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Should we be running the game jams on meta or elsewhere?
There has been talk of possibly finding or writing an external tool (website) for planning and running our game jams. Things like reputation requirements are less than ideal for what we'd like to do with the jams.
What are the community's thoughts on this? Has meta been working well? Are we fine with continuing as we've been? Has meta been working OK but perhaps there are changes you would make? Is an external tool essential to keep having successful jams in the future?

Meta fails the jam in the following ways:

New users, or lurkers can't post a game or vote on the jam entries unless they get 5 or 10 rep respectively
Voting on completed games commences as soon as the game is submitted, and this may sway more votes
No way to tell who is participating or show progress during the jam

For #1, it's really easy to get 5 rep, and I think two of our participants simply suggested edits to 2 questions each. It is a bit more of a pain to get to 10 rep for voting though.
Seeing as there are some annoyances to do with submitting/voting on games: What are the goals of the game jam? Do we want the jam to be a community-only event, a public event held by the community, a public event with community involvement? The way it is now isn't very inviting to the public.
For #2, there appears to be a correlation between the submission time and the number of votes a submission gets, but I'm not convinced it's due to hit-and-run voters. I suspect that late submissions are either last minute or rushed, and they are less polished and more likely to get fewer votes than the earlier submissions.
For #3, Chat works, but not everyone participates in chat. I know Ali S. and I were feeling like we might have been the only two participating. Ali even went so far as to add a work-in-progress answer to the jam so that others would know he was participating.
Some advantages of sticking with Meta are:

It's tightly tied to the community
It works, and it's easy
1 Account
Everything is in one place: right here in Meta
Members of the community with a passing interest in the jam can vote with very little effort.

So, I guess it really comes down to who the jam is for, and if we think the disadvantages outweigh the advantages. If we are to host part of the jam off-site, we need to find a way to maintain or increase the involvement, and I think having a second account will kill any casual voters.

Would a "Log in with StackExchange" feature alleviate most of your concerns or do we feel the separation of SE and the jam, even if it is all with one account, is distance enough to lose participation?

I'd even go as far as making it required assuming it's possible (which by glancing at the API looks like it is)

My problem with using a separate site for the game jams is longevity and history. A 3rd party site could easily go unmaintained and the content lost forever. I think meta is the best spot and we only need a feature to disable voting. I think chat works best for showing your progress throughout (I know I shared a few images).

Note that "only need a feature to disable voting" is almost certainly impossible to solve, though. Also note that meta currently also requires the active participation of diamond moderators to even function for a jam, so you're already relying on at least one of a very small set of people (there are only four diamonds).

Originally, I recall that part of the impetus for the jam was to try and drive participation in the actual Q&A portion of the site (i.e., the main focus).
While this was a laudable goal, I don't think it actually ever happened. I can't find evidence of increased Q&A activity or quality during the period where the jams run. I'm guessing that the short time period of the jams generally tends to make people stay heads-down on their projects, working around problems or sticking to things they know very well in order to get as much time making a good jam game as possible.
So I don't think there's a particularly compelling need to keep the jam hosted on the GDSE meta. I think it should be moved to an external site, because that would solve a lot of problems. The minimum reputation is an issue that would go away, as is the fact that meta is not really suited to the presentation we'd like for the jam and thus requires some ignoble hacks.
Of course hosting the site externally does present some challenges, but I don't think they are insurmountable or really, particularly different from the challenges we have now on meta.
Somebody would have to host and maintain it. But somebody (John, and previously Alex) is already doing so, and all the hacks we have to do to the jam posts require the intervention of diamond moderators. Hosting and domain registration would be the only real new costs/responsibilities of a single user if we moved the jam, and it's possible to get those cheaply enough that the site could be ad or donation supported. Alternatively, using the various jam-service-providers mentioned by others in this thread could alleviate that problem entirely.
The only major issue would be the software to run the jam itself. This could be built as an open-source project to distribute the ownership and thus avoid the problem of a single user building it and getting bored and abandoning it. But again, there is already software to do this so we don't need to build our own at all.
I think we should try to move the jam off-site. It would mean abandoning the StackExchange name and all association with the site (other than linking back here, of course), but I think it would be better for the jam itself and would allow it to grow much more than I think it's going to if we keep hosting it here.

In my opinion, there are two main issues, and a secondary-level issue:

Rep needed on Meta. This restricts entry.
Someone needed to manage the second site.

Restricting entry is undesirable, but running a second site will take a non-trivial amount of someone's time.
In my uninformed opinion (because I have not taken part in a Jam, and have the rep to post on Meta), I would rather restrict entry a bit than open up the can of worms involved in running a second site.
As a tangential thought I just had, I like that the Jam has more of an appearance of being legitimate when it's done through Meta.

Right, legitimate in the sense that it's run by the community, and not just some dude saying: "Hey, Check out my jam! Linkz below". I can see that.

