text:
Psychedelic 90s banner-style header has got to go
The parent Game Dev site's banner-style header reminds me of a bad 90s website with an added MySpace ad. It's distracting and wastes space. Look to the sister sites for efficient, non-distracting headers (except for gaming.stackexchange.com, of course).
It's up to you guys, but this was my first impression of the site. In my opinion, StackOverflow.com has nailed it. It's clean, space-efficient and doesn't make my eyes scream.

Just a note to readers that a down-vote in meta does not necessarily mean the author is wrong. It means simply that the voter is not in favor of the suggestion.

@Robert, understood.

50 rep says Jin designs on a 24" Mac monitor.

I browse on a 24" Monitor, not worth the 50 rep but yeah, even on smaller screens this isn't much of a problem to me.

I use a 12.1" laptop at 1024x768 and the banner size doesn't bother me at all.

Note - we appear to have a CSS fix for this, see my answer below. Fix is from Yi Jiang's chat, via @Tetrad.

It does look a bit like an OpenGL book cover from the 90s but I don't think it's too big at all.

Looking back, it's mostly the colours that bother me. It tries too hard (and succeeds) in catching my attention, instead of providing only a necessary identity before deferring to the real content: questions and answers.

short answer: the header is fine and it stays.
longer answer:
Looking through your original post and comments it seems the main complaint you have is with the colors in header graphic. While I respect your opinion, please understand that I can't make design changes every time a new user comes here and make a request based on personal preferences. (I'm assuming you are a new user to gamedev since you haven't contributed anything on the parent site).
All SE designs I create use 1024px by 768px as the lowest common denominator. this resolution and lower only account for about 5% of the traffic.
While the gamedev header is taller than SO's, IMO it's not a big deal especially compared to most popular sites out there(especially those with top ad banners).
Below is a comparison of Gamedev vs SO, your own site, Techcrunch and Mashable.

Also when designing a SE site, I have to take the type of users base into consideration. Gamedev is one of those sites I assumed users would have a higher resolution settings than the others. My assumption has been correct based on our web stats.
People do scroll, also see more data on this.

I like my screen's real estate more. I actually prefer the meta header's colour scheme over that of the parent site.

I believe you have no problem scrolling, especially your own site's header is a lot taller than any of SE sites' header. I think the word "usability" is being tossed like a jargon here. It seems clear to me it's more of a color scheme issue you have with gamedev.

thanks for taking the time to size things up. I agree that the audience here probably have a higher resolution, which the data supports. While I am not an active Gamedev contributor, I do spend a lot of time on SO. However, comparing my personal site to SE is like comparing DeviantArt to Google and saying DeviantArt needs to cut down on the graphics. It's a completely different target market and with a LOT less view per months. I respect the community's decision and I concur that the bright yellow draws the eye away from content, which to me still boils down to sub-optimal usability.

At first I did not like it at all, but I got used to it, doesn't mean I like it now though, I'm just used to it.
I agree that it is much too big. The full banner takes up more than 1/4 the screen size on my laptop when the window is maximized, and lot of times I run windows non-maximized.

That's why I always address the design issues that stand out immediately. Like with any software, once you become used to it, you can no longer identify the usability issues (until you ask Bob from Accounting to use it). Just because a user has figured it out, does not make it any more usable to begin with. I think most regulars have become "used to it" and have grown attached to the header, which serves as the site's identity.

That's not really a question - but if it were, I'd say, "no way, dude - that banner is trippin'" :)
Personally, I think it's great - captures the concepts of game development perfectly.
And several of the new SE sites have banners that are larger than SO - check out gaming or cooking, for instance. Even AskUbuntu wastes a ton of space, for a more boring design. :)
Update - just ran across the Photography site - wow... On the one hand, the ask question button is visible - on the other hand, the banner is huuge....

@Cyclops, see the first answer to this relating to the header on AskUbuntu.

That AskUbuntu header is horrible. I really like the SE beta layout (even if it intentionally looks like a mock-up). The SO, SF and SU sites are doing it right. When I have to weigh up "it captures game dev" with "usability," then usability always wins.

I'm all in favor of usability - but comparing GameDev to SO, the space difference only results in one less Question on the above-the-fold main page at GameDev. (Granted, my resolution is antique, 800x600 - higher resolutions might have more). But considering that you have to scroll down to see most of the Questions, anyway, I don't consider it a major usability issue. And okay, sure, the 'Ask Question' button is off to the right and I have to scroll to get it... Hmm, what was my point again? Oh yeah - at least the Gamedev banner is cool! :)

Photography was chosen to be like that on purpose BTW (see the Meta.Photo Thread). It has to be that large to include the image.

@Cyclops, seeing "one fewer question" is fine if you can see seven other questions. But on a small screen (or non-maximised screen) where you can only see three - taking away one is unacceptable."It works on my machine!" thinking does not a usable website make.

It does capture the concepts of game development, however it's still a bit large and garish.

I like it because it shows the Progression that Game Development is all about. Start with simple Wireframes that turn into fully built out fantasy worlds.

Me too, but I like my screen's real estate more. I actually prefer the meta header's colour scheme over that of the parent site.

Possible fix - adding custom stylesheet?
This should potentially work, unfortunately my HTML/CSS skills were not up to the task - specifically, I could not figure out which element needed to be made invisible/shrunk to get the large logo field to disappear.
If someone who is a HTML/CSS guru (for instance, the actual designer of this site) would like to fix to my code, please do so. :)
Step 1 - Add a user style sheet to your browser. This page has linked explanations of how to do that, for all major browsers.
Step 2 - Create a .CSS file. Here's one that generally compresses the height of the title bar.  source
#header {
    background-position: center -2px !important;
    height: 130px !important;
    margin: -3px auto 0 !important;
    overflow: hidden !important;
}

#hlogo a {
    height: 62px !important;
    margin: 5px 0 0 17px !important;
}

#header #hmenus {
    height: 24px !important;
    margin: 7px 0 0 !important;
}

.nav a {
    padding: 4px 15px !important;
}

#portalLink {
    margin-top: 6px !important;
}

And that looks like this:
Optionally add:
.nav {float:left !important; }

to move the "ask question" button leftwards.

you're looking for display:none;

@FreshCode, close - it hides everything, though, including the tabs. Any idea what element(s) I should be changing?

Note - this CSS works properly for SE sites, but just discovered it totally messes up some other sites - like pvponline.com . Wups. Still researching how to apply a stylesheet to only one specific site. So for now - Caveat Emptor.

it depends on how you use it.  For example, if you use Stylish for firefox/chrome, then you can whitelist what sites it applies to.

@Tetrad, yeah, Opera 10 has the same ability (or claims) to be able to assign a custom stylesheet to a specific site - so far I haven't gotten it to work yet. :)


text:
Awesome 90s psychedelic banner has gone
In Firefox 3.6.12 (Ubuntu 10.10 default), I no longer see any banner background at all on the main page. Other SEs still appear correctly; meta still appears correctly.

when did this start to happen?

Sometime within the last six hours, I think.

And just now (as in, between me checking before posting that comment, and posting this one), it is back.

Ah-ha, so it's not just me...

One of our build servers missed the image - I'll be researching this issue.

I call shenanigans! http://meta.gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/323/psychedelic-90s-banner-style-header-has-got-to-go

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
Answering questions the OP has asked elsewhere
I recently found this question here, and when searching for something else on SO, this same question. The OP has simply asked the same thing on two separate sites, at exactly (roughly) the same time.
I've seen this a couple of times, and been voting down (simply because it's time-wasting). But since one of the purposes of the SE sites is to produce knowledge, would it be ok on these types of questions to, in addition to posting an own opinion, quote answers from the SO questions?
 I mean, it solves the question, but it does feel like ripping off other users ideas.

It is seriously frowned upon to cross-post questions.
It is OK to pick one site, go for it, and if you don't get a good response, then ask again on another site.
Even then, we believe the question must be reformulated and tailored to the specific audience.
In other words, say you have a question about going downhill really fast on snow -- you would ask very differently depending on whether you were talking to an audience of skiiers vs snowboarders.

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


text:
Why do all questions appear as answered?
As of today, all questions appear like they have already been answered (eg. filled green hexagon).

Is that a bug or some design change? I think it's rather confusing.

Well, it's Christmas. You have to unwrap the question before you know if it's answered :)
No, this was a plain ol' bug. Fixed.


text:
White image background in the top status bar
Since today the three badges and StackExchange images have an ugly white background in all common browsers.

Yeah, the images were accidently commited without transparency. Not pretty, I agree :)
This is fixed now, thanks!

This was my fault. I was updating the sprite to have the new envelope icon suggested here: http://meta.gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/320/can-anything-be-done-to-make-the-unread-items-icon-more-clear but somehow the transparency was not preserved. I have pushed another update, should be on prod soon.


text:
Is <modelling tool> discussion on topic?
There was this question about learning Blender. The point that came up in some of the comments was is this on topic? I mean, modelling tools in general are a fundamental tool in making important assets for a game, but would something like 'How can I learn Maya/Flash?' be on topic for here?
And expanding on that, would 'How can I make my  model look more realistic' also be on topic?

Like I've said before, it isn't as much about topic as the audience.  We want questions that are interesting to game developers of different kinds.
If a tool or technique is relatively common in the production of game assets, then I vote that they're on topic.

That being said,

How can I learn Maya/Flash?

Personally I don't like "how can I learn X" where X is anything since it's not the kind of long tail question that attracts experts to the site.  Good questions are specific.
But this:

How can I make my model look more realistic

Is a great question, assuming there's an actual image or specific case the user wants us to look at and provide feedback on.  If it didn't come with an image, it wouldn't be a good question.

