE is to collect questions and answers for posterity, not just to solve an individual users problems, and these sorts of questions are counter to that goal.

Speculation is for forums, not GDSE. It doesn't matter that a million monkeys speculating might eventually produce an answer that is, or leads you to, the solution. That's a great process (bouncing the problem off others), it's just not what this site is for.

I do happen to know a fair bit about XNA, enough to know that this issue you've described as you have described it is very unlikely to be a problem purely in XNA's code. Something about your code is causing (directly or indirectly) the behavior, which means some of your code (or a video of your bug) is going to be necessary to diagnose the problem. That starts to get into "debug my code" question territory, which is why it's probably better you hash out the problem in the [chat] first to get all the back-and-forth involved in those questions out of the way, and then edit your question with the clarified information from that discussion.

As I already said in the question, I don't manipulate the window at all, so your last bullet point doesn't apply. Secondly, you contradict yourself by trying to claim that my question is both lacking in info and therefore broad, and too specific. Quite clearly my question is not broad, as you correctly get to in one of your bullet points, rendering your other points immaterial. XNA doesn't generally manipulate the window, nor does my code attempt it, so this is a very specific problem with a likely specific answer.

Finally, you have no idea if someone with the knowledge needed will see and answer my question. That's not very fair to cut me off from that possibility just because you think it's unlikely. It's also not fair to assume I'd be the only one to ever run into this problem.

I'm afraid you're still failing to see that the point is not whether or not somebody can answer your question, it's whether or not the text of your question fits our community rules for "too broad" or not. It sounds like we have reached an impasse at this point, and you're simply going to have to either take your question to the [chat] or an actual discussion forum or hope that the community disagrees with me and votes to re-open the question.

The exact text of "Too Broad" reads "There are either too many possible answers, or good answers would be too long for this format". If you can tell me for a fact that my question has many possible answers, then I'd completely agree with you. If you can't, if you in fact don't know how many answers there are, the fair thing to do is to give the benefit of the doubt to my question. "Too specific" seems, from my perspective, to be you reinterpreting the rules.

I don't think your question is too specific, that bullet point is meant to be an example of the practical ways we use the "too broad" close reason here.

Deleted my previous comment here, updated my Meta post


text:
Where do I talk to people about the Game Jam?
I'm wanting to have a try at the Summer Game Jam.
At the moment I have an idea of what to try, but aren't sure of how to implement it, however that's not the point of my question.
Having never participated in one of these before I think it would be useful to be able to talk to other people who are participating.
Is there a specific chat room for this, or some other discussion area?
Is it OK to put up questions on the main GDSE page, or will that be considered spamming?
Cheers,
Dave

There's always the GDSE chat: http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/19/game-development Do derail us if we're talking about off topic stuff :)

I think that's a good topic for the chatroom.
http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/19/game-development

Ask questions about the jam in meta or in chat. Chat will likely get you answers faster but which tool you choose is up to you.
Do not ask questions about the jam on the main site. You may use the main site for asking questions for issues you are having while developing your game for the jam. Keep in mind there are not special rules for game jam game dev questions and your question must still follow the rules outlined in the help center. When in doubt, as others have pointed out, just head over to chat and ask away.
Happy jamming!


text:
Let parallaxscrolling be dashy
Oh yes, I am going to meta-post about a one-punctuation-character-difference, because this is about dashes and I love dashes.
parallaxscrolling has 34 questions — parallax-scrolling none. All of our other multi-word tags (collision-detection, opengl-es, ...) are dashes-between-words.
I think non-dashy infidels should be forcibly converted to dashyness. Do the mods wield almighty power to convert masses—or should we retag these the old-fashioned way?

That's because parallax-scrolling didn't exist before. It does now. And, parallaxscrolling has been merged into it, so anyone trying to use that non-dash-non-sense will be converted to the dash-tastic parallax-scrolling.


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Had To Answer My Own Question To Be Allowed To Ask It?
So the saga of my question about XNA windows twitching and its subsequent plea on Meta to reopen the question had a bitter-sweet outcome that I feel needs to be addressed.
As a very brief history, I originally asked my question and had it put on hold within minutes. I made some edits and began making my case for having it reopened which was redirected to a Meta post. I won't get into more details as that Meta post can be read.
Anyways, I finally found the answer to my own question. The entire reason I had asked was I had hoped someone would recognize the symptoms of my problem and be able to direct me to a solution. Did it require research and debugging code? Yes, but only if you're unfamiliar with the problem. It would've been well within the realm of possibility for someone to answer with "That sounds exactly like this bug with MediaPlayer I've run into, I bet you're using that incorrectly," even without my mentioning MediaPlayer (my code is fairly complex, making narrowing down causes especially difficult).
The point of my question/post here is, does anyone not find it absurd that I had to answer my own question to even be allowed to ask the question? Had I been able to narrow down the problem I'd never have asked it in the first place, because I'd be able to fix the problem myself (which I have fixed it by now, knowing MediaPlayer's bug was causing it). I came to GameDev with the hopes of avoiding endless debugging and had no intention of wanting others to speculate or help me debug. I was simply hoping for answers.
This incident has left me feeling this StackExchange is too strict in its rules, and honestly makes me not want to ask any more questions (what's the point if I have to get 99% of the way to the answer before being allowed to ask?). Bugs without relevant code are not automatically impossible to recognize nor do they automatically have many causes that would necessitate needing more details. And just because the reader of the question doesn't know the answer, and would have to research just like the asker, does not automatically mean there's nobody out there who could give a good definitive answer (without needing all the explicit details uncovered by thorough debugging).
As a poor analogy, it's like being stuck on a complex math problem, asking for help, and being told "Can you narrow down the problem to where it's just adding two numbers? Then I can help". But I can also add two numbers, so what's the point of my even asking?

This is exactly the process by which we get those kind of rules re-considered or overturned. (Being very sincere) thanks for using Meta.

My understanding of the rules as they are today is had you taken the effort to narrow down your problem to Media Player causing the issue, like the person in your linked Stack Overflow post, you would have gotten up votes and not close votes (assuming it wasn't closed as a duplicate instead). I don't think the work it would take to get this far is as extreme as you claim.
I realize you said it's a poor analogy, but if you said you were stuck on a complex math problem, only told us you were using Calculus, and said you were seeing 5 as a result when you were expecting -3 but did not include any details on the steps you took to reach the conclusion of 5 no one would be able to help you. To expand upon your analogy further, yes there are probably people who know calculus who could help you reach -3... the problem is you might get 12 different approaches on how to reach -3 and given how little information that was provided in the original question that was asked, the one answer that helped you is technically not more correct than the other 11 making the question no longer about a specific problem you are having and about a generic problem anyone using calculus is having.
Another example, just to show you what we would be subjecting ourselves to if we don't define a clear line, would be a question as such:

I tried implementing proper collision resolution but the player just walks through solid objects. What are some common issues with collision resolution that might be able to help me solve this issue?

The above is just awful because there is no way someone could reasonably help this person without lengthy discussion or flat out guessing. The issue could be because of his collision resolution code, his collision detection code, or maybe he's using a physics library and he's implemented movement in a way that doesn't support the provided physics. I'm sure someone out there has seen his problem before and might have an idea as to what was done wrong based on his description, but if a person cannot answer a question with some degree of confidence I don't think that person should be attempting to answer the question.
If you can come up with how we draw the line between why you feel your question is appropriate vs keeping questions like the example above out I'm open to suggestions but if we cannot objectively define that line I think I have to lean on the side of believing that questions, such as yours, are off topic for the site because they don't provide enough context (too broad) to aid in answering the question with confidence.