Personally I prefer bigger jams, even if it means opening it up to non-meta and even non-GDSE users.
I argue that this is already the case for the GDSE jams: take a look at past entries, you'll find maybe half come from less-active users, those with 100 rep or less. Furthermore there is no correlation between rep and submission quality; at time of writing, the winner of the last jam has a grand total of 5 rep, and no questions/answers posted at all, either in meta or main. That is, many participants are already GDSE "outsiders", which means the meta requirement is an arbitrary limitation to participation.
Opening up the jam has advantages: it exposes GDSE to a wider audience, attracts more entries and voters which improves the overall quality of the jam - more feedback, more competition, more ideas showcased, more games to try for judges. The current size of GDSE jams are on the extreme low end as far as jams go. As a developer, this size is too small for me: chances are my submission will get 0 constructive feedback, which means I don't know what other people liked or didn't like, which means I don't get to improve.
Another point I want to make is that hosting jams elsewhere is easy. There are services like itch.io or gamejolt which allow anyone to freely start a jam, and all the infrastructure is in place: submissions, voting, deadlines. In itch.io's case, just sign up, go to http://itch.io/jams and click the "Host your own jam" button. You can specify a twitter hashtag to keep up with participants if that's your thing. Many major jams were organised this way: 7DFPS, flappy jam just to name two. The only downside here is that there is no explicit link with GDSE, but again I argue this is a small concern. Hosting jams elsewhere should reduce the work for organisers.


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What is the use of having multiple tags for compilation?
I am not an expert in SE politics. I do find it quaint that we have three tags for what appears at first glance as the same exact thing? What's the point in that?
The tags I'm talking about are:

compile
compiling
compilation

There's no good reason. Since anybody above a certain reputation threshold can create tags, however, redundant tags are typical. You can propose tag synonyms once you reach a certain reputation threshold, and until then you can propose them here on meta.
I'll go ahead and merge all of those now (to compilation), but I think it's worth revisiting the topic of blacklisting the tag itself, since I am highly suspicious that the tag represents nothing but off-topic questions.

Well, there might be a couple of tolerable questions about compiling game development specific Engines / Frameworks etc. I will go over the questions and see.

I don't think documenting how to compile every game engine under the sun fits into this site's purview, though.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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Should we blacklist the 'compilation' tag?
In my answer to this related question about synonyms for various flavors of tags referring to compiling and compilation I theorized such tags were actually relatively useless for the site.
I've done some research and cleanup of the newly-merged compilation tag, and I have come to a conclusion that I will present here as an answer. But of course I'd like to hear from other users of the site:
Should we add compilation to our "useless tags" list? Why, or why not?

I think we should blacklist it.
I think the tag as currently applied is not adding useful (or correct) information to any question (or when correctly applied seems to be a red flag for off-topic, better-on-StackOverflow questions). Further, I cannot think of a good way in which it could be applied in a game-development-specific fashion.
I went through the list of approximately 20 or so questions that had the tag. Most were already closed, usually because they were "debug my problem" questions or generic programming questions dealing with compile error messages. Many were incorrectly tagged (for example, actually being about link problems or runtime behavior issues) anyway.
"Compilation" can refer to a lot of things. It can refer to the compilation of C++ programs, or programs in other language. It can refer to the compilation of shaders, or the compilation of data. In all cases the word is the same, referring to the general process of producing something from some other set of things, but the actual details of the underlying process are not. Thus, it is unlikely that there are any experts on the general process of compilation that are not experts on compiler theory (which is a topic of SO, not here). The wide variety of meanings of "compilation" eliminates the categorization (and searchability) utility of the tag entirely.
After I culled out the questions that were off-topic, or used the tag totally incorrectly, we have a grand total of two questions:

Do you need Visual C 2013 to compile Unreal 4?
Do I have to compile Unreal 4's source myself in order to make games with it?

Now, I don't think these are great questions in general, but I also don't think the compilation tag even fits them. The first question is not asking anything about the compilation process, it's just asking if you need a specific version of tool to do a specific thing with a library. compilation doesn't help much here, because the version incompabilities extend into domains beyond just the compiler.
The second question isn't asking about the compilation process either, it's just asking if one has to compile the engine from source to use it (a yes-or-no question, incidentally). An expert in compiler theory is not going to have the answer to this question, necessarily (although an expert in Unreal would).
Thus, I don't think this tag is useful to the site.

I agree the tag is mostly useless in terms of compilation of executables. Executable compilation is not specific to game development. And the two questions tagged with compilation now don't really need that tag. Do I have to compile Unreal 4's source myself in order to make games with it? is really just an engine question, not a question about compiling and Do you need Visual C 2013 to compile Unreal 4? is really just a "read the documentation" question about engines, and not a question about compiling.
compilation may have a place in shader compilation.
We can probably add compilation to the useless tags, and either create or allow the creation of shader-compilation.

I think I'd rather see "glsl-compilation" and "hlsl-compilation" since they are different, fairly fundamentally, but I also think they are both covered by "glsl" and "hlsl" tags already.

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


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Are questions asking which technologies contain a certain feature off-topic?
Are questions asking something like "Do any game engines support feature X out of the box?" off-topic? Or do these fall under the "which technology to use" category (or some other category)?

This question is posted because of this question: http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/87750/do-any-game-engines-support-2d-shape-rendering-using-b%c3%a9zier-paths-and-polygons

The actual question is a yes-or-no question, which we know to be bad. The implied follow up is "okay, which engines support this technology?" which is, I'd argue, pretty clearly a "which technology" question.
But even if you disagree with that, it's a list-generation question, which is too broad.
So I think we should close these.

I think these questions are tricky and should be handled on a case-by-case basis, but should be closed more often than remain open.
First of all, because the answer can very easily be "No", which doesn't make for a very good answer. Or they can be "No, but you could try...", which can easily get into a back and forth about how you might tweak technology Y to work for feature X. Or generate a list of plugins or libraries that add said feature to a specific technology.
I think it'll be less likely for the answer to be "Yes, technology A and B support it and no others". This would be a very definite answer and likely pretty rare.
Since I see far more of the answers being the wishy-washy type, I don't think these questions are a good fit for the site.