This is a good point; I think the whole focus of the gamedev site is that game development is a holistic activity that requires skills in not just programming but a bunch of related fields as well. So if it is strongly related to game development, and has general utility to the community as a whole, I think it should be allowed.

I think this is a good question that needs clarification. I'd vote for off-topic because:
There are a lot of fundamental tools to create game-assets. Eg. Photoshop/GIMP or Illustrator/Inkscape for textures or 2D game-assets. Audio- and video-editing software for soundtrack/effects and cut-scenes.
Most if not all of these tools have something in common: You don't use them exclusively for game production. So a question about learning the basics of such a program is definitely off-topic. If the question was specifically targeted at game-development, that would be something else.
Just because a program is being used in the game production pipeline doesn't mean we should answer questions about that here. If some people choose MS Word to write their design documents, we wouldn't want questions along the lines of: "How do I create a heading in Word"
I'd consider something along the lines of
"How do I learn Photoshop/Maya/3D Studio Max/Lightwave" as off-topic whereas something like "Best Maya setup for low-poly modelling" or "How to bake normal-maps in blender" as on-topic (although one could argue about that too).

I agree with pretty much all your points, but I can't give you the upvote since I don't agree that they're off topic in the general case.  I think we should encourage tools discussion, as long as they're not so "noobish" as to turn away experts.  How to moderate that, though, is a hard problem to solve.

Yeah sure. I don't opt for general off-topic either. I'd also like to see some more design or art-creation related topics here.

I wish I could just say, "refer them to the 3D Graphics Techniques site" - but it's stuck in eternal proposal phase :(
If the site existed, I'd say these questions are all off-topic, and people should be referred to the 3D site. So this could be a temporary problem - I like to think one day the site will exist :)
And of course, it's only 3D - doesn't help on questions about 2D or music-tools...

What would be phenomenal would be to have a link to that site in the off-topic close reason.

@Kara, I don't disagree with that - but it's not a site yet, alas, only a proposal. I wouldn't send people there expecting answers, although possibly if you made it clear the site doesn't exist yet, it would be okay.

Exactly. I figure the best pool of people to draw on (and the ones who'd be most happy to find out about the proposal) would be the ones asking questions that are off topic everywhere else...

@Kara unfortunately, the people asking questions, usually want an answer now, or at least sometime before six months have gone by... Telling them to "go commit to this site, and maybe some day this year, the site will go live and you'll get an answer" - not sure that's much of a solution to off-topic questions here   :(

Not suggesting that it's posted as an answer, but perhaps as a site feature. Seems like a complimentary site to this one, much as SO, SF, and SU exist somewhat symbiotically.

This has come up again, with a very specific question about modelling in Maya, with a picture.
I would rather not see these questions here. But I would also rather not see half0 the programming questions we have here either, because I think SO can do them better. And there's no SO equivalent for modelling yet. So if we're going to have a double-standard, let's at least do it in the direction that provides a resource not otherwise available.
0 That's half after you filter out the quarter of the site that's "getting started" crap, which doesn't belong anywhere on SE.

I think you're being a little bit harsh with your examples of "programming questions better suited for SO" examples in the comment on that question.  The curved movement question absolutely belongs here.  It's not a question of programming but of logic of things that are commonly found in a video game.  I do agree with a few of your other examples, and will probably migrate a few later.

That being said, if you don't like questions feel free to flag them.  The moderators do read all the flags. We just may decide not to do anything about it.  I've thought we've been doing a pretty good job of shutting down the dupe "getting started" questions, though.

I would love to know why you think a question about how to model basic curves is off-topic but a question about how to program basic curves is on-topic. Certainly games contain curved movement; they also contain plenty of curved surfaces. In the grand scheme of things, someone asking about curves in Maya is far more likely to be working in game development than someone asking about programming basic curve motion, who could be doing anything from algebra homework to transportation networks.

I didn't vote to close the other question.

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


text:
Bounty on community wiki questions
How to write a network game? was converted to a wiki, but the bounty wasn't removed. Bug?

Bounties:

Bounties are not affected by community
  wiki mode. When you award a bounty to
  an answer marked as community wiki,
  the reputation bonus will still be
  awarded.


text:
What should the standards be for editing posts?
I've spent some time editing other people's posts to fix various trivial errors, and I was wondering what kind of standards make sense for our site as to what types of edits are appropriate for our community. I have some thoughts but would love to hear everyone else's.
What seems 100% appropriate:

Spelling and grammar fixes that do
not change meaning
Formatting fixes
that make reading difficult
Adding tags

What seems inappropriate:

Anything to dramatically change
meaning of question/answer

Discussion areas:

Adjusting question titles to be more descriptive of actual question. Should we do that or let the tags handle it?
Dramatic fixup of text. Take a look at How to Create a Game?. Iain's edits were very helpful and appropriate but to what degree should we fix up poorly written questions?

What should the standards be for our community.

We should definitely be proactive in editing questions to be more to the point and more correct.
For example, this question had a bad title.
This question probably should remove references to a specific language.
Most questions with pointless intro/outro text should probably be removed (i.e. "Hi", or "Thanks").
I'd even go so far as to correct capitalization of proper nouns, i.e. Unity instead of unity.
Sometimes I'll even go in and remove potential flamebait subjectivity, even if it's seemingly harmless.  See this example.
If you think of questions as things that people are much more likely to find by searching at some point in the future instead of a discussion group, it makes sense for people with the time and the reputation to treat edits as a copy editor would.  Or think of it like wikipedia, where lots of people touching topics incessantly somehow creates a reasonably high quality resource.  Granted, I'm only really coming from my personal experiences with StackOverflow, where most of the time I don't have to ask questions because somebody before me usually did and I was able to find it easily.

On the flip side, I'm less inclined to drastically edit poor questions, especially if the person obviously isn't a professional or enthusiast (i.e. the target audience for a site like this).  If I saw the question in your example before the fixups, I'd just vote it down and maybe even vote to close it as off topic (although honestly I'm probably going to do that anyway since broad, newbie questions like that kind of go against the whole point of stackexchange sites).  Some people will argue that there's sometimes a good question buried beneath the cruft, but I don't think it's worth the trouble.

+1 couldn't have said it better myself. I agree about the horribly bad questions, they create a false sense that behavior is alright when voting turns around.

I mostly agree, although I'm not sure about the assertion that we should remove references to specific languages. Certainly, that question in your answer asks for an algorithm, and then asks wrt a specific language; but my thought would be that if they've tagged it with a certain language, they probably mean "I'm trying to implement it in this language"; and if anything, it's the word "algorithm" in the title that needs changing, rather than the language tag. Just my thoughts.

My opinion on that question is mainly the tagging, honestly.  I don't write/care about flash games so I have flash/actionscript/etc tags marked as ignore, but yet that question is still interesting to me.  The algorithm can (and should) be mostly language-agnostic, even if the person who asked the question is going to be implementing it in actionscript.  That's just me, though.  I'll concede the point if only so that the bulk of my thoughts on the matter aren't derailed by this particular example.


text:
Is Unity turning into our jQuery?
I hope not.... just sayin'

I'm not familiar with the issue, but is this appropriate for meta? For discussions about the site operation?

I think memes are inherently meta, so I guess it's OK!

what's wrong with Jquery?

@Spooks, on StackOverflow javascript questions are likely to get an answer suggesting jQeruy, whether that is helpful or not. So jquery has made it into a mem: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19478/the-many-memes-of-meta/19492#19492

Would have never even made that association. But yep, It appears so, but honestly... it's so hard. It's really just that easy and that usable.

Same with jQuery. You should totally drop Untiy and try jQuery.


text:
"Discussion" tag in meta is probably redundant
How's that for meta?
But seriously, aren't most of the topics in here "discussion"?  Unless they're bugs, I guess.

This would be status-bydesign.
The meta site is intended to be where we discuss the site itself, but it is also where users would connect with the Community Moderators, and System Developers. To make working easier for those people Meta sites have a few mandatory tags.

Discussion (For General Discussion of the site)
Feature-Request (for making a feature request)
Support (for asking for help from a moderator / developer / helpful person)
Bug (For reporting what you believe to be a bug)

This allows the staff to focus their time when they need to, if you have the 'fix bugs' task for the day the discussions can get in the way. So you'd just search for the 'bug' tag. Also it allows them to keep a running count of the amount of Requests for Support, new features, or bug checks.
For example, this quick search shows the bugs that haven't been assigned a status on Meta.SO
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/%5Bbug%5D+-%5Bstatus-completed%5D+-%5Bstatus-norepro%5D+-%5Bstatus-declined%5D+-%5Bstatus-deferred%5D+-%5Bstatus-bydesign%5D+-%5Bstatus-review%5D


text:
Logo Proposals for Game Development
Please post as answers below, your logo proposals for this site.
Rules:

Original artwork only.
You need to have a copy of your submission in a vector format.

Stolen from here

I don't know if money is an issue, but you can also get logos for $250 at http://logotournament.com (and no, I don't represent them :P)

This design is based on the currently leading URL "beyondpolygons.com," although it could also work for the "gameloop" variants.
Basically, it's a polygon, ie 3 vertices. There are several variations, some with and some without colors. In places where there is color, it's the all powerful RGB triplet. There are a few variants here where the polygon has a sharp/broken edge around it which, while also looking cool, kind of plays on the "beyond" part of the URL, ie "breaking" out of the polygon mold, etc. Also notice that the color is coming from each vertex as though they are linearly interpolated vertex colors--a play on the colored triangle we all drew when learning how to use vertices.
And yes, it is the Stack Overflow font because it looks so clean/sharp/good.
3:
2:
1:
There are of course a number of other combinations of color, edge style etc but hopefully the subset above gives an idea.
Edit: ordered by the preference we've been leaning towards so far (pseudo-upvoting?).