The only reasonable middle ground I can come up with on my own (I'm very open to suggestions), is use of community wikis for solving something like this. I still don't know where we would draw the line for "This can be a community wiki" and "This should be closed" though

It has to do with how specific the problem is. "Why is there black smoke pouring out of my house?" is answerable with "It's on fire". "Why do I hear a clicking sound?" is not. Like I was saying in the other Meta post, it has to do with how many possible answers there are to determine how specific the problem is. If in doubt, I feel benefit should be given to the question, and not assume the question has too many possible answers.

More than one possible answer is too many. Your question had more than one possible answer without more context.

How do you know there's more than one possible answer? If you can't answer that, if you don't know, how is it fair to declare a death sentence on my question from that position?

One of the links you posted mentioned a lost device being the culprit. Perhaps you were interacting with GraphicsDevice or related objects in a way that could have caused this. Maybe you there was a GPU driver issue. Maybe you have a GPU hardware issue. Maybe you've got WinAPI hooks into your window and are doing things that could potentially cause this.

Lost device wouldn't explain the behavior I saw. My original question already mentioned I wasn't manipulating the window through any means. All signs pointed to it being something unusual, like a bug with XNA, which in fact it turned out to be. Armed with this information, I would've been able to answer my own question as it was originally written, without need for more context. A very good sign that my question was not too broad, as the problem I saw was very specific and narrow, especially considering window manipulation is so rare.

I'm not going to debate this with you in a lengthy meta comment thread. Your scenario is not how you describe it despite what you want to believe and if you want to convince me otherwise we need a real time conversation. I hang out in chat very frequently so feel free to stop by and we can discuss this further.

And just to be really clear... I can change my mind though I will also convince you of seeing my side of the story as well. But I am open minded so please join me in chat :)

I don't think that the “more than one possible answer” describes a situation in where a question would be closed as too broad.  Many, many well–written Stack Exchange questions have more than one possible answer:  that's why there is also the Accepted Answer function.
The problem is whether the person providing the answer needs to engage in troubleshooting or diagnostics — which is probably not possible unless that person is the same as the one asking, and who already does so and thus answers their own question.


text:
Parallel action is game
I been suggested by rwong, in programmers stack exchange, to ask for my question to be migrated at here.
Do you think I will find my answer at here?

Yes, you can have them migrate the question here. You need to flag it on their site, as we don't have the power to take their questions, they need to give them to us.

Done, I asked them.


text:
Appeal for undelete of a question
I would like to appeal for an undelete, since this question is puzzling me, and I would really like an answer!! I'll add a bounty if I have to:
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/79245/the-concept-of-a-user-vs-player?noredirect=1#comment141174_79245
Absolutely no effort was made to address my additional points in the comments...

The question was automatically deleted after being closed for a set period of time. You could try asking the question again, with any attempts you've tried to solve the problem included in your question. Whatever you can include to narrow the scope would be good, since the question was closed as too broad.
I'm not saying the new question won't be closed as well. Just try to make sure it fits within the guidelines defined in the help.

Thanks, I'll try that.


text:
Can we merge the 'three.js' and 'threejs' tags?
I guess these two tags are the same and one of them should be removed (preferably threejs):

three.js
threejs

updating post history, 12 rows affected (pipe delimited)
updating posts, 12 rows affected  (pipe delimited)
updating PostTags associations, 7 rows affected
removing/renaming old tag, 0 rows affected
updating count for master tag, 1 rows affected
tag remapping of [three.js] and [threejs] complete!
remapping 0 synonyms
13 favorite and ignored tags remapped!
Tag Synonym threejs -> three.js was approved!
Broadcasting tag-engine reload

Done.

The contrarian in me was tempted to downvote this just for the hell of it.


text:
Why is 'Ethical F2P monetisation' a good fit for the site?
Ethical F2P monetisation methods

Which F2P methods do players find ethical and acceptable?

So I find tons of issues with this.

ethical is subjective.
acceptable is subjective
players are simply not a single entity
each answer will be a list of answers
answers are very likely to become outdated quickly w/ cultural changes
answers are very likely to become outdated as additional F2P methods are developed
answers will be backed up on anecdotal evidence
answers will based upon observations of specific communities

So all answers will (for a better word) expire quickly and be very incomplete. I don't think these issues are made okay due to it now being a community wiki. (I thought it was accepted that community wikis were not a crutch for questions that are a bad fit for the Q/A format of the site). Additionally being a game developer doesn't make one more qualified to answer this question, in fact most people are answering drawing upon their personal experiences as a consumer.
Also Ethical F2P monetisation methods is not analogous to Why might a PC game have a set number of resolutions? as was argued in the comments.
The answers to Why might a PC game have a set number of resolutions? take into account 2 things, limitations in developer manpower, and technical reasons. Being a game developer actually makes you more qualified to ask this question (it doesn't for the F2P one) and the answers are much less time sensitive.

FYI closed now.

I don't think it's a good fit for the site, but I will admit to leaving it alone (for the time) as something of a litmus test for the rest of the community.
We as diamond moderators get a lot of flack for exercising our unilateral close votes aggressively on this site. There is some merit to that criticism: as diamond moderators, we should be acting as exception handlers rather than active enforcers. There are several reasons having to step in as frequently as we do is bad:

It shapes the community around our bias rather than that of the larger userbase. There are four of us, compared to many thousands of non-diamonds. That kind of skew in the direction of the community is undesirable. It goes against much of the StackExchange philosophy.
It reinforces the precedent that we will step in, leaving the people with the power to vote-to-close less interested in doing so because one of us will take care of it.
It means the quality bar of available questions fluctuates drastically when the four of us aren't around or as active (typically on weekends).
It upsets people whose questions are closed due to a perception (grounded in reality) of unfairness or arbitrary closure.

I worry about the quality level of questions here, especially since the Graphics Programming SE got promoted to beta and will likely skim off a good portion of our good questions. Part of the problem with question quality is not having the community have a clear understanding of what it's guidelines should be, and if it isn't capable of exercising those guidelines itself it cannot develop that clear picture.
In the past I have justified most of my unilateral decisions by arguing that question quality needs to be kept high to keep the site afloat and we don't currently have enough active 3k+ users to close bad stuff quickly enough for neophyte-but-well-meaning users to post answers and start reinforcing a precedent that those bad questions are not okay.
So when I saw the question, and its similar in structure to a few other borderline questions we've had recently, I decided not to unilaterally close it to see if the community would do so instead. Indeed, I had noted a slight but visible increase in the number of community-closed questions recently. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like enough has changed quite yet; review stats suggest that only a handful of users with close-vote power actually bother to review questions.

I don't think it's a good fit for the site. It's primarily opinion-based, unless someone can cite some studies showing what players find acceptable.


text:
"how to get started making a game" faq link
While offtopic, people keep asking questions in subject. I think that Help Center > Asking page can be improved a bit, by linking how to get started making a game to this page. During my personal experience in starting with gamedev I can say that this page is, at least, a very good starting point. Maybe even propagate it a little bit up (closer to Ask Question page), since such questions often asked by younger audience which is often impatient and/or unexperienced to read the FAQ.

Remember that downvotes here only mean people don't agree with the proposal.

UserGuide.SE.Com FTW !!! Have nooby guides and canned responses should just link to them when a mod shuts a question down with a default reason.