I wonder what actually would be a good way to find out which existing frameworks support feature X? Should one ask for each framework separately? In other words: Would "Does framework X support feature Y?" questions be offtopic?

In that case I believe it would be best to look up the documentation. Yes-or-no questions are not very good questions.

Fundamentally, these questions are not good QA site questions for the same reason shopping questions aren't allowed on SuperUser.
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/qa-is-hard-lets-go-shopping/

[T]echnology moves so rapidly that the best shopping recommendations will be utterly obsolete within a year! What’s the point of a bunch of labor intensive questions that provide only temporary benefit to a limited (some might say Too Localized) audience? There isn’t any.

Yes, technology moves often rapidly but still, even a temporary benefit for a limited audience is a benefit. I think one should not be too harsh and decide on a case by case basis. After all every question is only useful to a limited audience and might become outdated. Most questions here are about technology one way or the other.


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Should we enable Stack Snippets?
Stack Snippets are runnable JS/CSS/HTML codeblocks within the questions/answers that have recently been implemented on StackOverflow.
I don't know as there are enough HTML5 game development questions to warrant the feature, but this question brought the feature to mind, and I thought it might be something useful to have. Especially to mitigate dead links to fiddles or pens in those instances.
It might also be useful for explaining or showing certain algorithms; e.g. how to layer octaves of noise for PCG and a resulting visualization. Or for GLSL/OpenGL questions that can be implemented within the subset of WebGL.

Note: I couldn't find an existing feature-request. Doesn't mean there isn't one, I just couldn't find it.

-1 for that will encourage code dumps instead of pinpoint code snippets.

@KromStern, would it though? People already dump code...often without even formatting it. I'd like to think that those who are going to dump already do.

I'm on the fence, but I'd encourage anybody who has an opinion to vote this up or down accordingly and/or post an answer detailing their position.

Is stack snippets really something we can just enable or will it get shot down by SE like latex support? I don't fully understand the circumstances around each of the technologies so I'm asking out of curiosity.

@SpartanDonut From the SE blog post about them, almost at the end: "If you feel that a particular site should have Stack Snippets, post a feature-request on that site’s meta – if there’s support from the community there, we’ll enable them." To my understanding, if we can make a good case and garner significant community support (and I think we can), the Ancient Wizards will take notice and call upon the necessary magicks. (Moderators probably have the details?)

I have no details beyond what's in that post. However, it looks like we have a pretty solid consensus for "yes," so I'll try to bring this to the attention of a community manager.

Poof! You have Stack Snippets. Now get out there and do some awesome stuff with them! ;)

Thanks for the swift response.

Yes please
Games are interactive, so questions about them are often about interactivity.  Stack Snippets allow interactive demonstrations.
Currently, when I write about something interactive (like splashy waves, brushable hair or mouse following), I tend to post a bunch of pictures (often GIFs of my cursor poking things), followed by the code I used to produce them.
Stack Snippets would let people just try the thing.

Look, here's a demo of a foolproof physics engine:

(Well… it could have been!)
Interesting: Tetris and Rogue clones in Snippets.

After some further though I don't really see any reason we would not want these. Yes, you can make an argument that it will "encourage" code dumps, but we don't allow those, so the existing moderation venues should handle that just fine.
If anything, perhaps the quality of code dump questions will improve slightly (since the snippet won't run if the code is bad) and we'll be able to relax the restrictions on debug-my-code questions somewhat (provided a snippet demonstrating the issue can be provided, maybe?).
So I'm for them.


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How can I ask about what I need to know to make a game similar to an existing game?
I'd like to ask what sort of "roadmap" one would follow in order to be skilled enough to create such amazing work, both for games, or for UIs in general. The thing is though, my experience on other stack exchanges has taught me that questions like that are generally poorly received, and considered to be too broad/opinionated, or if more detail is provided (e.g. "I am skilled with Python", etc.) the question ends up being too asker specific for general use.
Could you help me figure out what questions I really want/need to ask given my motivations, and which one of those would be acceptable to ask on the main gamedev stack?

Some questions, no matter how they're asked, will never fit into the stack exchange format. A question like "What skills do I need for X?" or "What should I learn to do X?" or "What should I know before making something like X?" are just too opinion based. There's no correct answer to those questions.
Only you can decide what your requirements are and how those requirements match up to your skills and resources. If you're absolutely not sure where to begin, you'll have to do further research on your own. That research can include asking your open ended discussion questions on another site. If you look at the bottom of this help page you'll find a few sites that are available for such questions.

You can ask about it in chat.

These questions are always just masked forms of "I don't know how to make a game. Where do I start?" Because if the user did know how to make a game, he or she would know what specific questions to ask about the particular kind of game he or she wants to make. (i.e, "How do you implement X kind of collision checking?" "How do you implement X kind of AI?" or even better "I tried making feature X, but I am confused about Y")
At the very least, the user needs to have tried to make the game, but got hung up on a specific point.