+1| Very good idea, I wonder if it would be appropriate to split this up. 1, 2 and 3 are all great. If I were to rank them though my order would be 3 > 2 > 1. 3 only ranking higher because I think a bit of color is good.

I think I'll wait a little while to split them up. If not very many designs show up, I'll split them for individual votes. If lots of designs show up I don't want to clutter everything with similar logos in separate answers.

Looks good!  I like #3 and #1

I absolutely think it needs a splash of color, and so my vote is on 3. The white in the middle looks much better in my opinion than the entire thing filled in (4).

By the way, that domain has been registered by SO, so it does appear to be our official domain not-yet-announced.

@Ricket: I'd have to agree as far as the center being filled in goes

I think #2 and #3 both look good. #2 works better as a logo, but I really like the concept of the colour in #3 - I just think the implementation could be improved. (Also: your font rendering is a bit blurry.)

@Ricket: That's not really a guarantee, they registered it very early. People with good ideas for open domains are encouraged to send the idea to SO before posting so a squatter can't grab it. That said, considering the current state of voting, I don't think the result will come as a surprise to anyone.

Continued on Sean James logotype since I liked the idea. It definately needs a splash of color but the original gradient between vertices is a bit uneasy to look at and will usually do badly in print. So here are some alterations on the logotype where the colors are simplified.
1.
Whitespace in vertices are filled with color:
beyond polygons vertices colored http://a.imageshack.us/img706/2093/bpverticescolored.png
2.
Black figure around the vertices is filled with color:
beyond polygons vertices colored http://a.imageshack.us/img269/3966/bpverticesfilledpolygon.png
3.
All white space is filled with color:
beyond polygons vertices colored http://a.imageshack.us/img36/7871/bpallwhitespacefilled.png
4.
As per Noctrine's comment where the white space bars between vertices are filled:
a.
beyond polygons with color http://a.imageshack.us/img97/6163/bpbarsfilledccw.png
b.
beyond polygons with color http://a.imageshack.us/img69/3987/bpbarsfilled.png
c. Tetrad's suggestion with R->G->B
beyond polygons with color http://a.imageshack.us/img46/2015/bprgb.png

I like number 3. It looks like people holding hands (similar to the Ubuntu logo).

@Firas: I like it for that exact reason, but I also sort of don't like it for that exact reason. Do we really need yet another logo that looks like people holding hands? It's good-looking, it's just starting to get a bit cliche.

I recommend one with color going only across one bar and filling one vertex.

Sure @Noctrine, made a quick edit.

I like the clockwise rotation in 4a, but think the order should be R -> G -> B.

@Tetrad, made a quick edit with your suggestion.

Good points. I like 4c as well.


text:
Should the FAQ have a restriction on time-dependent Questions?
For example, the UnityAnswers FAQ:

Don't write things that will be
  irrelevant in a few days.

This is in response to Doom 3 Codebase release details?
I was going to comment it with a link from our GameDev FAQ, until I looked at the FAQ, and realized it doesn't say anything about time restrictions. Now, it's possible the Doom Question won't become irrelevant, as it would at least have a link to the actual code.
But in general, is it a good idea to avoid time-dependent Questions, and/or should the FAQ be updated?

And why exactly is faq a reserved tag, anyway?

Because it makes a kind of faq page, you have to look at Meta.SO to really get it though. If you look at the side you will see frequently asked http://meta.stackoverflow.com/

Well, we already have a close case for that. Too Localized, can also refer to being only relevant to a particular point in time.

But how would people know the question should be closed (or not asked at all)? I'm wondering if we should modify the FAQ (or have the moderators do it).

Just checked, the FAQ page is kind of lacking on close reasons. If you want you can add it in the "What should our FAQ" contain question for voting, if not I'll add it when I get freetime later tonight.

+1 For the sake of Community♦, and the issue doesn't seem to be much of a general problem.


text:
Moderator Pro Tem Announcement
As we enter the second week of the public beta, we desperately need members from the site whose focus is to engage the community, both in community-building issues and site management. That's why we select a few members from each community to act as temporary, provisional Moderators. You can read about the program here: Moderators Pro Tempore.
I am pleased to announce that these members have stepped up and generously volunteered their time to help us assure that each community’s issues are properly addressed:

We want to make this site a huge success, and these members are great examples of exactly the type of people we need to make this site succeed. Please welcome them for the hard work and time they contribute.
Did I overlook anyone?
Almost certainly. There are members who are actively involved and very deserving of recognition. My failure to account for everyone this early on is in no way a slight against them. Ideally, Moderators are elected by the community and that's why you'll have your elections in several weeks.
Most of all, be respectful and understanding of the Moderators Pro Tem. Members of your community are volunteering their time and learning on the job. It’s a learning experience for everyone.

Woo! I feel a bit bad though, with my rep being so low in comparison. We need more questions, time to advertise more!

Don't feel bad about it, you're putting a ton of effort into the meta. All I've done is answer a bunch of questions with answers that people seem to like. :)

Yeah, reputation is nice but isn't a determinate. As long as you take the communities opinions into consideration when appropriate, I'm glad to have anyone else do the grunt work of moderation! I think a "grats" might be appropriate.


text:
Professional game developers and NDAs
Assumption: we want as many professionals on the site asking as many "long-tail" expert questions as possible.  From Joel Spolsky's post re: firearm SE proposal:

Excellent suggestion. One thing to think about is this: is there a subgroup of firearm owners that are more than just dilettantes? Think about why MathOverflow is so much better than Yahoo! Math Answers... it's because it attracts professional mathematicians. Can you narrow the target audience from "people interested into firearms" to something like "professional firearm dealers"? Or "military firearm maintenance officers?"
You'll still get all the people interested in firearms, but because of the heavy presence of professionals, you'll get much higher level conversation. Rather than "What are the requirements to obtain a concealed carry permit in [state]", which already has an excellent Wikipedia article, you'll get questions like, "How do I authenticate a genuine 1911 Pacific Theater commemorative Colt?" which doesn't.
The power of the Stack Exchange platform is detailed, expert answers to extremely rare, "long-tail," highly technical questions. To get expert answers, you need experts. To attract experts, you need a site where people are asking very interesting and hard questions, not the basic questions, so that it's clear that this is a PRO site, not a consumer/enthusiast site.... and remember, the pro sites WILL attract the enthusiasts, but not the other way around.

Problem: NDAs.
I think it's going to be difficult to get the kind of long-tail questions that really drive professionals to the site.  Most of the major players in hardware and software put developers under pretty stringent NDAs.  Posting anything about the Wii/PS3/Xbox/beta iPhone SDKs isn't really something people can do.  That's probably true for most game engine licenses as well.  And there's the idea that a lot of proprietary tech is considered a valuable trade secret.
So a lot of the questions on the site now are high level subjective design questions.  The engines and platforms that aren't under NDAs are generally considered indie/enthusiast (i.e. XNA, Unity, UDK).  Non-domain-specific programming specific questions usually are the domain of SO.
I don't really have a specific question to ask.  More like a call to arms on suggestions on what we can provide as starting points for good questions to bring people here.

As a professional game developer myself, I don't think the kind of questions that would require breaking a platform SDK are really appropriate for a site like this in the first place. Platform SDKs change very frequently and already have decent messageboard/newsgroup resources for answering specific technical questions, as well as theoretically resources from the company. So NDAs will stop that kind of answer but that kind of answer is nowhere close to the core of what an "expert" would discuss about game development.
For instance the vast majority of game design knowledge is not protected via NDAs (with the exception of specific implementation details that are company trade secrets). This site is a PERFECT place to discuss how to solve very specific game design problems and I hope it continues to move in that direction. Similarly this is an excellent place to ask multi-disciplinary questions, such as the kinds of things professional technical artists and technical designers need to figure out every day. As far as I am aware there do not exist any great communities for asking questions about game creation as a whole, and that's what drew me to this place.
Basically I think this site should strive to get as many professional GAME creators as possible, as opposed to focusing on the specifics of software development on a platform. We should all strive to get as many professional designers, producers, and artists on here to mix with the existing set of game programmers and indie folk.

Speaking as a professional game developer, I've been actively promoting the site amongst my peers, since the more people involved the better quality the questions/answers will be.
I can tell you right now that a lot of them are instantly turned off by the high noise/signal ratio on the site already: too many hobbyist and noddy questions. While that's to be expected (there is no barrier to entry), it's something that will need to be struggled against constantly to get the level of quality to make the site feasible.
Worse, the developers I know see the low quality questions and answers, but of course being new to the site, can't vote them down. So they're left with a situation where they see a site with very little good quality content, and to have a hope of making a difference, have to answer poor questions before getting enough reputation to provide a tangible contribution.
Can I suggest a system of vouching, where professional game developers (who have sufficient reputation here already of course) can vouch for other developers, to artificially get them past the barrier to contribution. Doesn't have to run indefinitely, but as a way of kick-starting the site, might help to get more professionals, and less amateurs involved.

I don't think The SO team would be all that keen on awarding any rep outside of the base association. If they are active participants at any other site (with over 200 rep I believe) they will automatically gain 100 rep upon joining here.  But nevertheless, please post your vouching idea as a feature-request. :)

Also, could you encourage them to contribute to the meta-site? I think it's very important that we get active professionals, and meta is where we shape site policy.