I think essentially what you're suggesting is to create an answer for "How to get started". The reason that question is off topic here is because there is no correct answer. I think attempting to answer it with a single link is a bad idea.
I agree that Amit does some wonderful work, his tutorials are great. However, it's impossible for someone to cover all possible scenarios for getting started.
Further, most of the people who ask those questions, aren't reading anything anyway. They're just trying to find out how to get their question posted, regardless of the rules. It's not that they're reading the rules, then going against them (though that sometimes happens), they have a goal to post a question, and just "click-through" whatever's in the way. For this reason, I'm not sure that moving it up would be any more helpful or why this particular topic should be treated any differently that all the other off topic questions we have. Once we're moving all the off topic examples to the ask page, it's a cluttered mess, and we might be scaring away legitimate but unsure askers.


text:
The anniversary gamejam theme
The next gamejam will mark a year of gamejams here on gd.se! Consequently, we should make sure it's a special kind of gamejam with... special kind of stuff in it.
You get the point. We need some sort of ideas. We're not time pressed though, so feel free to think for as long as you want. Whenever you can think of something appropriate, post it as an answer here. The jam will most likely take place on the 23rd (or rather 24th) of October, for a proper anniversary, though this is not exactly settled yet.
I'll bake a cake.

Potluck Jam
Just riffing off of the meta jam and cake jam ideas here.

Thanks Michijan28 @ Wikimedia Commons
Before the start, everyone submits 5 "foods" (English words) into a common "buffet".
At the start, the words are shuffled and dealt to participants, so everyone has 5 random words from what others brought.
Pick 3 of those. That's your jam theme.

This sounds incredibly silly and fun

This sounds like a great idea.

Community building exercise?
This is less of a theme and more of an idea.  Recently a few of us in the GDSE chat took an adventure into Graphic Design Stack Exchange's chat, The Ink Spot.
I hoped to talk with some designers and artists to potentially to collaborate on upcoming portfolio game prototypes. To me, for the most part, they (both mods and members) seemed fairly interested in getting involved.
I have 2 thoughts:
Art-first challenge

Commission a second contest "Game Art Jam" for the Graphic Designers in The Ink Spot chat to take place before the "Game Dev Jam".
With possible mandatory art submission to OpenGameArt.org?
Then for the "Game Jam" theme, require people make a game built off only the art submitted in that contest?

Team up
Pair up with our art friends over in the other chat for some sort of team-based jam.
I realize some of this goes against the typical game jam mentality; the focus on lean prototyping with less visual appeal to get devs working more on mechanics etc.  But I think getting others involved could be beneficial to everyone and even M0R3 AWSOM3R!
Just some random thoughts. Let me know what you think!

I personally love the idea of teaming up with another site. Lets see what others think.

This is awesome.

Like the Art First Challenge but it is dependent on participation from the folks over there. Teaming up isn't a horrible idea either, but again is dependent on participation over there... which could go awry. "By the time I asked everyone was already on a team," "No one wanted to help me with my game idea" and "I work better alone" are some things that come to mind.

yea good point, there are always those additional challlenges when you move into the groupwork, responsibility and cooperation - but even with the art first challenge, i think we could really strengthen some community ties

I like the idea.

After some thought, this idea can be very risky too. Collaboration over the internet is hard, and making game-ready art is surprisingly hard if you've never done it before. Experience working with amateur artists and sites other than OGA made me realise what a god-send OGA really was: no more unaligned sprite sheets, lack of background channels, uncropped/uncut assets and so on. Also, are their users familiar with the principles of animation? You'd be surprised at the number of otherwise-talented artists who are unable to do a basic walk cycle; it's a different skill set.

i completely agree its an entirely different skill set and this could totally blow up in our faces.  it could also be the most amazing community galvanizing collaboration event in the history of the internet.  i really don't think any of these issues would totally make or break a game jam submission. maybe i am wrong it happens a lot. but would a sub par sprite sheet really ruin a game? especially if we are all using the same broken sprites

I'd also like to see this, but as mentioned, I think it'll be prohibitively difficult to coordinate. That would raise the bar for entry quite high and reduce the number of participants and submissions and hence fun. The first idea sounds good though, if the Graphics people are willing to organise their half.

Anniversary Game Jam: Meta
Make a game about game development. You can even include users from the community as playable characters!

"Starring Josh Petrie as Chuck Norris and Byte56 as Batman!"

@Anko With Noctrine as Dr. Evil!

One button game
In honour of the one year anniversary, make a game that is limited to accepting input as if it came from a single button.
You may accept input from any device (keyboard, mouse, touchscreen) but it must be treated as a button only - no gestures, no clicking on specific areas.
Bonus points for originality: try not to make a infinite runner / flappy bird clone!
See here for examples.

And next year we could have 2 buttons! :p

This is a cool idea.  Also this.

Anniversary Game Jam Theme: Cake
Nuff said.

But... its a lie!

"Its gamejam anniversary. Everyone bring their cake, we are gona have a party."

Ninjas
...and ninja-like things.

Bruce Lee wasn't a ninja though.

@AlexM. "..and ninja-like things."

Anniversary Game Jam: the random tip-top

Take the top 3 themes.
Choose one randomly.
???
JAM!

Unless I'm not following this is more or less how we've done it for a some of the jams already (2 of 3 I think?) which is fine but not very different. I wouldn't care if we did this again though.

@SpartanDonut, 2 of 4.  Although it's pretty standard, I enjoyed the voting process. pctroll: you can see the old polls here: Fall / There can only be one, and (Winter / Time is Broken)[http://meta.gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/1450/suggest-or-choose-a-theme-for-the-2014-winter-gdse-game-jam]

Yeah the voting is fun. We need a better system (votes hidden IMO) for it though I think.

What if this is one of the top three themes? Note: see here.


text:
Can we please be more friendly to new users?
I've been monitoring closed questions for a few days now. I noticed a very common pattern emerging:

The question is closed ("on hold")
It was closed by a single diamond mod
The mod closed it within 10-15 minutes of it being asked
The user (OP) had one rep only
The question is a poor fit to the site

Now, in all these cases, the only clue the poor mod left to this new user, who may not understand how SE sites work, is a generic statement under 'The users who voted to close gave this specific reason:`
While this is sticking to the technical and intentional design of the site, it's not helping. If the question texts themselves are an indicator of how poorly these users understand the site, they won't "get" why the question is closed.
What's worse is that many of these questions could be recast, salvaged, or even answered -- but all we're left with is, um, the close reasons. It's not intuitive, and I really don't think many of these users will edit their question or even come back.
Can we please be more friendly with new users who don't "get it?"
I suggest some small changes to our collective behaviour.

Say hi, hello, hey there, or something that indicates you're human, and friendly.
Indicate via a comment, if it's not bleedingly obvious from the reason of closure, why the question is poor
Give some concrete suggestions for how the user can improve their question -- for example, narrowing down a code-block; specifying where their problem is, etc.

I think this is a good step toward helping new users of the site become long-term users and quality contributors.

Sounds like a massive investment in time when they should be reading the FAQ.

@Almo I couldn't easily find the FAQ even now. I had to dig for it. If it was more prominently located, maybe.

The close reasons include links to it. New users have a giant banner pointing it out, as well.

Related discussion from a while back: http://meta.gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/542/request-relax-a-bit-on-moderation-and-dont-be-so-eager-to-shut-down-questions (honestly I thought we'd had more than one of these, but I can't find the others).