It pretty much comes down to ordinary project methodology, which applies to everything. That is, decomposing a problem into bite size chunks, and then attacking each piece individually. Your questions here should be driven by specific problems you run into while running that course, which is the stuff we're really interested in answering.
For example, say I want to clone Scorched Earth. From the ground up:

What's the most basic premise of the game? It's an artillery game, so
Piece-wise, I need a launcher, a projectile, and maybe a field.
I'd write the code to display that stuff.
Next, mechanics-wise, I need to control the launcher and I need some basic physics for the projectile.
Then I'd write the code for that.
Then comes the "whee" part, where I play around with it for a while going "whee!" and making little tweaks.
Rinse, repeat.

So much depends on personal preference and background, or just doesn't matter, between here and there that there's nothing interesting to say about it.


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What should we do for the 2014 Winter Refactor?
Last year we organized a semi-formal backlog-pruning event called the Winter Refactor. With the StackExchange holiday season rapidly approaching, I'd like to solicit input on running another Winter Refactor event this year.
In particular, I'm interested in the following opinions, if you have them:

Should we bother?
If we should, what should we focus on?
What can we do to drive participation?

Of course if you have other thoughts beyond those, I'd like to hear them as well.

The majority vote seems to be towards "do the same thing," so I have. I did include some words about duplicates though.

One option is for us to do, essentially, exactly what we did last year: focus on reducing the unanswered question queue by either answering questions, voting to close bad questions that have fallen through the cracks, or upvoting good zero-score answers.
This worked pretty well last year, but the big disadvantage is that the broad focus makes it hard to track progress, especially on a per-user level, so offering rewards for participation is pretty much limited to manually awarding bounties for good answers.

How about motivating killing some unanswered questions by having a chart that shows the progress we've made?

EDIT: OK, I made one. Live chart!

EDIT 2: Live chart replaced with how it looked at the end of the event.

It's number of unanswered questions on GDSE over time, from around midnight December 9th, when I left the data collection running, until right about now. The times are UTC.
I mashed it together from the StackExchange API, D3, Node.js, Inkscape and ImageMagick. The code is on Github. It renders a new image every 10 minutes and tells your browser to cache appropriately.

This is very cool.

Make softball/canonical questions
We get a lot of the same kind of questions: mostly from folks starting out, but the answers would be too broad or opinionated for the Q&A format. Some examples: "I want to make X / do Y, what do I need to know?" "Should I use this or do that?"
Right now we close these questions to prevent attracting low-quality answers, but I think we can do better. One problem with closing (as off-topic) is that, by saying "we don't welcome questions like these", we're implicitly saying "we don't welcome you here", we drive away users who probably don't come back, even when they've gained enough experience to be able to contribute better to this site. Instead, if we build a collection of softball or canonical questions and redirect duplicates to these, we can say "this is a better way of asking questions here", which encourages people to stick around and learn.
Apart from answering common questions, we can also help narrow down those too-broad, opinion-based questions. Often what the asker really needs is information to help her make a decision, and I think for many opinion-based questions, there are ways to address them in a fact-based manner. To make a car analogy, in order to answer the question "what car should I buy", instead of having a huge poll with options like "Toyota" or "Sedan", a good answer might follow up with a list of criteria such as "what's your budget" or "what will be the primary use". Only the asker can make the final decision, but at least she can now make a more informed decision, or follow up with more specific questions.
I think we can use the refactor as an excuse to do this work.
How this might work

Find a type of question that keeps getting asked and closed as off-topic, but might be addressable
Ask the question in the most generic, broadly-applicable way possible, maybe with a tag like softball / canonical and marked as CW
Answer and revise as usual, avoiding opinion
Where suitable, mark other questions as duplicates of these
At the end of the event, publish a list of top contributors to these questions (# of questions/answers, score, # of duplicates), with awards like bounties or hats if they can be arranged

A few years ago, in response to a rash of questions in the form of "What engine should I use to make ?" (which are explicitly off-topic for reasons that I agree with), I posted a proof-of-concept question: What to consider when evaluating libraries and engines for making a game?, as an attempt to reframe the question in a generic way.

While it received upvotes and some interesting answers, people didn't feel that it served as a viable replacement for the "please just tell me what to do"-style "what engine should I use for my project" questions.  Coming up with canonical questions that people will accept as canonical is tricky.  Particularly when they redirect responsibility for picking a final answer for their specific circumstances back to the questioner.

While I like (some parts) of the "canonical question" idea, I don't necessarily think it's something appropriate for the short term push of the Refactor. I have a few proposals in mind for a longer-term project to address the issue that I was hoping to surface after the holidays when fewer people are likely to be off on vacation and the like.

One option I've been thinking about is focusing on reducing the amount of duplicate questions.
We have a fair number of questions that are effectively duplicates (lots of questions dealing with rotating objects to face other objects, dealing with resolution independence in UI layout, where to put the renderer in a component-based entity system, et cetera).
Many of these questions are standing alone, without duplication links. In some cases, the questions we are using as the duplicate target aren't, themselves, the best example of the fundamental question. We could focus on correcting those problems.
The downside is that this excludes a lot of low-reputation users from participation, beyond flagging or suggesting duplicates in the chat.


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Can we remove the "Reversal" badge?
The usual purpose of the badge system is to guide users to more constructive participation. However, the gold-level Reversal badge seems to serve the opposite goal:

[Gold] Reversal
Provided answer of +20 score to a question of -5 score

This badge encourages people to provide answers to bad questions. However, as I was recently taught by our moderators who recently chastised me for answering a bad question, this behavior is not wanted on this website.
Because I believe that mods must have a much better understand of this website than anyone else, the only possible conclusion is that this badge is inappropriate for GDSE and should thus be removed.