I'll certainly try. But again there's a chicken and egg situation: they're reluctant to invest time/energy until there's a viable site and a tangible benefit to them, but without interaction from actual pros, there won't be a viable site...

The signal to noise ration is pretty bad, I agree.  The best way to deal with that is efficient use of voting powers, but it'll be tough 'til we have a "powerful" community.  However this is sort of the same affliction that the gamedev Usenet groups had; a bunch of "pros" were (are?  Haven't checked in years) there, but rarely had questions to ask due to any number of reasons, so the hobbyists were the ones left to do the asking...

Personally, I'm hoping we can get some more game-programming-specific questions on the site.  Things like shader or other graphics programming.  Maybe questions about things that show up at SIGGRAPH. Maybe try to get some artists to get some art tool questions here as well, i.e. "how do I do X in Max/Maya".  I'm spreading the site around to anybody who might think the format is interesting, and most people seem enthusiastic about it, but very few have actually gotten around to asking any questions (if they have any questions to ask).

I think "if they have any questions to ask" is a big part of it. I think there's a bit of a cultural issue in the games industry where many creators don't like to admit they don't have the answer. This site can help to open up the community a bit I hope :)

From my perspective, I just don't have many questions to ask of the random sampling of others that may be reading at any given time.  Perhaps unfortunately, most of the work that I do is in the realm of reimplementing solved problems, and generally speaking the solutions that I need to come up with either have tons of documentation available or truly are of the cutting edge, nobody's done it before sort of work that I don't actually want to let the community in on until it's done.  :)
The programming challenges that I run into aren't particularly restricted to game development, so I ask them on StackOverflow.
However, I still come here hoping to run into some good conversation and maybe help steer some newbies right.  Perhaps it's exactly that attitude that will prevent more pros from joining up, though.
Richard Fabian's "runtime game tweaks" question could be one of the coolest ones around if it revealed an implementation that one could just go and grab.  As it is, yeah that's the coolest feature ever and everyone implements it themselves so I don't really have much to add.  Go go reinventing the wheel!
As to reinventing the wheel, I think the NDA issue does sort of coincide with the fact that there is generally no sharing of "work product" between "pro" game developers, so discussions turn higher level and conceptual or end up of lists comparing Jira to FogBugz and Unreal to Unity.
Not to mention, many of us participate in other fora which are either primarily "pros" or exclusively (e.g. invite-only).  Mailing lists like gdalg or sweng-gamedev serve a much more focused purpose, and I suspect they therefore detract from an individual's desire to join yet another community.

Thinking about this some more, and possibly deserving of its own answer, is that often the questions somewhere like StackOverflow are answerable.  Someone posts a snippet of code and asks where they're going wrong.  Someone else asks how to make a particular editor syntax highlight strings in a different color.  ...at least the tags that I follow.  :)
In the gamedev.stackexchange the questions we're seeing are more like, "how do I make a game," and "how does a physics system work."  These are not answerable questions, at least not in a forum like this.  A "good" question might be "how do I map controller buttons to actions, since my press-button-call-function method is getting too complex" or "how do I best smooth out camera motion in a third person game?"  These are the sorts of questions that programmers in game development run into and there are many answers, each with pros and cons, therefore yielding discussion and vindictive downvoting.
Honestly I'm not sure how to get to that place, or even if that's what the community wants.  That's what I'd like to see, though that sort of arena is already present on the gamedev mailing lists and other public and private fora.

There will be a class of question which cannot be openly answered here by an expert, and those are questions about an NDA'd topic, asked by someone not under NDA.
Someone under NDA wouldn't ask the question here in the first place.
All else is fair game, and of sufficient interest that you will absolutely attract professionals to the site.

I've seen atleast one major industry professional here, but I agree the NDAs that developers are required to sign would be a considerable hindrance to getting that particular line of professionals to the site.
I think, what would be best, is to figure out a way of bringing over those development communities. It's a shame that we won't have access to sponsored tags for some time, but there are many professionals in the indie community, and quite a few with the appropriate skillset among hobbyists.
I never got into UnityAnswers, so I don't know how into Unity would be to driving people here (I would assume very little, although a Unity sponsored tag would probably cost less than hosting unity answers)
But I do know that the UDK community could benefit vastly from having a resource such as this. With UDK practically being Unreal Engine 3, many professionals play with it from time to time.

To be perfectly frank, most people who post in UnityAnswers aren't exactly the kind of people that you want on a site like this.  Most of the questions are "find my bug for me since I don't fully understand UnityScript".  I was thinking about sponsored tags, especially if we can get XNA or UDK ones, but the really big players probably aren't going to go for it.  I know Nintendo, for example, has their own private newsgroups that they run and moderate.

It may be possible to encourage the UDK community, I don't know about XNA though Microsoft already has a ton of communities for getting / giving help.

@Tetrad- all of the console manufacturers have private forums for developers.

@dash-tom-bang, there are forums for a lot of things, but one of the selling points of StackExchange-based Q&A sites, is that they aren't forums. The structure works completely differently, with voting, rep, etc, and is intended to build up a useable, detailed knowledge-base of Q&A. (Of course, people keep trying to use it as a forum and have extended discussions, but that's another issue :)

By "forum" I mean "a place where people gather to hear themselves talk."  Usenet, BBS, StackExchange all count as forums IMO.


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Should we allow "list of X"-questions?
Many questions currently on the site are things like "Give me a list of options for X".
There is a decent amount of precedence for these kinds of questions being discouraged on StackExchange sites.  For example, on Meta SE: "Should we have a “List of X” close reason?" and on the Gaming Meta: "Best/favourite/subjective list type questions".
Specifically on StackOverflow, there used to be precedence for older, popular questions to be grandfathered in as long as they were community wikis (ostensibly to prevent rep farming), but apparently now all those questions are closed.
There also seems to be some precedence on SuperUser to require "recommendation" type questions to be tagged as software-rec.  There's some discussion on Web Applications to consider following a similar paradigm.
Just on the front page, here are some examples of what I'm talking about:

Tools for creating 2d tile based maps
Easy to use cross-platform 3D engines for C++ game development?
Where can I find good (well organized) examples of game code?
Recommended 2D Game Engine for prototyping (and other "what engine" type questions
What are your favourite game-specific coding gems?
Where can I find free music for my game? (and other "where can I find..." type questions)
(and for balance, one of mine) What was the funniest development bug you’ve seen?

I could list more but got tired of copying and pasting the title and the link for every example.
What should our stance on this site be for these kinds of questions?  What moderator actions (if any) should be taken on them?  I'm not fully familiar with all the discussions, so I'm not going to list out pros and cons myself.  I'll leave that to the answers.

Edit: for the record, I've changed my mind on this since writing it.

Personally, I happen to not mind list questions.  I find that there are often a lot of resources out there that I haven't found that other people know about, so those kinds of questions seem useful.
I can also understand the desire to discourage these kinds of questions for rep farming.  In my case, it doesn't necessarily seem fair to get 50 rep points just because I was the first person to link to something relatively popular.  There are some more extreme examples out there in some of the other "list" questions.
Also, in my personal usage of StackOverflow, I've sometimes gone through some of the grandfathered community wiki list questions and have enjoyed reading them (in the case of the "favorite programmer cartoon" one), or learned something new from the "hidden features of C++" question (which is now closed).
One of the options moderators have is to force questions to be Community Wikis.  To me, this seems fair.  It leaves the question there for the community to build upon, and it mostly solves the rep farming concern (or at the very least, doesn't encourage the behavior as you don't get rep for asking/answering those kinds of questions after they're made into CWs).
I can understand the larger, more mature sites looking down on those questions entirely.  SO has a relatively huge userbase compared to the other sites, and those kinds of questions can add to the noise.  But in the younger, smaller sites, I think having those questions can actually help build the community as they give easy questions for people to rally around.  Getting people in the habit of participating, even if it's just to post a link to something they know about, is probably going to help those users keep coming back.
Edit: seems like the general consensus is to make these types of questions community wikis.

I second the community wiki solution. I think lists are perfectly valid questions--not every question has exactly one answer and allowing multiple answers to exist seems perfectly fair to me. They should, however, be community wiki to avoid rep farming while still allowing up/down votes on answers.

Community wiki sounds like a good idea to me.  These questions are useful for finding new resources (graphics, music, etc.) that one might not have known of beforehand.

This answer—even with the edits—doesn't match the current guidelines, and all of the questions linked from the OP have been closed or deleted. I started writing an answer to this that would clarify the situation, but realised it might be better if you did. (Does this sound sensible?)

I like list questions, as long as they are not duplicates. In fact if we DO start closing them  users will keep trying to reopen them as new topics. I'm sure the mods will be marking new "Where do I get free sound" questions as duplicates for years to come. They are honestly one of the first questions any new game developer would ask. Also, they show up nicely in google search results if they're edited well, so can drive new users to the site and expand the community. Finally, as game development is changing relatively quickly many of these list questions could actually need new answers within a year or less. By allowing the users to add  new answers we can use this site to keep nice resources lists to solve a variety of problems.
So my personal view is to force these questions to be community wiki, and to proactively close duplicate list questions. Other than that I think they are a positive for the site as a whole and advance the general cause of sharing information within the game development community.

+1 I agree wholeheartedly, I think it would be nice if we could have a visible guideline for posting list questions. Doubt that would get added though, as the general community looks down on these 'questions' as a whole.