Perhaps showing new users where the FAQ is before allowing them to ask a question, and then prompting them to read it again when they go to post their first question, would help

There are some large banners that try to do that, but that specific feature has already been discussed (here).

It would probably help if the "Tour" section of the Help menu included the letters "FAQ" so new users can make that connection

The help used to be called the FAQ actually; it got changed a while back. See here for discussion and rationale. You're probably right, though.

"Read the FAQ" is a poor solution, how many of you ever read the instruction booklet before you start a new game? I know I don't because I expect a decent tutorial. Perhaps a better option would be that the first few questions have a checklist of Dos and Don'ts at the bottom before the submit button with items like "Is my question X..." If they check all the Dos and none of the Don'ts it will enable the submit button.

Reading isn't the problem so much as comprehension. Features like what you describe likely just provide a speed bump; a user who does not care to think about the rules will still just tick all the boxes until they can get to the submit button. This is just like those EULA screens that require you to scroll through the whole thing, as if that will actually make somebody who doesn't care to read it actually chane their mind (it usually doesn't).

Further, a user that does not respect a community enough to read its rules before engaging has no right, in my opinion, to expect any special / extra treatment outside of the ordinary: a polite but succinct suggestion that they familiarize themselves with these rules before continuing.

Another related: http://meta.gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/1559/is-this-stackexchange-too-restricted-or-overly-moderated

Here's what Jeff Atwood has to say about this.

@Almo Why does this first comment get voted up? I know massive is a relative term but i type "Hi, and a very short reason your question does not fit here" in a matter of seconds. It is not like a single person have to do this on every bad question.

Because it sounds like a massive investment in time when they should be reading the FAQ. No other reason, really.

This question has a close vote. irony

The close votes appear to both be duplication-related, which is strictly-speaking correct but I think it's relevant to have this as a unique question due to the time-context-sensitive nature.

Show me the data! Much of this page presents its statements without backing them up. Why do you think you "see a pattern emerging"? Is it strong or weak?

Hi. I don't know if it's just me, but I see more and more trolls. That covers the other sites as well. It's ok when people that doesn't have rep enough to edit others questions, to please ask a user to be specify an unclear question. But all these negativly loaded remarks, that contributes to nothing, frankly I'm surprised that not more people react. It scares away new users, and destroys the sites. My opinion at least.

I'm one of those "existing users who don't use the site well" that Josh mentioned.
I mostly don't vote any more, though I have the rep to do so.  I almost never go through the review queue, though I have the rep to do so.  I almost never see a question I feel interested in answering any more, despite having been making games professionally for the past 15 years (and as an amateur for a lot of years before that).
One big reason that I don't do these things is that I don't actually visit the site much any more.  Maybe two or three times per week, down from four or five times per day, a few years ago.
My impression is that all of a sudden, about a year and a half ago, the questions being submitted to the site changed.  They stopped being general and conceptual and broadly-applicable, and instead became ultra-specific to providing help to individuals (with the vast majority of these individuals being absolute novices).  They stopped being "explain this concept to me", and instead became "write some code for me for free."  Or to put it differently;  the questions stopped being interesting resources for learning, and started being a do-it-for-me service.
Deep down, I feel like spending time on crafting answers to the majority of questions on this site doesn't add value to the Internet any more, the way that it used to;  it's just helping individual users one at a time, by giving them my time in exchange for nothing at all;  often not even gratitude.
So I kind of feel like maybe I'm not in the site's target market any more.  It feels like we've become some sort of free get-help-quick service for novices.  And I'm sure there are people who are interested in participating in that sort of a site;  just not me.  And that's why I'm not interacting with the site much any more.  And haven't been, for more than a year.
Bringing it back to the actual "Should we be more friendly to..." question:  If I'm still supposed to be one of the target users of the site, then I'd argue that the very last thing we want to do is expend our moderators' limited energy trying to coddle and retain new users who are cluttering up the front page with yet more "How do I write an 'if' statement" questions.

@TrevorPowell you may be misinterpreting my extreme frustration with the "aggressive" of passive-aggressive. I actually did upvote your answer, which I believe is solid. My opinion is always that users with lots of rep should know what's good for the site and work toward it, but that's often not the case. Unfortunately, you're right, and that realization makes me also less inclined to contribute. This trend of unfriendliness is across the SE network, which makes it even more frustrating for some of us. My apologies if I offended you.

The question stated on the bottom is awful, the guy didn't even seem to have tried to implement the gameplay behavior he was seeking.

@GustavoMaciel I agree.  It was always a bad question.  I honestly thought my edit would make that more obvious, but for some reason there haven't been any close votes (until the one I just added).  A lot of the poor questions revolve around "how do I do {some non-complex procedure} in my game?"  And the answer is "you code it to do that.  Go code it."

I too frequent this site less, and I do recognize more 'bad' questions. However that also means that something about this website is less clear to the new users. We could do something about that if we put our minds together. Of course not wanting to put energy in that 100% fine! But having the active users passive-aggressively disregard new questions and new users is not going to solve this problem. (And it doesn't even really free the home page of clutter).

Do you have admin tools to compare GD with other SE sites, on terms of closed questions count, zero votes, etc? Maybe theres something to learn from that comparison.

@RoyT. I completely agree -- the fault is definitely on current users (including me!) for not making it more clear what sorts of knowledge this site is supposed to be focused on.  The original strategy for doing that, I think, was that if you closed all the bad questions, the people would figure out the correct sort of question automatically, since only The Right Sort of questions would remain on the front page.  But subjectively, that approach seems to have stopped working a year or so back.  The front page is full of bad questions (even if closed), and so people feel free to post more.

My feeling is that "Make the front page represent the sorts of questions we want" is still the correct strategy.  Our problem is that our "put the bad questions on hold" approach isn't accomplishing that any more -- there are just far too many of them, even with the moderators probably overusing their powers to close questions faster than we can do as a community.  Maybe it's time for us as a community to start thinking about other ways to bring our top quality questions back to the front page, so new users have a chance to understand what the site is really supposed to be about.

@TrevorPowell I think those are very good points. I'll make a new meta question for that!

+1 @TrevorPowell exactly my thoughts, but slightly off topic I would think. This about how that closing is percieved by the new user not giving the right impression on our homepage.

So are there any activities of limiting the programming questions on GD, maybe by migrating them to SO? Is this even possible or desired to limit the scope of GD? Where should one draw the line?

@Trilarion We already migrate general programming questions to SO.

@TrevorPowell Good to hear. It's of course up to the makers of GD.se which questions they want but currently in the last 20 questions I would say that about 15 deal with libgdc, unity, java or c# which in a way is also all about programming. I'm fine with it in a way but I'm worried that too many others might leave here because of not enough interesting questions.

I didn't realise this was a problem on GD.SE, too. It's a huge problem on SO, roughly within the same timeline. Many many high-rep users have the exact same reaction as you. Interesting.