Related: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/277576/get-rid-of-the-reversal-badge

I want to agree... but 20+ votes means that it was an incredibly useful answer. People found the question and an answer they needed somehow regardless of question quality and to me I think that's really important.

I believe you're referring to this answer. Answering a question that's off topic and answering a bad question aren't the same. The comments on your answer there are about answering a question that's off topic, not about answering a bad question (however in this case I believe the question is both).

The Reversal badge is to give someone an incentive to answer a good question that got downvoted because others misunderstood it, or disagreed with the whole premise.
Discussion on SO about this:
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/277576/get-rid-of-the-reversal-badge

I see your point, but I think the distinction you are missing is that votes and on-topicness (or lack thereof) are not one-and-the-same.
A question might get a bunch of downvotes because it's off-topic, but it also might get a bunch of downvotes because it was poorly worded, or because somebody didn't think it was well-researched. The same is true of upvotes (although typically for the opposing reasons!).
But being up- or down- voted does not make a question off-topic; it just often correlates. What makes a question off-topic are the rules of StackExchange itself and the rules decided upon by the individual site communities.
If the Reversal badge was about answering off-topic questions, then I would absolutely agree that it has no place existing here (or elsewhere on SE). But it's not, it's about downvotes. In that sense it's about encouraging you to look at questions that may have been poorly interpreted, or which may have started off bad but were since edited into something good and answerable.
And that is definitely behavior we'd like to encourage.

All that said, I don't actually care much for badges, so I wouldn't care if it went away. But as far as I know the SE software doesn't support disabling badges on a per-site basis, so this discussion would likely need to continue on meta.se.


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Why not purge unanswered questions as part of the 2014 Winter Refactor
Out of curiosity why not a purge unanswered questions?
There is lots of talk about "fixing the site" and its said that answering unanswered question is a good way to do this. I don't understand the reasoning behind this.
I would like to know why the effort to why fix them other than to make metrics look nicer? Below are my reasons for thinking its a counter productive effort that stifles current activity.
Reasoning
First there is little to no incentive to go back and answer these question and the incentives that exist are not community driven. I'm referring to the bounties that seem to have been offered from the 2013 Refactoring thread. Though well intentioned I don't like this sort of behavior, personally I would rather solve the issue through leveraging community involvement through using the existing site mechanics as they were intended.
Second most of them are subtly unanswerable. Either they are off topic or they develop to become too localized. The few good unanswered question I could find are unanswered because the question is brutally hard.
If the question is one that the community has an interest in getting answered it will be asked again. This time with the opportunity of having the attention of the current community on it. If it deserves to be closed it is more likely to be closed. If it deserves to be answered its more likely to be answered (due to visibility allowing for more up-votes and the possibility of engaging the OP in necessary).
It seems purging them would increase activity and the quality of the site as a QA forum. Additionally I help prevent stagnation cause by those questions causing similar ones (that may be a better fit) to be off topic. To elaborate think of a venn diagram, the questions remove the incentives for a sizable circle area within the circle that is all on topic question.
I figure there will be examples of questions that are popular though unanswered. The purging can of course have exceptions based upon votes/views but that should not a part of this discussion.
Edits to Address Points Made in the Answers
So I believe the goal behind both ideas is to bring attention to the questions. The Refactor address this by using (mostly) artificial incentives to involve a small subset of the community (the ones who participate in meta - the ones who don't feel like participating).
Deleting and allowing the questions to be re-asked involves the entire active community in addition to using the incentive system the site is built around. The bold bit being the important distinction.
Also I suppose deletion wouldn't be necessary. Perhaps a mass closing would be less absolute option? I fully understanding not wanting to be the person who name is on the deletions. Perhaps closing them with a message that is is okay (or even encouraged) to ask similar questions would be an alternative.

The point of the Winter Refactor is not to "fix the site," per se. I'm not sure what we'll do this time around, but the original one was mainly an attempt to get eyes on the old questions that don't normally get much traffic except, maybe, for the occasional bump by the community bot.

@JoshPetrie My question is not really related to the Winter Refactor other than if this were to be done it would probably be the best time. Mainly was thinking about stuff and came to the conclusion that such questions are harmful to site's goal as a QA site. So why not remove them?

Oh, I see. I guess you can ignore most of my answer pertaining specifically to the refactor then. But I'm still not sure I see how old unanswered questions are harmful to the point of needing bulk deletion.

I'll answer again, based on your edit. Specifically, I want to address this:

Deleting and allowing the questions to be re-asked involves the entire
  active community in addition to using the incentive system the site is
  built around. The bold bit being the important distinction.

I think I see where you are coming from. It seems to me that you're saying that by deleting the question, and having somebody (possibly eventually) re-answer it, the entire current community will see the new question since it we appear on the front page of the site.
However, the same can be said of the process of editing the original old question: it will be bumped up to the front page, making it more likely to get visibility.
If we're going to delete and wait until somebody re-asks, we're not really involving the entire community until it gets asked. Until then, we're waiting on one of the potential few people who actually have that question to ask it. We might lose that question for a long time, which would be sad if it was a good question.
If we're going to delete and immediately re-ask on the original poster's behalf, that's functionally the same as simply editing the existing question.
So why not just go back and edit old questions instead? I still would argue that it involves the community more: more people can edit than can delete, and those edits will push the questions to the front. Plus I think there's a difference between having a question and being able to see a question somebody has and think "that is an interesting problem." This question for example, is not one that I would likely ever have in the near future given what I work on, but I think it's really interesting.
Plus, the act of simply going through and unilaterally axing a bunch of old questions seems very much against the spirit of the site. We aren't a dictatorship and we shouldn't discriminate against users just because their question is old.