The style of question described is at odds with current policy on what is and is not considered on-topic.
If allowed, such answers have also difficulties with other current guidelines:

Stack Exchange has a strong policy against link-only answers. Most answers to this style of question fall into this category.
Most answers fail the six subjective question guidelines.

The community policy is to avoid using community wikis as a crutch for otherwise-bad questions.
Unless a question manages to overcome the difficulties described above, requests for "a list of options for X" should be closed.

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

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


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Can I create an "article" by posting a question and an answer directly?
Let's say that for a time I have been researching a specific question or topic on my own and I've come up with an answer. The answer seems to me to be complete and satisfactory to my needs. At this point I just could go ahead and use the answer or file it away or whatever, but I feel that this result could be of benefit to the community.
Now, many other knowledge-sharing communities have article sections where users can submit this kind of result so that other users can benefit from the research even if it's not an open discussion. The Stack Exchange model has no explicit function to submit articles.
My question is, if I have such an article from my own research that I want to share, is it good conduct to form a question and a solution from the article and post them both together?
I think this would expose the result to the benefit of the community without violating the question-answer structure. Also, by not accepting my own answer right away I could leave the question open for others who maybe have researched similar topics to contribute.

Go for it - the purpose of the site is to increase useful knowledge in Q&A form. Of course, "together" should not mean in one post - the Answer should be separate. Others can add their own Answers, and good/bad ones will be up/downvoted (hopefully in that order).
Should I answer my own question?
Although if the article is really long, just a link and summary text would be enough, don't post an encyclopedia.

Agreed, if it can be broken down into a question and answer, then post it.  Who knows, the community might find an even better answer than your own!

Yes. That goes along with what I had in mind, to boil down the content and then provide a reference link to the full article, if there is one available.

"Article" makes me scared a bit, we are above all a Question & Answer community. But yes, if the Question end of it is a proper question, and the answer portion is a proper answer then (at the moment atleast) I can't see anything really wrong with it.
But yes, it would be best to not accept your own answer immediately, You never know what you may find.

Unless this site is different, you can't accept your own Answer in under two days, anyway. And I did also mention he shouldn't post an entire encyclopedia, just a link. :)

This is a good idea for two reasons. First, it shares valuable knowledge with the community, and addresses a specific issue in a way that fits in with the Q&A format. Second, since you are asking a question, and there are people here to answer it, you may get a new, interesting answer you'd never considered before. This makes the question even more valuable, since there are now two approaches to a solution.
One potential downside is that people may look at it unfavorably as rep-farming. A countermeasure to this is to make the post (or even just the answer) Community Wiki. If that's not a concern of yours, though, then no need to worry about such attitudes.
To mark as a Community Wiki, simply check the box "Community Wiki" before you post your answer.

As Tetrad points out, this checkbox option is only available for answers. There are several ways for a question to become CW, including being edited 10 times (or by 5 different users), or a collecting 30+ answers. Questions can also be flagged for a moderator to make the conversion.
More information on Community Wiki and how it works is available in this answer.

Last time I checked Community Wiki isn't a end-user facing option anymore.

@Tetrad See my edit

Maybe it's just not an option for asking questions then.

You are correct. I've updated my answer to address that point.


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What should we do to spread the word about this site?
Everyone who's reading the Meta site has an interest in spreading the word about the site. That will increase the user base, give us better questions, and give us better answers. What kind of things should we, as interested users, do to let others know about the site? The "random googling" method is already going pretty well, but I suspect there's other things we can/should do. I'm also assuming we've already told our game developer friends about it. Or should we wait until the site is formally out of beta to do more full on evangelizing?

Social media outlets if you don't mind tweeting or updating your facebook status about the site if you think you have some followers/friends that would be interested in game development.
I put the word out on Slick2D's forums, which is a popular Java 2D gaming framework.

I think going to GameDev.net and Gamasutra too early will only exacerbate the relevancy/quality issues already present. I'd suggest actively targetting professional game developers somehow, perhaps by emails to tech leads, or similarly direct means. Might be worth talking to Develop, getting them to run an article in the magazine on it.
EDIT: On another note, I wanted to put up a post talking about the site on my company blog. It would be nice if there were a banner image I could use for the link - the nature of the HTML used on the page heading means I'm having trouble actually pulling the image off for use.

Sites like Gamasutra and Gamedev.net seem like good places to try and get an audience for the site. What's a good way to get those communities over here?

What about the IGDA forums? May provide a few good people.

I believe I saw mention of this site a few months ago at GD.Net, or at least an idea about it before it was actually created. Then, it was regarded as semi-spam and nobody took any interest. However, when this site gets out of the beta [I think it's in beta?] and matured somewhat, say in a month or two, then we could probably go to Gamedev. I'm sure it'll be pretty popular, as long as it's not seen as another site that doesn't do much.

I think reaching out to the Indie communities that don't have a dedicated Q&A section would help drive people here. The initial endorsement from Jeff & Joel helped Stackoverflow (followed by the Google Endorsement for android) I am hoping that some of that magic can work here.
If you are active participants in any of the communities below (feel free to edit more in) then changing your signature or something to link to here would be of some help.

UDK
XNA
Neoaxis
Ogre
irrlicht

For the Unity3D game-engine community, I posted in their forums twice about GameDev (once at proposal, once after it went public). This may have gotten some users - alas I can't vouch for the quality of users (UA is filled with, uh, ignorant children who expect to press the make my game button in Unity and complain that it requires work :)

@Cyclops, if I ever get into Unity plugin development that will be my plugin :p And yeah, I think I posted in your thread.

Unity already has its own dedicated stack site answers.unity3d.com/

@lathomas I know, that's why I didn't put it up here. But I think this community has developed in a far different way than Unity Answers.

Don't forget any gamedev related IRC channels you guys hang out in. Essentially pass the word to anyone or any group that you come in touch with.

I got it inserted into the topic at the IRC channel I hang out in. Seemed to work.

(Adding a new answer since the StackExchange guys are talking more about promotion of sites)
Personally I've always thought that face time with people is more effective an endorsement strategy than random internet stuff.  And that's really what we should be thinking of it as, endorsing instead of advertising.
Most people who are active on this site should be a member of their local IGDA chapter.  I'd recommend going to their meetings and talking about the site with the guys there.  If there were fancy fliers or business cards that we could hand out, that would be even better.  But it has to come from a "hey we're developers and use this site and think you guys might like it to" as opposed to coming from "outsiders".
I've tried telling people in the industry that I hang out with normally about the site, and gotten a few people interested in it and posting results.  They've mostly been programmers, though.


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The Subjective Tag
Are we going to have it? I know there is a discussion going on in the Meta.SO community about whether or not the Subjective Tag should just be removed.
There it would face considerably more problems, but in our case the site is a lot smaller (only 17 [subjective] questions) and we could end this issue before it starts.

Related
Should we permanently remove the [subjective] tag?

Forgot to wiki so others can edit.

Jeff just posted a blog about this exact topic, that lays out a pretty good case for subjective be banned:
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/

And to make the point stronger, he says, " From this point on, meta-tagging is explicitly discouraged. "

Subjective is fine with me.  They might need to be required as CW seeing as there really isn't a real answer to them.

I think subjective questions are necessary for this SE site. Gaming is a very diverse topic; you will find a lot of questions that begin with "What's the easiest way to..." or "What is the best library for..." etc. I don't think these kinds of questions should be banned. I think the subjectivity inherent in game dev is particularly noticable when dealing with things like storyline and effects. Game development is a very new academic area, so it stands to reason that there just isn't a right answer to some of these questions (yet). That said, they still need to be asked.

This isn't completely about subjective questions. We already deal with a bit of subjectivity. This is about the tag [subjective]. Which has already been nuked.

It's also that the kinds of questions we want to encourage are different.  "What's the best engine" is a bad question.  "What's an engine that meets my requirements X, Y, and Z" is a better question.


text:
Which tags are useless or blacklisted?
This question covers our list of "bad" tags, tags which don't make sense in general or in the specific context of the site. These include meta tags, tags that are redundant with the focus of the site (game-development), non-specific tags, and so on.
Note that originally this question was set up as a community-wiki, with one answer per bad tag suggestion. Recently we seemed to have moved to a model where we post individual meta questions for each tag, which seems to foster better discussion. You can still post in this topic if you like.
This list can also cover tag synonym suggestions. For example, dx11 should be mapped to directx11. Note that you can vote on tag synonyms other people propose. For a list of synonyms currently in the system, go here.
Currently Blacklisted Tags
The tag link pages for each of these should be empty. If you add a new tag here, please preserve the alphabetical ordering for easier browsing. Please link to the discussion that lead to the tag being included on the blacklist for posterity.