Now, in all these cases, the only clue the poor mod left to this new
  user, who may not understand how SE sites work, is a generic statement
  under 'The users who voted to close gave this specific reason:`

The precise reason the close-reason templates exist is to avoid having to invest time in repeating information that is in the help center. I, for one, am happy to provide clarifying comments when it seems necessary, but if all I'm going to do is restate the automatic close reason text, I don't see any reason to waste my time.
Anybody who wants to leave a comment further clarifying why they, as a more advanced SE user, perceive the question to be closed is welcome to do so. Or to vote to disagree with a close reason. Or to edit the question to make it better.
Quite honestly, getting new users to be "long-term users and quality contributors" is relatively low on my list of priorities for the site. It's probably dead last. What I'd like to fix first is the existing users who don't use the site well (users who don't vote or flag, but can; users who answer bad questions anyway; users who don't edit questions well or at all; users who don't answer any questions because they are afraid of being down-voted). Fixing that will remove an entire class of problems associated with unilateral close votes because we won't need so damn many of them.

Thanks for making it absolutely, unequivocally clear that your position -- which, as a mod of the site, is the site position -- is to be unfriendly to new users.

I'm sorry you interpret it that way, but my position is not "to be unfriendly," it is "to maximize the efficiency of my moderation time," by leveraging the automation/time-saving features provided to me so I can address more questions in the time I allot for moderating this site.

It is quite unfortunate that your time savings translates very directly into warding off new users. Perhaps others (including other mods) will have a different position than yours.

I agree with @ashes999 here, it may not be the intention but its often the impression given. I also agree that mods have a large workload and its tough keeping such a large community on track so their time is short. That said, if time is so tight why not have more mods so the ones we have are less rushed?

You can start another meta topic if you think we need additional moderators. I don't, though; it's not that there isn't enough coverage of the site overall, it's about being able to cover more ground from an individual's perspective, while they are on the site.

@Ashes999 An individual mods position is not "the site's position" the sites position comes from the continued policy building that takes place on this meta site.

@ashes999 if you disagree with the current moderators, why not vote for other ones during the next elections, or even nominate yourself?

Elections don't generally replace moderators unless a moderator resigns, for what it's worth. Plus -- again -- somebody doesn't have to be a moderator to do the things ashes999 is suggesting.

@JoshPetrie why is it important that high rep users / mods are able to do a lot in a short period of time? The only reason I can see for this is a blatant rush to gain more rep. My thinking is that if something needs a response time should be taken to provide one or no response given at all. Not that your time isn't important its just ... there's a lot of features built in deliberately to prevent "knee jerk response" so why should that also not apply to mods?

I think it's important for me to do more in a given period of time because this site needs a lot of hand-holding from a moderation perspective. This is not a "rush to gain reputation;" none of the actions under discussion here award reputation. It's not a "knee jerk response" to write a redundant comment after closing a question, it's inefficient. I'm not going to comment after I close a question unless it is warranted. The site gives users that ability so it can be used.

I get where ashes999 is coming from . This is a troubling statement from a mod to be honest. The knowledge of our experienced users is getting old and stale (as will always happen) and we need new users with new knowledge and new questions continuously. Even users with bad first questions can become valuable members if given a little guidance. I know my first question was shit. (In all honesty who reads the FAQ when first time posting on a website, especially when you want a quick answer to a question you think others can easily find the answer to).

I'm not really worried about (or intending to comment on) the domain knowledge of our existing userbase; I'm worried about that existing userbase engaging with the site well. I think that is where effort needs to be focused. Attracting new users to turn them into eventual old users if we cannot get old users (who have the sufficient reputation) to engage in the site does not strike me as a good plan.

I don't mean our current users are stupid, I just mean that people don't stay active on this site forever, so without a continuous influx of quality people this site will eventually stop being useful.

@JoshPetrie did you just say "getting new users is a bad plan", its also worth noting that any user will only engage the site if it has something to offer, I think Roy has a point here. New users with or  without rep are just as important as old ones to keep the site moving forward.

No Wardy, I have never said that. You seem to be laboring under the delusion that the moderators run the site, because you (and others) consistently seem to assume that my position/priority/actions are necessarily those of the site itself. That's exactly the opposite of reality. New users will come to the site regardless of what any of us do. They come to the site all the time, we very clearly do not have a problem getting new users signed up...

...We do have a problem educating those new users, it's true. But we have a worse problem in that the users who are experienced and active don't participate in closing questions (or even answering them very often), resulting in an inability to educate those new users effectively regardless of how "nice" we are when we close questions. Thus, in my view, my priorities place focusing on existing users over focusing on new users, because I see the other way around as putting the cart before the horse. It's also worth noting that a priority that is "dead last" is still a priority.

My priorities are not the site's priorities. StackExchange works on the principle of the community aggregate. If you or anybody else want to do something that is perfectly within the rules and accepted policy, do it. I would love to see more users voting/flagging/commenting/answering.

I'm not delusional just maybe not too good at making a point at times ... you seem fixated on 1 comment I made about "running the site" ... I simply meant that as a moderator you are better placed to take certain actions which are by their very nature administrative which is in a sense contributing to the ongoing smooth running of the site, I wasn't implying any ownership rights or anything. Poorly worded though I admit.

I also stand by my previous, previous comment ... this site needs activity from users at all levels but you seem to imply that a user is only valuable to SE if they have been around long enough to have a high rep which is not a clear indication of knowledge just time spent here. "rep" is not (in my opinion) important, knowledge is.

That is not what I said. Yes, the site needs activity from all levels of users, but low reputation users do not have the privileges to perform the necessary site administration and guidance that high-reputation users do. And we don't have sufficient engagement from high-reputation users. Which leaves us in our current position where site policy is dictated by an alarmingly small number of users. At the same time we have a perfectly healthy influx of new users, so between the two "problems," encouraging more high-rep engagement seems more important to me if we want the site to keep existing

Let's count the number of ways we show new users how to ask a good question.
First, when the user hits the homepage of this website.

Second, when he clicks "ask question".

Third, after their question is placed on hold. (Not closed. The difference is important.)

If a new user can't be bothered to take a measly few seconds and read any of these things, how can he possibly be selfish and inconsiderate enough to expect others to spend even more of their equally precious time to help him?
If someone asks a bad question and it gets closed, then just leaves the site instead of trying to ask a better question, then it's not because he's unaware of the rules. It's not because the rules haven't been explained to him "nicely" enough. He just doesn't care about the rules.
Personally, I don't want that kind of user here.
But here's the clincher. When I see a question where my comment could be more helpful than the close reason, I do leave a comment. I've seen other people do it too. It might be a link to a tutorial, or a piece of terminology to google, or advice on how to improve the question.
Want to know how many times the OP has either responded to the comments or edited the question? So far, I've seen it three times, and two of those three just said "lol no the question is fine" (paraphrased). Out of all the questions I've seen get closed, that few have an OP who is willing to even put a tiny amount of effort in.

Equally bad, however, are the experienced users I see who keep saying, "The site sucks, so I stopped being involved." No, the site sucks because experienced users like you are no longer involved! How dare you refuse to put forward any effort in fixing the problems, then complain that they're not being fixed!
If you want the site to become better, then make it better. Jump into the unanswered questions list and start flagging, editing, and answering things.

re your last two paragraphs. What's the incentive?

@LightnessRacesinOrbit What do you mean? Is seeing the site get better at helping people not a sufficient incentive? (Also, imaginary internet points!)