Out of curiosity why not a purge unanswered questions?

Just because a question doesn't have an answer doesn't mean it's a bad question. There are a lot of reasons it may have simply failed to get any traction when it was originally posted; perhaps, for example, there was nobody on the site at the time who was knowledgeable in the area.

There is lots of talk about "fixing the site" and its said that
  answering unanswered question is a good way to do this. I don't
  understand the reasoning behind this. I would like to know why the effort to why fix them other than to make metrics look nicer?

While there have been discussions about addressing perceived or actual problems with the site (such as relatively poor participation in certain community actions), the Winter Refactor event isn't aimed at "fixing" anything, necessarily.
Answering unanswered questions is good for the site, since it's basically what the site is about. The event isn't about adjusting metrics (but having metrics is useful to gauge the success of the event).
But, that said, metrics are important because if the site's metrics skew way out of line it could be closed (this is a general truth; I'm not saying this site is in danger of that, or anything).

Though well intentioned I don't like this sort of behavior, personally
  I would rather solve the issue through leveraging community
  involvement through using the existing site mechanics as they were
  intended.

I am not a fan of the bounty mechanism as an incentive to participate either. I would rather there be something else but I don't know what it could be. We have to work with the tools we're given and we're not given particularly good tools for this sort of scenario.

Second most of them are subtly unanswerable. Either they are off topic
  or they develop to become too localized. The few good unanswered
  question I could find are unanswered because the question is brutally
  hard.

That's fine; vote to close them then. Then the question would eventually get deleted.

It seems purging them would increase activity and the quality of the
  site as a QA forum. This time with the opportunity of having the attention of the current community on it.

I don't see how? Without a good reason why, I'm loathe to and arbitrarily delete "anything older than date X that has 0 answers and a score of less then 5" or something. Especially since it would basically have to be me (or one of the other diamond moderators) doing all of it.
As for "having the attention of the current community," that's the point of the Refactor event: to focus the effort of the community on a section of the site's questions that, due to the way the site operates, are no longer "in the spotlight." We don't need to delete questions to do that.

Thanks for taking the time to read though the proposal, I have edited the question addressing what I feel the important distinction is.


text:
Where can I ask open-ended questions instead?
GDSE is not a discussion forum—we discourage questions that are primarily opinion-based or that aim to generate discussion, because they don't fit the Stack Exchange format.
However, even if they don't fit here, they might still be good questions.
Where could such questions go instead?

We have a chatroom for that.
In addition, some other large game development sites do welcome open-ended discussion:

/r/gamedev
TigSource forums
GameDev.net
Indie DB forums

You could also ask local game developers at a meetup.


text:
The 2014 GDSE Winter Refactor
It's everybody's favorite time of year again. The celebration of hats, of course!
Last year, we organized a community "refactoring" event aimed at bringing some much-needed attention to the old, unloved, neglected questions on the site. It was a lot of fun and produced some great results, so we're going to do it again. In conjunction with the Winter Bash, we'll thus be holding the 2014 edition of the GDSE Winter Refactor.
This will be a directed effort to review, answer or close all the "unanswered" questions on the site which have fallen off the front page and are bit-rotting in the deeper, darker, less-trafficked portions of our site. This year we'd like to focus especially on tackling duplicate questions.
What can you do to help, you ask? It's simple! Visit the unanswered questions page and give it a browse. Keep an eye out for questions good and bad that could use some tidying up (really, that's most of them). Then:

Vote or flag questions that are duplicates as such. This will generally involve some searching around to find the duplicate, but please take some time to do it if you see a question and have that funny, "I think I saw this already..." feeling in the back of your mind.
Vote to close anything that doesn't belong on this site or that would be better served on another SE network site. That includes

Questions that are not on-topic or that aren't high-quality questions.
Questions that not the right sort of question for a StackExchange site.
Queries that are general programming questions better suited for StackOverflow.

Edit any questions that are poorly worded, overly verbose, or not actually phrased as questions.

Try your best to find the real question that a user is asking. Edit the question to focus on that. Remove excess distracting information.
It's okay to make a question more general, especially if you are turning a "code dump" type of question into one that is more focused on the theory behind the topic.
If the question title and the question text disagree, edit the former to match the latter.
When in doubt, remember to be bold. Some of these question have been languishing, unanswered, for months. You can only really improve their chances by editing them.

Answer any questions you feel qualified to.

Keep the usual guidelines in mind for answering questions. Try to avoid guesses or lots of speculation.
If a user is asking about something that suggests they are taking the wrong approach, consider answering their direct question first (briefly) before offering guidance on an alternative approach.
If a question already has an answer, consider editing the answer to improve it if needed, or give it up an appropriate vote.