2d-physics (just use physics and/or 2d instead; related post)

actions (generic, discussion)

api (meta-tag; discussion)

artifacts (discussion)

beginner (discussion)

best-practices (discussion)

buffers (generic; related post)

circle (discussion)

class (discussion)

compilation (does not add value, related thread)

computer-science (generic, off-topic; related post)

conceptual (meta-tag; related post)

delta (does not add value, discussion)

design (discussion, tag renames)

development (discussion)

engine (meta tag; discussion)

environment (too broad; discussion)

feedback (too ambiguous; related post)

framework (meta-tag; discussion)

free (meta-tag, discussion)

game (prior decision)

hexagon (discussion)

hobby-development (meta-tag with no value, executive decision based on similarity to indie)

homework (Another executive decision, it's a meta tag that doesn't describe the content of the question.)

indie (meta-tag with no value, see the related thread)

infinite (too general; discussion)

inspector (discussion)

language-agnostic (Executive decision, this semi-meta tag adds nothing on the content of the question.  Most questions are algorithm or math related, or specifics of a particular language.  This tag is redundant, as any programming/math/algorithm question without a specific language tag is going to be assumed to be language agnostic.)

language-choice (Executive decision, all questions tagged this way are a "which technology is best" type, which shouldn't be used anyway.)

languages (discussion)

learning (Executive decision, but there's precedence on other sites)

libraries (meta-tag; discussion)

limitations (meta tag; executive decision)

middleware (discussion)

old-school (meta tag; discussion)

opinion (same as subjective)

pre-processing (discussion)

polygon (discussion)

quads (discussion)

rectangle (discussion)

sdk (meta-tag; discussion)

shape (discussion)

size (too ambiguous; discussion)

smooth (too ambiguous; related post)

subjective (discussion)

techniques (meta tag or too broad: discussion)

tips (another meta tag)

triangle (discussion)

triangles (discussion)

units (discussion)

update (used broadly for content covered by game-loop deployment synchronization)

surface(meta-tag: discussion)

Note that there's an easy way to link to tags nowadays.  The format is: [tag:TAG_NAME]

I have closed this question because we've reached the point where the scope of the question is too large to effectively manage the proposals or the discussion using the SE format. We have long since switched over to a model of having individual discussions for each blacklist proposal, and simply linking them from this question when a consensus is arrived at. If you would like to propose a tag for the blacklist or discuss the blacklisted state of a tag, please make a dedicated meta thread for the topic.

development
It's almost, but not quite as bad as having the word game in a tag on the "Game Development" Stack Exchange site.  It's somewhat implied that all the questions are either about game development in some fashion.
Personally, I don't see any question on that list that if I was trying to categorize it or search for it would be helped by the inclusion of development.

Seems to be consensus on this one.  Jeff Atwood went ahead and removed the tag, but I think people with editing power are going to have to keep an eye out to make sure it doesn't get re-added.

flash-professional
Honestly, I don't understand why there's such a tag. If somebody has a flash-related question, they will tag it flash. I don't think flash-professional does any good for further classifying flash-related questions.

Blandantly useless, used it in just two questions (one of which is closed, btw): removed it.

hobby-development
Is there a significant difference between hobby development and other forms of development? If I have a question about which physics engine I should use or what kind of school I should go to, will the fact that I'm hobbyist developer make a significant difference?

This feels like a "meta" tag to me (read: useless/unadvised).  You can argue there is slight precedence with the homework tag on SO.  However removing tags (as opposed to merging) is pretty difficult and there isn't an easy way to "ban" tags, so this is lower priority to me.

opinion
It is synonymous with subjective

DONE (a while ago)

collision
Make it a synonym of collision-detection
There were two collision detection questions with the tag before I retagged them (1, 2).

You can vote on them here http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms

Done (a while ago)

sound & audio
They seem to overlap quite a bit. If no one has any rationale against it, I'll merge.

If I was asking a question about sound effects I would not use audio, Sound is more appropriate there, "Sound" deals with vibrations through different mediums with physical properties and characteristics like reverb and Doppler effect. Audio would be the output of all that and included stuff like music which is not really classified as just sound. I think they are different enough to keep separate.

Although I see your point, I think most people would be confused about which one to use, resulting in many cases where each is used incorrectly. Merging these two together could prevent those issues from occurring, which makes somewhat of a case for merging them, at least there are enough tagged questions to provide an easily discernible difference between the two tags.

Based on how the site seems to actually use the tags, [sound]should either find itself inside [audio], or [sound-effects]. The current ones are actually more of the former, but in some ways a synonym towards the latter seems more appropriate post-fix.

This seems like something that should be revisited and/or discussed. There's a plethora of [sound] tagged stuff that could fit in one of the two mentioned buckets.

learning & education
I don't really see the need for both of these. Can we keep education and merge/remove learning?

Maybe even make both a synonym for "schooling" or something, so people don't put them in just because they want to learn something from the answer...

I'd rather make the education tag more specific to talk about schools specifically so there's less overlap.

best-practices
Probably a controversial opinion, but best-practices, kind of like discussion, subjective, poll, etc. are tags that more often than not describe the type of question and not the content.  Most best-practices questions are either 1) mistagged, or 2) lists of things to do (i.e. subjective community-wiki questions).
For more discussion: Are questions about best practices bad?

If that's really what you're after - a practice widely-recognized as "best" that you can adopt as your own, then go for it. All too often though, i see people asking for a "best practice" when what they really want to know is:

"Given my situation, what are the available solutions to my specific problem, and which one should I choose?"

Note the key difference: if you aren't free to make changes, potentially major, to what you're doing and how you're doing it, then "industry best" is irrelevant - you just need something you can use now. Perhaps it'll happen to be a Best Practice; perhaps it'll merely be the best of a bad set of hacks necessitated by the particular corner you've been painted into. But regardless, the focus has to be on you.

Jeff weighed in on this tag: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/

To me, this tag is less cut-and-dry than beginner.  If you just look at the content of our site compared to SO, a lot of the questions are "let me see good examples of X so I can decide how I want to solve my problem".  Which groks with my way of doing things in my professional career as well.  I'm personally on the fence about this tag (even though I suggested it), probably because it isn't as "overused" here.

I'm going to make a judgement call and say we should remove the tag from questions.

turn-based-strategy (Destruction)
Specifically, I'm advocating its replacement with the tags turn-based strategy. It probably does not need black-listing, just the initial destruction to remove it from the queue.
Normally I'm a promotor of singular combo tags, but in this scenario I'm actually leaning towards the former. Browsing strategy shows a lot of questions about the Strategy genre that can be safely abstracted from the game's being real-time versus turn-based. Likewise, turn-based can be applied to other genres, most predominantly RPG. Those two tags have important meaning to be used on their own as a result, and their combination is literally identical in meaning to the combined tag.
Unlike with what I see on the Gaming Stack Exchange, there seems to be no huge ambiguity as to what "strategy" means - to game developers it applies to the genre. There is one exception, but it needs a big retag and otherwise does not seem like it should trend dangerously. Most "unit strategy" questions actually properly get tagged with ai.

Turn-based strategy is a much more defined genre compared to, say, turn-based RPGs. You could easily get away with tagging things as RPG without needing to differentiate the different expressions of it, but being turn-based versus real-time is often part of the soul and definition of a strategy game. So a preference to keep turn-based-strategy is more than understandable. But if this is the case, then it feels like something should be done about the other two tags instead.

beginner
First off, it's probably off-topic as this site is supposed to be for "professional and amateur game developers."  It's also subjective and localized to the person asking the question.  It is also indicative that a lot of the questions tagged with beginner are also tagged with tutorials.  It's almost redundant.
I'm not really sure of the purpose of that tag.  Maybe there's some value in that beginners might be able to search through the beginner tagged questions to find some good starting points, but they would just be as likely to find things under tutorials.

edit: It's also now banned on the trilogy sites: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/

I disagree - I think it could be quite useful. In the same way that a homework tag is encouraged (as it gives context to those answering the question about how to construct their answer to best explain it to the asker), tagging as beginner will help those answering target their answer better. As far as being off-topic, I would think that an amateur game developer could be a beginner.
In terms of searching for beginner-tagged answers, it's not so useful, but then neither is the (encouraged) homework tag.

I wouldn't exactly say that homework is encouraged on SO.  It's mostly just to satisfy the people who think that homework shouldn't belong there so they can filter it out easily.  Also, there's a key difference from homework since beginner is subjective to the person, not an absolute.  A tutorial is a tutorial.  Something that's a beginner task to one person isn't necessarily a beginner task to another.

I think it's useful. If someone tags it as beginner, it indicates that they're looking for a more basic answer. I mean, a topic about how to store game entities for a beginner wouldn't require a long post about optimizations that could possibly have an effect due to the way something is O(log n) over the fact something else is O(n). Rather, they would just want to know that 'x is probably better to use, because it's faster [at O(log n) speed].

Before @TheCommunistDuck commented I was all for this being considered useless. While in general, it is fluff. It can be VERY useful for making sure that our answers help the person asking the question. Difficulty is variable in Game Development, this would make the professionals among us be able to say I'm not interested in giving the "for dummies" version of the answer to that. And help with their signal/noise ratio.

Here's a discussion on meta-tags on another new SE site which I think sums up my opinions on the subject: http://meta.cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/434/please-zap-the-meta-tags-and-dependent-tags.  Yes, question difficulty is variable, and scope is variable, but at the end of the day we're trying to find answers to problems, and it shouldn't matter the level of the problem or the level of the asker in order to get to a solution.

Jeff weighed in on this tag: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/

design
Based on the conversation here: Should the "design" tag encompass architecture AND game design questions?, design is too ambiguous a term in game development.  It can refer to the art side of things (i.e. character design), the game design side of things (or a subset of that, level design), or the engine design side of things.
I went through and renamed the existing design to game-design, and retagged design questions that were talking about engine design to architecture (which may also be due for a rename to have the word engine in it).
Note that this tag (at the time of this writing) doesn't exist, but I wanted to put this answer in this question anyway for safe keeping.

jobs & career (Synonym)
As opposed to this group, this pair deals with the variety of occupations in the game development world, as well as advice on getting those jobs. Between the two tags, there aren't really any distinguishing factors that I can find.

And [tag:hiring]

2d-physics
A bit more subjective, but the distinction between 2D physics and just physics probably isn't worth making.
Plus the programmer in me hates tags that start with a number.  Variables aren't supposed to start with a number.