I'm with Josh on this one being a low priority, especially with so many unanswered questions hanging around right now that need clearing up. However, we could maybe create a new feature regarding what comments to leave by adding in customisable templates.
If you edit or review questions every day it might be useful to integrate your own choice of words on the type of close being performed. So if I am voting to flag a question and I pick "unclear what you're asking" and tend to always reply with something like this

"Hey, welcome to GD:SE, I'm not quite getting what you're asking for in this question, try to narrow down a single problem and explain it with these guidelines in mind [link]"

Maybe GD:SE could save this as my last response to this type of flag and place it in the comment field for me the next time I flag a post with this type. This would kill two birds with one stone by promoting appropriate and "newbie friendly" comments for flags by popping up the comments box and preserving personalised comments to make commenting similar things more efficient.
To avoid making unnecessary clicks or extra work for users to flag a post, those who don't want to bother and are happy with the comments provided by the automatic system could toggled this feature with a profile setting. This would then make it a useful feature for regular members who like to leave personalised comments but doesn't interrupt the current flow for those who are content with the way things work.

The number of close reasons is fixed in the SE software, and this kind of feature would be extra dev for the core SE system. As such, I think it is unlikely to happen.

Extra dev is not really a reason to overlook it though, if the feature being implemented helps maintain overall health on SE sites it may be more than worthy of it's dev time and cost.

I'm not saying the suggestion is wrong, just that the SE developers are reticent to add features unless they show a huge benefit. I just not sure this shows a huge benefit.

Yea, seems unlikely to happen as a formal part of the software. However, other SE sites have done this in an ad-hoc fashion by setting up a public gist on Github with additional pre-canned responses to various issues. It might be worth doing that here (you should start a separate meta topic on the issue if you want to).

I disagree with Josh and Blue on this one.
I see the same thing you see ashes999 all the time and it gives the impression that a mod's time is more important than the main reason for the site being here which is to help a community flourish and grow.
How can that happen if the people that run the community come across like all they care about is removing your annoying question from their todo list? (i'm sure this isn't the case and I have a lot of respect for the mods here)
Yes it may be costly and repetitive for mods but if they don't like being a mod then maybe step back a bit and let others pick up the workload, offloading your pain on a noobie that doesn't understand the community is not fair on that noobie.
I think there needs to be a bit more effort from some mods that appear to be annoyed by repetition and take it out on noobies to step up and welcome noobies to community with a more positive templated response in some way (although i don't know what the correct response is).
Also dev time, should not be the most important factor for a community by a long shot, if developers build something once then it helps people thousands of times over.

Good points, also I agree on the dev time factor for improvements. Short term investments and testing leads to long term benefits.

We do not "run the community." As I said, I would love to "step back and let others pick up the workload, but right now the state of the community here is such that it does not work.

Further, moderators are human. I am sure we have all been annoyed, at one point or another, by bad or repetitive questions. But that is also something the boilerplate close-reasons exist to address. If we had to manually write out a close rationale for those questions I'm convinced you'd see more personal annoyance leaking into the system and creating a hostile environment. Having pre-determined text for the reasons helps keep personal bias out of the equation.

I am also offended, for myself and other moderators, that you think so little of our time as to begrudge my saving it where it I can, especially since I want to save it so I can handle more of the site. It's not like we are compensated in any way for our work; we do this because we want the community to flourish and continue to exist.

Apologies as I said I meant my comments in the greatest respect but being a user of low rep myself I have often been on the other end of moderator reactions. Where you may have seen something over and over to me being new I may not know that I can search to find the same question or that my question doesn't quite fit the bill ... maybe @Blue is on to something with the suggestion of being able to save "personal responses" to certain situations allowing the mod to be less "canned" and more "personal canned" but also sounding less authoritive and more "i want to help but ..."

We can control the wording of (some) of our close messages; if your issue is really about the impersonal nature of those messages, start another meta topic proposing a change to one or more of them and try to drum up consensus on the change.

I don't have an issue I'm simply responding / answering this question as I think it has a fair point. I too have seen the mods judge a question in a manner I didn't feel I agreed with and it's sometimes hard to understand and puts you off SO unless faced with some reasoning for the response (which is often missing). If anything my thought is that the mods are actually very good at their "job" maybe its just the canned default responses that need a friendlier tone and maybe some elaboration / links to more detail.

Also @Wardy, being active on the site and in meta by suggesting these changes will help improve your rep and make you a more able member of the community. The more time and care you spend on the site, the more you can positively influence it. Make changes by being that positive newbie friendly commenter and help us make this site run better. I'm not a mod, just like you, but we can still influence the site as a whole and make it a whole lot easier for the mods by working with them in the process.

"the main reason for the site being here [..] is to help a community flourish and grow."  I can't overstate how strongly I disagree with this claim.  The stack exchange sites are about building an archive of expert knowledge.  A community naturally assembles around that, but the community is not the goal!

There's no point in having a knowlegebase that noone uses ... a community is the core consumer of this knowledge so I stand by my comment ... also why have features like chat if a community is not at least part of the goal? That view of yours seems very narrow minded @TrevorPowell

No I was saying you were taking a narrow minded point of view not calling you narrow minded, there's a difference, it wasn't about being rude just pointing out that I disagree with your view. hense why is said "that view of yours ..." and not "you are ..."

Please keep it civil folks.

Just today, I had a question, searched google and this came up:
Deep Cloning C++ class that inherits CCNode in Cocos2dx
To me this question is perfectly valid, unless I misunderstood the site. It's specifically asking How to do something (which is deep copy) In some specific framework (which is cocos2d-x)
Of course you can interpret that question a general how to deep copy things in C++, but that's not what the OP was after at all. In fact that question has a very simply short answer:

For some types like actions, there is a method called clone available, but there is nothing built in to make a deep copy for rest of engine (nodes for example)

I'm not saying this kind of things happen a lot but there are other examples like this, that are either misinterpreted by high rep users or are valid questions asked badly. Maybe it's better if at least we let questions to be open at least a day before closing them. That means with out current number of questions being asked, let them reach the second page before closing them. All users (and not only mods) will have more time to both see and if applicable fix those questions if possible.

Note that the question you're talking about was finally closed more than a year after it was asked, having received zero answers during that time.

@TrevorPowell Well, it was my mistake and others who know cocos2d. I also check the main site for new questions rarely. But then again, it doesn't mean we can not-bad close questions if they are not answered.

it doesn't mean we can not-bad close questions if they are not answered... my brain hurts.  Can you rephrase that to use fewer negations?  I'm having trouble parsing it to understand what you mean.

it was actually a typo, meant to be: it doesn't mean we can close  not-bad questions even if they are not answered

That question should be closed. There's nothing there that a game developer would answer better, necessarily; it should be asked on Stack Overflow. Questions need to go to most-appropriate site on the network, much like how it doesn't matter here how many different ways and with how many different APIs you want to orient some object to face some target. It's all the same answer, we close them as duplicates of something canonical.


text:
Customisable Canned Responses - shall we make a Gist for common comments?
As an addendum to this topic I am asking if it is time we made a Gist repo to fill up on some common responses for commenting on different post types. Such as new users not knowing "question format", "length of content" on questions, "Welcome to the site" comments etc.
Just to get us started here is an example:
https://gist.github.com/thopiddock/ee4894427d855b10f868

I'd note that both of your examples contain redundancies with the primarily-opinion-based close reason. The close reason text is displayed to the user, so any unofficial collection of pre-canned responses probably should not duplicate that information.

Noted but my examples are rough ones I've made on my lunch break, it's open to more suggestions of course.

These comments are so specific to the question/comment/answer, it's a waste of time to save them; they'll likely never be used in exactly the same form again. I can guarantee you I wouldn't be looking in a repo for canned responses. I just write my own every time.

I think it would be useful to do this if we were instead discussing the need for a new close reason (since we are at our custom close reason cap). But I am sort of indifferent to the need to do it to augment existing reasons.