Of course, please remember that the point of this event is to reduce the unanswered question backlog and improve the quality of the Q&A available on this site.
As such, please don't upvote zero-scored answers just to mark the question as answered, and please don't answer bad questions, make trivial edits, or add chatty comments. Remember that users can be directed to ask their question elsewhere if it's too open-ended or discussion oriented. We want to be decisive about getting good questions salvaged and answered and getting bad questions closed. When in doubt, flag it for moderator attention.
One of the problems we had last year was tracking metrics. To that end, Anko has built a live graph of the site's unanswered count, which we can use to see how things are progressing:
[ final chart moved to answer ]

...and that's a wrap! Thanks to everybody who participated. Here's what the graph looked like at the end of the event (Sunday, Jan 4):

We got down to about 1700 unanswered questions, a fantastic result!


text:
Should we change the "kismet" tag to "udk-kismet?"
I have noticed that the kismet has started to become more popular. It is a component of the free UDK engine, so wouldn't it be better as something such as udk-kismet?
Or is it better if a component is separately labeled?

The term "kismet" doesn't have any other common meaning in the context of game development, so I don't think there is any danger of ambiguity. Further, I would expect that "kismet" is more discoverable and expected as a tag name than anything prefixed (or suffixed) with "udk."
I don't see a reason to change the tag.

As far as I know, in the context of game development, Kismet is very specific to UDK (UE4 has Blueprint) so without the term being ambiguous I don't see a need to change the tag to be more explicit.

As a side note, it is perfectly fine for a question to be tagged with both Kismet and UDK


text:
How can this question about renderer decoupling be salvaged?
This question is too broad as originally written. However, it is an interesting topic and the heart of the questions posed are both relevant to game development and very common.
How could this question be edited or broken up to make it more appropriate for the site?

After thinking about it for a bit, a big reason the question is too broad is because there are three separable questions there. Each of those questions have a large variety of answers and still may be too broad on their own (without further tweaking of their scope), but certainly all three of them at once create too many variables for answers to reasonably address.
I think a good first step towards getting the topic addressed, therefor, is to break up the question into at least three separate questions:

How can I decouple asset types from the renderer?

This question should narrow it's focus by concretely defining an 'asset' (is it the file format itself, or is it the class that manages the loaded intermediate data and should thus should not be polluting the rendering API because it deals with things like filesystem change notifications which the renderer really doesn't need to care about, et cetera).

How do I manage the relationship between instances and assets?

As above, a specific definition for "instance" and "asset" should be supplied because the terms are very general and very widely used, which broadens the interpretation of the answers' scope.
The references to state sorting make me think that this question is possibly more about state sorting and less about actual decoupling in any form, however.

How do I decouple instances of things to render and the renderer itself?

This question seems like it could possibly be rolled into the second question, depending on the given definitions for 'instance' and 'asset' in the second question.
I have a strong suspicion that the answer here is "don't, this is not a an appropriate place to decouple two concepts," but again that depends on the definitions.

I still think that the ambiguity present in the questions terminology and in the overall goal of the question warrants some hashing out, either here or (preferably) in the chat, however.

Noted. I think I included all 3 as I didn't expect to be breaking all 3 at once - but wasn't sure which 1 or 2 of the 3 I should be breaking. I think defining "asset" more narrowly would depend upon the expected relationship with the renderer? No? I feel that if I could define "asset" and "renderer" specifically enough for you I would have implicitly defined their relationship as well. I admit I'm being much too vague with "instance". Read this as "an object containing just the data to be uploaded to the shader per individual renderable game object", i.e. transformation, animation frame etc.

With regards to state sorting - if I keep a bidirectional coupling then there is no actual sorting. Only if I decouple them do I actually need to sort. Your final bullet point, coming from a professional, is close to an answer (or part of one) by itself. I had a look at chat - it really didn't seem like the right place, mixed in with discussions of Ubuntu and iOS and advertising. Maybe you meant some other chat room or feature I missed? (p.s. as we are off the main site: Undead Labs? Big fan of State of Decay...)

This link should take you directly to the appropriate chat room. It's also occasionally off-topic, but if it says "Game development and other polite discussion" in the upper-right you are in the correct room.


text:
Tags are overlapping text in user profile "About Me"
I'm using tags in my user profile "About Me" and I've noticed that the tag link is overlapping the "About Me" text like in the following example:

EDIT: I've noted that the same happens when you use tags inside posts, which is a normal thing in meta, and when you are selecting a tag to create or edit a post.
Inside posts:

Tag selection:

All problems are related with the following CSS: .post-tag { margin: 2px 15px 6px 0 }. Changing it to .post-tag { margin: 2px 7px 6px 7px } would fix the issue.

This issue was fixed with the major design update: http://meta.gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/1978/site-design-updates-are-live?cb=1

authors: Justin ᚅᚔᚈᚄᚒᚔ


text:
Community Promotion Ads - 2015
The dawn of a new year, 2015, now approaches, or has already approached, either way it means that it is now time to reset our Community Promotion Ads!
What are Community Promotion Ads?
Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.
Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?
This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:

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

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

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

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

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

Image requirements

The image that you create must be 220 x 250 pixels
Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)
Must be GIF or PNG
No animated GIFs
Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB

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

Shouldn't there be a new one?

Possible duplicate of Community Promotion Ads - 2016

Help create a dedicated 3D graphics community here on Stack Exchange. Get answers to all your 3D problems.

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

Courtesy of @squeamishossifrage from PPCG. (This ad replaces the ads from last year, in order to add a bit of variety.)

It's a bit big isn't it. "The image that you create must be 220 x 250 pixels"

@Noctrine That's not an issue. The image will display well on retina screens, and it scales down nicely for normal screens. There's no issue with it, and it's allowed. They seem to be allowed as well: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/247063/do-the-double-size-retina-screen-community-ads-work-on-all-sites The imaged that is displayed is 220x250, which might be confusing, but the image is fine :)


text:
Why don't we have LaTeX?
It is crucial to have LaTeX on this board, because we often need to talk about matrices and vectors e.g. while physics simulation. I think there are many themes like AI and other which require matematical symbols. Thanks.