[2d] [physics] would be just as good.

hmm, 2d-physics (which also ties into things like mario's physics) has a pretty different connotation to me than normal old physics, which is implicitly 3D to a professional game developer. I assume that is why they are distinct.

Conceptually, 2D physics are a different beast in quite many ways. For example: rotation (and rotational energy) works very differently, concepts like density have different units (kg/m^2 vs. kg/m^3 for the 3D variant) and consequently the laws of physics are quite different as well. The solutions to Navier-Stokes equations (for fluid dynamics; those are generic differential equations theoretically working on any number of dimensions) even look differently.

graphics
While looking at some retagging I added a graphics tag before realizing it was overloaded and questioning my decision. It refers to both 3d rendering programming (which rendering would seem to cover better) and art, and graphics-programming is on a few questions as well. Does the graphics tag by itself make any sense?

I agree. The meaning, like design, is overloaded. It almost seems like graphics-programming and rendering are very similar as well, but I'm not sure enough of they should be synonyms yet.

learning
Another "meta-tag" that describes the type of question instead of the content.  SE sites aren't a discussion board, and questions with this tag (usually) are the kinds of questions that don't have a point.
It's kind of like beginner.

Can't it be viewed as almost exactly the same as beginner? If you want to learn about X, Y, and Z to increase your knowledge, then you must be a beginner at X, Y, and Z.

I'm going to make an executive decision to remove this tag.

generated
I'm not sure what this tag is supposed to mean.  Perhaps it's mostly a synonym for procedural-generation?

There is "generation" other than procedural, such as automatically generated code, but it's still extremely general (after all, wasn't everything generated by SOMETHING?) and doesn't tell potential answerers anything useful.

units is ambiguous as users have asked questions tagged with it that are both about entities (i.e. enemy units) and measurements (e.g. unit conversion).
I also believe it doesn't exactly add much in the way of filtering (i.e. searching for questions that are about units in games (usually contained into a much more major category e.g. strategy games where one expects to find units) and units in physics (physics here is a tag that's enough)).
I recommend deletion.

languages & language-choice

I think these should be merged under languages.
I think languages should also link to all the language specific tags (although this will require a moderate amount of upkeep)

I'd almost rather obliterate the languages tag.  It's also slightly vague with the localization-related question. It really doesn't add anything to the existing questions.

infinite
Not sure what this tag really means.  It's been used 8 times: half of them are asking the same question about an infinite scrolling background; the other half are asking a variation about an infinite scrolling level that's has a procedural component.

Is there a need for tags like 3d-engines when you could just combine the 3d and engine tags? This would ensure that anyone interested in engines wouldn't have to search through engine, 2d engine, 3d engine, xxx engine, etc.

I think 3d and 2d game engines are sufficiently different that I do not think they should be merged.

In that case, why don't we remove the generic engine tag, and require people to specify the kind of engine?

Not everything relating to an engine is related to graphics.

@Tetrad, agreed, but we also have engine architecture, physics engine, etc. tags, so wouldn't it be better to break the engine tag into more specific tags, rather than having a generic tag and a fair amount of specific tags?

Similar: [tag:2d-physics] == [tag:2d], [tag:physics]?

project-management & management
Unless there's sound rationale against it, these should probably be merged.

There are a couple of management questions that aren't project-related.  Like http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/937/managing-a-complex-game-storyline-or-quests-system.  I don't think they should be synonyms, but retagging some of the questions that should be project-management to be more specific sounds good to me.  Feel free to do that.

For the question you referenced, I don't see it being so much a "management" related as it is a data structures (how do I store this type of data?) question.

game-component and component-based
They're both about the same thing.

A majority of the [tag:game-component] ones seem to be dealing more with specific XNA components than the concept of writing a component-based system, though.  Maybe component-based could be renamed to something else.

game-industry & business (Synonym)
Deals with game development as a business, usually for corporate matters such as profitability and legality. Game industry is the business this site deals with, and the questions under both tags cover mostly the same ground.

I don't agree with this, but mainly because I think game-industry as a tag should go away.  Like you said, the game industry is the business the site deals with, so it should probably be implicit.  I don't think any questions with that tag really describes the content of the question.  Some of them probably should be tagged with business, though.

@Tetrad So, probably have to manually sift them, but assume that our main tag for "corporate concerns" will be [business], then?

Or something similar to it, yes.

time-management seems to be ambiguous.
About kill cams: Handling game states like Braid's timeshift or Shooter's Killcam
About slow-motion: Easiest Way To Implement "Slow Motion" and variable game speed in XNA?
About update speed: Stuck at enemy movement
About time-travelling gameplay: How to implement time traveling into a game?
About time zones: What time to display in text messages in multiplayer game?
About software design: Splitting a tetris game apart - where to put time-management?
The last one is actually the only one to mention "time management" in the question, but I'm not sure it is actually a thing in the way the asker is using it: a software component.

If you sort by date, you'll notice the (IMO useful) original intent of this tag - production issues of scheduling people over time, not code.

I went through the questions in [tag:time-management] that were unrelated to time management, and generally replaced them with either [tag:timing] or [tag:time-travel] (a tag I created just for this; apparently we didn't have one before). The [tag:time-travel] tag might be better named time control, since slowing down time isn't exactly time travel, but time travel is the more well-known name. Also I added a tag wiki for [tag:time-management] to explain what it actually is.

@JoeWreschnig Yes, that sounds right. I should have included one of those questions in the above list as well.

@JonathanHobbs Good solution. I'll keep an eye on it as well.

logic
Seems more like a meta tag, and a pretty bad one at that.
One popular use of the tag is as a synonym for "reasoning" or "method", e.g. "Whats the logic behind XYZ?" but you wouldn't use reasoning would you?
Another popular use is part of "game logic", as opposed to things like rendering, and the separation thereof. Analogous to "business logic" in software. But then it's better served by tags like architecture or programming.
Other times it's a synonym for ai or algorithm, which just shows how uselessly broad this tag is.
Of course there is a proper thing called logic in math and philosophy, and is perhaps the right tag to use if someone were asking a question about making a logic puzzle game. I haven't checked if any of the tagged questions fall under this case. It seems doubtful, and in any case this might be better served by a tag like formal-logic.

I agree with the conclusion that it's probably a meta-tag. 81 questions is a lot though (there's no "obliterate a tag" mechanism, so it has to be removed manually). I would recommend going through the tagged questions and removing or re-tagging as appropriate. I won't be able to get to all of them myself in a timely fashion.

assets & resources (Synonym)
With a couple exceptions, the latter seems to refer to the same asset management and handling that the former tag covers. I think it may be useful to make these two the same for the more common scenario, while leaving tags on the non-asset posts to refer to what they are resources for (such as "ai" in the first example).

I'd almost want to just nuke the resources tag since it's pretty vague, but in lieu of that I pretty much agree with the synonym.  When used in the exceptional cases you linked to, it's pretty much a meta tag and should just go away.

programing
This is just misspelled programming, for which there is already a tag.
Edit: This should be deleted, not made into a synonym.

I don't think we should make synonyms for misspellings.  I fixed the one case where it was spelled wrong.

uvw-mapping
It should be a synonym of uv-mapping, as UVW-Mapping is a small subset of that, and is covered in the tag wiki.

smooth
The term is hardly ever descriptive without other words nearby (surface, movement, edge, etc).
It can't be used on it's own.
There are no experts in general "smoothness" area.

I should have finally gotten around to removing all of these.

procedural should be replaced by procedural-generation
procedural-generation has a lot more usage and a much better wiki entry and, as far as I can tell, both tags are being used to mean the exact same thing

directx, directx9, directx10, directx11, direct3d, direct3d11
Do we merge all of these under DirectX or do we require that people specify the version of DirectX they are using? Either way, we need to come up with a solution that can be applied to all "versionable" tags.

Are you suggesting merging to a single 'DirectX' tag? The DirectX versions are significantly different in places so having the number there is a good thing. People often tag questions as DirectX that could be more accurately tagged as Direct3D questions BUT 95% of the time someone says DirectX, they mean Direct3D and for this reason I think we should drop the Direct3D tags and go with numbered DirectX tags (i.e. DirectX, DirectX 9, DirectX 10, DirectX 11). However users may often tag questions as 'Direct3D N' so retagging would be frequent...

Some questions tagged with a specific DirectX version really apply to any version (or a broad range of versions) of DirectX, but it's up to you taggers to determine if it should remain particular to a version or changed to 'DirectX'.

The separate versions should stay separate.  The precedence is that questions that are non-version-specific should use the base tag and specific version questions use the more specific system.  There is no hierarchy system for tags and I don't think there ever will be, so merging the versions will be a mistake.  That being said, I'm open to the idea of merging Direct3D* with DirectX*.

DONE (not merging version specific, but merging direct3d into directx) Maybe that'll bite us in the ass later with the people talking about the nuances between the two, but for now I think it makes sense.

minecraft is too localized. Replace it with something like:

boxvoxel or boxworld (add minecraft as a synonym)
and introduce minecraft-mod

I don't know if I agree with the synonyms.  I think [tag:minecraft] reads a lot better than your suggestions.  It's also what more people are likely going to search for and internally categorize as.  I don't necessarily have a problem with the idea of a minecraft-mod tag, but it begs the question if we're going to make a separate -mod tag for any question asking about mods for a specific game.

@Tetrad thanks. I think the mod tag would generally be on a popularity-basis: if you start getting a few questions about modding a certain game make a tag for (which means I don't think minecraft-mod qualifies).

easing is confusing and has two questions tagged with it, which both deal with the same relatively localised subject of smooth interpolation between two points in space.
Synonym? Delete?