Personally I feel that rather than the system providing a set of canned responses the mod / user should be able to store their own set of responses and pull them out as appropriate.
The key here is that ...

users aren't met with a default response which comes across as rude
mods should be individual in their response showing their real attitude towards the community.

To me, a Gist doesn't feel like an improvement to the site (again personal opinion, totally subjective)

A gist is something we can do, however. We can't alter the site software.

Further, I doubt a proposal on the SE meta to support this would be met with any sort of encouragement: if you want to store per-user canned responses, you can store them yourself in a text file on your machine, your own personal gist, Dropbox, Google Docs, et cetera.

Then my response to that would be ... stop canned responses altogether. Mods should take the time to give an appropriate response given the context of the current question. I know I always do whatever the situation so why is your time more valuable than mine?

The boilerplate close reasons are available for everybody to use, and they are considered an appropriate response. That's why they exist (and we can alter some of them if needed, but I've seen no actual actionable suggestions to that end). They appear on every close, not just moderator ones. We are not going to stop using them, they are a network-wide feature. If you want to make a case for SE not having them any longer, you'll need to propose it at the SE meta.

To my mind they seem a little impersonal ... everything on SE should be user content IMO but i'm sure many don't agree and would happily justify it with reasons like "i don't have the time"

"I don't have the time" and "I don't have the time to manually write out exactly the same comment which is applicable to 95% of closed questions," are two very different things. The rationale for the closure text and UI is to help address the latter case. When you vote, you don't have to comment explaining why either. It would be pointless to require you to do so, 95% of the time users would simply write "+1!"

Exactly the same? Are you a robot?

I am not a robot, and as such I do not like to waste my time doing what I perceive to be silly things that a computer can do perfectly well for me. Manually typing: 'Questions about "how to get started," "what to learn next," or "which technology to use" are discussion-oriented questions which involve answers that are either based on opinion, or which are all equally valid. Those kinds of questions are outside the scope of this site. Visit our help center for more information.' every time is one such thing.


text:
Should we change the name of the chatroom? If so, to what?
People in the chat itself have suggested changing the name. It seems "Game Development" is too uninteresting. Propose names here, and we'll change the name to the most upvoted answer in a week or so.
Downvotes mean "I don't like this name" and upvotes mean "I like this name."

A link to the relevant chat discussion might help people make decisions about this.

Added. sdhsdhdjjmed

The overwhelming consensus here appears to be that we should not change the name. Thus, we will not.

The current name is fine, no need to change it.

I don't see a huge reason to change the name at all. Especially to something "clever" like the things Blue points out in his similar answer about silly and opaque chat names.

Considering the entire "change the name discussion" was a single offhand comment. I don't think the name needs to be changed at all.

am i the only one who finds it weird the site is titled "Game Development" and the chat is self-titled "Game Development" as well.  just seems weird to me

@Joe You are the only one.

@Joe I think it's weird too

When I look through the chat rooms listings I see:
The Pod Bay
The Loop
The Bridge
The Garden Shed
And you know what, I have no idea what SE site those are relevant to without needing to read the description. I think the name as it is right now is perfect. Easy for new people to locate, easy to see at a glance and fits in the side bar without stretching it.

A vote for this answer is a vote for the no change needed answer.

Does that mean we effectively get to vote twice? ;)

Once upon a time, this room was called "Gamedev Down Hall" or "Town hall" or "Down Town" or something like that. I never understood why was it changed, since I liked that name better.
It doesn't have the problem @Blue mentioned, while it's not as boring as exact same name of channel.

After some talks and some searchs, it seems it's all my imagination. We never had that name, but then again it doesn't mean we shouldn't.

Default Player
The default player is designed by the development team to fit the majority of users (or all users when there is no editing system).  Also maintains that this is game development, not just any programming.

Chat<GameDev>
It fits better with the Game Development theme than Chat<Gamedev>.


text:
Remove [tiled]->[tiles] tag synonym
"tiled" often refers to the open source map editor software and format, which enjoys wide support across many languages and game frameworks. However, tiled is currently a synonym for the very general tiles.
A search for the exact term "tiled" shows many results, about half of which are about the specific editor/format. Therefore I believe this synonym should be removed, and recreated as its own tag.

Good catch! This was a very old synonym - it has now been removed.


text:
Why do some questions display the wrong user in the "Unanswered" list?
While browsing the Unanswered Questions I noticed this:

I clicked through to the question and the user in the picture is nowhere to be found.
I also noticed a similar issue with this question, so it is not specific to one question.

The question list shows you the user who most-recently answered the question or edited a post in the thread.
In both of these cases, however, the users modification (an answer) was subsequently deleted. If you have the reputation to see deleted posts, it would be somewhat more obvious.
It's just a quirk of the software, not (as far as I know) a bug.

Is there somewhere that explains why this is the design?

I'm sure there's a post on it on the meta for SO or SE (since that's where I learned about the behavior), but it's a little tricky to search for. I haven't found it yet.


text:
How do we make sure there are more "good" questions on the front page (to inspire new users)?
Recap of events
There was some discussion here and in chat with concerns of the quality of new questions and the quality of questions visible on the front-page. The consensus (or more honest: people I agree with so who I will selectively quote) is that if a users sees better questions on the front-page he/she is more inclined to ask better questions. To quote:  "Make the front page represent the sorts of questions we want". Putting bad questions on-hold does not help with accomplishing this goal, even if moderators use their power to quickly close bad questions they are still very visible.
Implications
So closing questions does not give us a good front-page, does not inspire new users, and frankly pisses of existing users (who are irritated by all the bad/closed questions while trying to find something interesting to answer/comment/moderate).
Question
My question to meta is: how can we make bad questions less visible on the front page.
My thoughts on a good solution
While I don't have a direct answer to this question I think a good solution should not censor/remove bad questions. Visibility is the keyword here.

All StackExchange sites run on the same software (though StackOverflow has some modifications), so this crops up elsewhere too. This issue is much more noticeable on StackOverflow, prompting this SO meta question. The developers have noticed and solutions are in the works.

I know, but we have some control over the CSS for this subsite I think. That coul adress somethings beforehand

I definitely think improving the front-page question view is a good idea. I don't think we should do it by "closing less," (closing less is essentially another way to say, "allow softer questions," which I would much prefer we discuss -- if we're going to discuss it -- as a separate topic where we actually use that terminology; it is a viable option, but it also has serious risks).
Rather, I think we should do it by promoting pre-existing good questions to the front. There's only one effective way to do this, and fortunately that way goes hand-in-hand with what I perceive to be the fundamental key problem on this site (as discussed in the "be nice" threads): lack of engagement by existing active users. As I write this, we have 1279 (that's one thousand two hundred and seventy-nine!) unanswered (zero answer) questions.
A good portion of those questions are bad, many are duplicates, some are unclear. But there are also some really good questions in there, with difficult and/or interesting answers. There are also a lot of questions that could be good with a little love and editing. Answering or editing those questions not only increases user engagement, it improves the quality and utility of the site overall and (particularly relevant to this discussion) it bumps them to the front page.
Consequently, my call to action here would be for everybody who has participated in this thread (or the other one) to go out and start working through that backlog of unanswered questions. If you can't vote, flag. If you can't edit, propose a suggested edit instead. And every single one of you can answer. This is supposed to be your community. Take charge of it.

Also, refer to the 2013 Winter Refactor post for some guidelines for dealing with the unanswered queue.

For comparison:  Stack Overflow has a 0.2% rate of unanswered-unclosed questions (39,388 out of 21,265,972 questions).  Superuser has a 0.4% rate (2,997 out of 607,266).  Our rate is currently 1.1% (654 out of 62,056).  (I'm not sure why you're showing 1,279 questions, Josh;  I only get 654 in the Data Explorer.

That query is not what the "Unanswered" tab shows, that's why :) (specifically the "no answers" sub-tab).

Hey, cool, I'd been struggling to find a way to get to just the unanswered questions.  Still would be interested to know how the 'no answers' sub-tab chooses which questions to show, because it clearly is showing a lot more questions than the data explorer claims exist, which either means that my query terms are wrong, or the data explorer's data is suspect.  (The former is more likely, but I can't see a problem in my query..)

@TrevorPowell the Unanswered tab counts questions with 0 answers with score 1 or higher, which is not the same as having 0 answers.

@congusbongus Thanks so much for posting that clarification! It totally explains the values I was getting from Data Explorer.

This isn't a real answer, just some stats that are too lengthy to fit into a comment:
Looking over the current front page, the vote score for a question actually looks like a pretty good heuristic for predicting the question's quality.  That is, questions voted +2 or higher look pretty legitimate.  And the ones voted -1 or lower look less ideal, in terms of being the type of questions we want to encourage on this site.  This suggests that the voting members of the community are still successfully identifying good questions -- the problem we're perceiving is just the ratio of bad questions to good ones.
At the time of writing, out of 48 questions on our front page, 11 of them have a vote score of +2 or higher.  6 have a vote score of +4 or higher.  10 have a vote score of -1 or lower.
Comparing to other SE sites:  On Stack Overflow, 9 of the 48 front page questions have a vote score of +2. 2 have a vote score of +4 or higher  And 2 have a vote score of -1 or lower.  (Note that Stack Overflow gets a much higher volume of questions;  the vast majority of their questions have zero votes in total)
On Superuser, 12 out of their 48 front page questions have a vote score of +2 or higher, and 10 have a vote score of +4 or higher.  4 have a vote score of -1 or lower.
Per-site front page stats ("voted up" == +2 or higher, "voted down" == -1 or lower)

Stack Overflow: 20% voted up, 4% voted down
Superuser:  20% voted up, 8% voted down
GameDev: 20% voted up, 20% voted down

It's interesting (and perhaps surprising) that the percentage of up-voted questions on the front page turns out to be almost identical between the three sites, even with Stack Overflow's substantially higher churn rate.  The real difference between the questions shown on the front-page of the different sites seems to be in how many of the non-great questions are bad enough to attract down-votes.
I wonder whether any other SE sites have down-vote rates similar to ours?  We might be able to learn from them, if they've dealt with this situation in the past.
Edit:
For the sake of interest, here's a graph showing the percentage of GameDev.SE questions asked in different months that were downvoted to -1 or below:

Interestingly, this shows a big peak of downvoted questions a little over a year ago, after which it fell right off, only to have a few brief peaks later on, including a big one that appears to be going on right now, which lends some support to @Anko's suspicions.  But even these big peaks are topping out only at about 15% of questions being downvoted.
But here's another interesting graph, this one showing the percentage of questions asked in GameDev.SE each month which would eventually wind up with a score of at least 4:

Note that this isn't a cumulative graph;  pretty regularly, month-on-month, we've had a lower and lower percentage of questions reaching a +4 score ever since the site opened.  In July of 2011, nearly 50% of all questions asked were reaching a score of at least +4.  In July of this year, only 4% of questions reached +4.  (To be fair, though, we got almost twice as many questions in July of this year as we did in July of 2011)
The query I used is saved publicly here.  It prompts you to specify a minimum threshold, and graphs the percentage of questions which scored beneath the specified value.
Please feel free to mock my rudimentary SQL skills, and let me know about the terrible blunders I've undoubtedly made which completely invalidate these graphs.

Nice insights. Actual numbers to work with! Maybe someone with a bit more rights can try to deduce these statistics over a longer period of time, to see when (if) things started changing and to reduce the interference of this being a bad (or good) day.

@Anko Absolutely.  Definitely worth running the numbers again in a few days to see whether they come out the same way, or whether it was a once-off thing.

Can probably figure it out from the data explorer - I'm not the best with this kind of stuff but I might give it a go. Maybe someone with better SQL skills and better understanding of SE data could do it faster though.

I probably lied. I don't know if we can get "front page" stats from Data Explorer but we can get a general idea of close rates over time.

This is great data! But the last graph is terrifying!

Well, maybe (that the last graph is terrifying). In theory we should be accumulating questions that cover many topic, so it's only natural to expect the number of new good questions to diminish. Any time askers cover ground in questions asked previously, they should be marked as duplicates and never reach that +4 number.

@MrCranky I should have been clearer about how I generated those graphs -- closed questions are completely ignored in both of the graphs above.  (But there are other reasons to not panic over the shape of the graph)

What I notice about the problem is that Gamedev seems to have a lack of high-rep questioners.  I have a shakey hypothesis that the more knowledge a person has, the fewer questions they ask.  Also that the more familiar with SO rules a person is, the fewer questions.  Obviously, this isn't a problem unique to gamedev, it's just more pronounced here.
Here's an anecdotal comparison (big rep difference, not a big membership duration difference):
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/users/1430/josh-petrie?tab=questions
https://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet?tab=questions
One thing to note in those lists is that they both have self-answered questions.  That's better than OK, it's really good.  (Also note the extreme Answer-to-Question ratio.)

We could ask more good questions.  We have talked about doing that before.  Good questions do not rely on the asker not knowing the answer.

So the hard part about this solution is that it takes a LOT of individual work.  I haven't followed my own suggestion from that meta post above, because Laziness.  (As far as I've noticed, Josh is the only one who has.  I'll take credit even if he would have done it anyway.)  It takes far more time to construct a high-quality question AND an answer than it does to fire off close votes, comment on passable questions, and upvote the rare good question.  But it would certainly help fix the lack of good questions.
I'm sure everyone has information they want to share.  That's why we frequent the site in the first place.  I just think we ought not wait for someone to ask the perfect question.  Perhaps we could treated this site more like a blog with a wacky, 2-part format.  You have a schizophrenic conversation with yourself.  One side asks a question, and the other answers it.

I think your theory is pretty sound. The only question I have ever "asked" on the site was to self-answer it, since it had been coming up a lot. I expect that's the only reason I'd ever ask a question here, as the overwhelming majority of the "questions" I have at this point in my career are not appropriate here (either better fit for another SE, or just discussion oriented).

We could also definitely use some "canonical questions" for some things (dealing with resolution independence in object positioning, orienting objects to face targets, et cetera); we have existing questions that we use as duplicate targets for these common topics, but mainly by virtue of age, not by virtue  of the question being a good, generic, well-searchable question.

I'm pretty much in the same boat as Josh;  the only question I've asked on this site was an experiment (testing whether the community would accept a "what library should I use" question if it was re-framed as "how do I decide what library to use?")
I wonder how many of our higher-rep users are also in that "answering, but never asking" boat.

Here's a graph of the average number of questions asked per user, grouped by user reputation.  Note that we don't have enough users > 7K reputation to draw valid conclusions about the top end of this graph, but I'm not seeing any obvious trends between questions-asked and rep, in the <7K bands where we do have copious data.