I suspect this is because easing is part of tweening, what Flash/Actionscript calls location interpolation.  AFAIK interpolation in AS deals specifically with colors.  Still, it would be nice to gently guide AS3-only developers to the industry standard usage.

I'm thinking that maps and levels generally mean the same thing, except in the case where "levels" refers to "character level" or something like that.
Both are generally really vague anyway.

feedback
Not many tagged questions (16), here are what it's being used for:

Feedback from players (alternative: community-management)
Force feedback (alternative: input)
Transform feedback (alternative: opengl)
A meta-tag for getting feedback from this site (please respond)

I suggest removing this tag entirely.

Tag obliterated.

computer-science
Not used much, but all questions belong to two categories:

Should be using algorithm instead, or not at all
Not game dev related (i.e. "computer science degree")

So I suggest removing this tag, and maybe replacing some instances of it with algorithm.

It's been nuked.

game-mechanics really feels like a synonym of game-design.  There's a high correlation between the two tags

Not a main site tag, but a meta tag, but vague nonetheless.
specific-question
Discussion.
TL;DR: If your question isn't specific, why are you asking in the first place?

networking & client-server
I think these should be merged under networking, seeing as how the client-server model is a form of distributed computing.

Not all networking is client-server, though.  "Is a" isn't a good reason for tag merging.

I don't see what the benefit of having client-server is, when we have networking. If you look through the client-server questions, although they mention the words "client" and "server", most are not client-server model specific, so having them tagged as such is fairly misleading.

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


text:
Is the italic button broken?
Why is this italic but my text in this answer is not?

mmyers edited my answer and fixed it. Turns out the underscore in the Twitter name "Nick_Lalone" needed to be escaped with a backslash; then suddenly it worked fine.

Yeah, it's because underscores are another way to form italics, so the parser got confused.

I suspected because it's a hyperlink, but when I tried it, it worked fine. Make sure the asterisks are matching, either inside or outside the brackets.
Funniest-bug link - I created this link by

typing the words "Funniest-bug link"
selecting the entire line
clicking the link button and filling the box with the URL.
while the text was still selected, clicking the I button.

And it seems to work fine. Making this Answer a wiki so you can edit/see the raw text. (You might do the same so we can see your text).
I also noticed that I used asterisks both inside and outside my URL brackets, so apparently it doesn't matter where they appear.

Hmm. I just edited the answer so that my hyperlink is an actual link rather than just http... text, and it still shows the same problem. I think it's a real bug. And yes things match, I'm a programmer after all. :)


text:
"How to make an entire Game X" - off-topic?
For instance, How to make a Battleship game?

Yes.
If this comment gets more than 5 votes I'm going to close it (if the community and/or another mod doesn't do it first).

Sounds like a candidate for [not a real question] ...cannot be reasonably answered in its current form.

Sounds good to me.  The question already has -4 so keeping it open any longer is probably not worth it.  I'm surprised there are no community close votes, though.

I'd have voted to close, but alas, don't yet have the 500 points needed. :) Just for the record, only 23/1,540 people (1.5%) do have enough rep.


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Spreading the word about the GameDev chat room
The GameDev chat could be a great extension to the site, but only if people are going to utilize it. Earlier today a few of us were talking about ways to spread the word, and possibly have a big push for a chat meetup later in the week.
How do you feel about the idea? Would you be interested in such an event? How could we spread the word to get people interested?

This has been handled. The Chatroom is available on the right sidebar now.

Without an agenda a meeting is a waste of time.  Unless your goal is just to shoot the shit.
The best thing we can do is what I did earlier today and make it a system message at the top of the page.  That, and if you like the idea of a chat room either idle in there or keep coming back.  Beyond that any additional pushing is probably not sustainable.

Organised meetups are also going to have real time-zone issues...

Would it be possible to have a button labelled 'Chat Room' or similar along the main navigation bar? That would certainly spread the word.
As for a meetup, I'm sure there could be a time that is accessible to most users.

Not just yet. The Chatrooms are currently in public beta, and they aren't even completely deployed. Our room is technically in violation because chats on MSO are supposed to have topics relating to MSO.

But still, post it as a feature request. I'd upvote and see if the Devs will pay attention :)

The main reason people don't visit a chatroom is because they are often somewhat empty. So how about adding a tracker that displays total number of people chatting, biggest chatroom and number of people in that chatroom?

This discussion is 3+ years old at this point. The chatroom box on the sidebar displays a list of the users who are currently logged in, and the extra information is available on the general chat frontpage.


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404 (Page Not Found) Image Nominations
I noticed this was missing here, so...
What should the 404 image be for this site?
Should it be funny like the other ones or more serious?
Please post only one image with source per answer for voting/rights.
Related:
"Amusing 404 "Page Not Found" Images for Trilogy sites?" on Stack Overflow Meta

I'm going to guess we might not have the bandwidth for a little Flash or HTML5 game.
But we really should have a little Flash or HTML5 game. How awesome would that be?

The "sketchy-404.png" we have now is a bit larger than 32KB.
http://hakim.se/experiments/html5/sinuous/01/
is about a third of that, so games should be possible with proper compression.

I love the idea of a game for 404 (and upvoted it) - but how widespread is HTML5? And Flash may or may not be available/turned on (iPads don't have it, and I turn it off unless there's a specific reason to have it on). We'd still need a fallback image.

+1 for HTML (it doesn't have to be 5, please reduce the buzzword usage), maybe something like Google's Pac-man game; NOT a Flash game!!

Canvas is supported by newer versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera. Explorer Canvas (JavaScript) adds support for IE but is 12KB in the compiled version. We can use jQuery, so the fallback can be a single replaceWith or a $().ajax([...]) for exCanvas.
It should have a title screen, so it doesn't affect performance by default.

This is a cool idea but should encapsulate the notion of "NOT FOUND." Like a game where you have to dig for treasure, but the treasure simply isn't there.

404 - Page not found

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

> HELP

The page you wanted wasn't where you thought it was, and now you're lost.

You can:
 * Try searching for it
 * Browse recent questions
 * Browse popular tags

...or some variation on the above.

You control one of three different vessels lost at sea.
Link: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5013896/404Game/404game.htm
There is still room for optimizations, but most features are ready.
The title screen definitely is not.

There are some copyright issues but it probably wont cost to much to get the Mario saves the princess from Seth Macfarlane or some similar prank :)


text:
What is the font used on the current logo?
I like the font, but I'm having trouble finding it on widely-known sites like dafont. Thanks in advance.

I mentioned in a post over on meta.SO that I think the font is Sketch Block.


text:
Is this question about game dynamics on-topic?
I have a question, but before I ask it, I want to make sure its on topic for this site.
Is the following question acceptable for this site? If not, is there a way I can change it to make it acceptable?

Seth Priebatsch recently gave a
  tedtalk entitled “Building the game
  layer on top of the world.” In it,
  Seth described four “game dynamics,”
  techniques used by game designers to
  make games fun and addictive. The four
  dynamics that Priebtsch described
  were:

Appointment dynamic-a dynamic in which to succeed, one must return at a
  predefined time to take a
  predetermined action. (Real life
  example: happy hour)
Influence and status-the ability of one player to modify the behavior
  of another's actions through social
  pressure. (Example: different color
  credit cards as a reflection of
  status)
Progression dynamic-a dynamic in which success is granularly displayed
  and measured through the process of
  completing itemized tasks. (Example:
  linkedin profile progress bar)
Communal discovery-a dynamic wherein an entire community is rallied
  to work together to solve a challenge.
  (Example: finding interesting content
  on Digg)

Seth explained these four game
  dynamics in his talk and added that
  his company has an additional three.
  I'm curious if anyone has any guesses
  about what those other three game
  dynamics might be.

Thanks for the responses, here's the question: http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/3131/what-are-the-other-three-game-dynamics

It's about making games fun, therefore it's about game design, therefore it's about game development, therefore it's on-topic.
I figure pretty much anything game-specific that happens before the game is released is on-topic here.

Question seems totally on topic to me. Broad Game design questions are cool here, and that seems like an answerable question as well.


text:
What conferences & events should we have a presence at?
I don't know if many of you know, but Robert recently posted a blog about how we can promote our site. In it he offers to match our dedication to helping the site grow, with resources to do just that.
So, in your opinion, what do you think are the key places that we need to be to really help this site take off?
*(And because I like formatting so much, going to borrow from webapps.)
For each answer, please identify the following:

Name
Dates
Location
Brief Summary
Ways we can be involved (if you have ideas such as:  be a sponsor, have a booth, etc)

Name: Game Developers Conference
Dates: March - TBD
Location: San Francisco, CA
Brief Summary:

...is the largest annual gathering of professional video game developers, focusing on learning, inspiration, and networking. The event comprises an expo, networking events, awards shows such as the Independent Games Festival and the Game Developers Choice Awards, and a variety of tutorials, lectures, and roundtables by industry professionals on game-related topics...

Ways we can be involved: Either a booth, or a sponsored party.  Similar to what IGDA does at GDC.  Maybe joint IGDA/GameDev sessions etc.

Local IGDA Chapter Meetings
There are a lot of chapters and each have their own schedule of events.
One thing we could do is hand out business cards or fliers.  Maybe set talk to the local leaders and set up part of a meeting to give a brief presentation of what it's about and examples of good questions/answers.  It's smaller in scope and much more hands on with local people who are generally in the industry.

the GGDA has an expo called SIEGE every year in october. www.siegecon.net