This is basically not going to happen, as StackExchange considers the dependencies involved too expensive to deploy to sites outside of the Math SE.


text:
What should we do about this users spam-like answer behavior?
What is the proper way of action about this new user, who spammed 14 identical answers in around an hour?
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/users/59097/celtic-sadness
The answer is rather poor in my opinion, they boil down to:

This is complicated, I suffered from it, please see my solution in code [link] and my upcoming tutorial [sitelink]

Sometimes the answer is not even ontopic:

Isometric Tile maps in Cocos2d-x
Best technique for drawing isometric tiles
didn't checked others

Here's rather disproportional users response. My comment was edited to add "and promoting your site":

Now he is deleting his answers I had pointed as off-topic and one with comments quoted above.

Looks like he just goes through [isometric] tag.

In general you safely vote to delete link-only answers. Especially if, in situations like this, they are borderline spammy (although you may want to flag the posts for moderator attention in that case as well).

Flag the answers for moderator attention with a comment, or flag them as spam if they're really bad.
For these answers in particular:
I think if an answer happens to include a link to a tutorial you made, that's OK. However, if you're creating answers to direct users to a tutorial you made, that's promotion and not what this site is for.
I deleted some of the answers and edited others to remove the link to the personal site.
UPDATE
The user in question has now self removed all of their posts.


text:
Feature request: Grant chat privilege
It's been an issue for a while, brand new users who need help can't get it because their questions are off topic for the site, and they can't gain reputation because they're new to game dev (so find it hard to answer questions) and they can't ask the questions they want (because they're off topic). These users could become productive members of the site if we can get them started here by helping them in chat.
We have a work-around for the 20 reputation requirement, but it's pretty clunky. It would be great if a moderator or high-rep user could just go to the new user's profile an press a button.
Clicking the "Allow access to Chat" button in their game dev profile could just allow them access to chat in the game dev main chat room. This button would essentially automate the steps for the workaround applied to the main chat room.

Yes. This. Because we don't have this, we often just send users outside the SE network instead.

I like the spirit of the idea, solving the ever-present problem of new users who need chat and can't have it.  Most of the rest of my post is purely devil's advocacy in the name of taking care to do it well (if at all).
I think implementation details will be hard:

It becomes a by-invitation feature, which creates a member/nonmember club.  It's contrary to every other privilege in SE.  I don't think this a huge impact issue, because obviously you can just earn the rep the normal way, but I can imagine a new complaint of "Why won't anybody approve my 1-rep chat?"
What rep level gets this power?  We already have a dearth of users at the high-end, but allowing this at a low level creates all kinds of other issues.  One unscrupulous empowered user with 1k rep, and we'll see swarms of noise in the chat.  And related, what would you do with such a user excessively granting this power to new users?
What do you do with users who ought not have been given the privilege, but received it anyway?  Is there a separate, permanent  "override/reverse" of this privilege available at an even higher rep level, or would that be reserved for diamonds?  Or closer to 10k, at least?

Yeah!
So, in the interest of resolving this problems, I would suggest making the feature a limited-duration privilege.  You can grant anyone power to chat...for a while.  30min, 2hours, etc.  More than enough time to (help) solve their question-unworthy problem.  Or at least, enough time to teach them how to earn reputation.


text:
The reopen vote interface kind of sucks (so what could be done to improve that?)
I gauged whether to vote to reopen for this question, https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/posts/93321/revisions, but I realized I couldn't accurately determine if the OP had improved it or not.
I had to open the question itself in a new tab.  The comment back and forth there, as well as the edit history, made me decide to vote to reopen.  But none of that was available on the vote page.  Or I failed to find it, in which case I will still claim that the UI is to blame.
I think more information should be available directly on the vote page.  At least the same quantity of information should be available, if in a different arrangement.  This isn't just a problem for the reopen votes page, but reopen votes usually demand a little more subtlety than close, first post, or low-quality, because the question text doesn't necessarily speak for itself.

Definitely agree. In the close/reopen queues, I almost always open the question in a new window to get maximum context for a good decision.


text:
"Trollerators" aka moderators need moderation
Edit:
Moderation is overhead and does not directly contribute to the purpose of these sites, which is to answer questions.
Suggestion:
Instead of simply being, or not being, a moderator, I suggest giving users the ability to earn "moderation points" based on their answers to questions. "Answering a question", from a moderation standpoint, could be as simple as deleting a question rather than just marking it as "not our problem" or "try again" (and letting it sit there for years). Likewise, frivolous and/or excessive moderation just needs to be (re)defined. A user that flags a question for editing, rather than make the edit that they are (overly)qualified to make themselves, should lose "moderation points" to encourage them to "get dirty". Does a second moderator really need to be notified and manually come in after XX days/months to re-moderate it? Why is one moderator not enough?
Another of my analogies:
This reminds me of Office Space where the management is constantly complaining about the workload and hassle of dealing with "TPS reports". We find out later it's actually his secretary's, secretary's, secretary that actually does all the work regarding them. Another employee explains that he "deals with the customer so the engineers don't have to" and when the "Bob's" (firing consultants) ask him "What, exactly, do you do here?", he has no (good) answer. The employee just hysterically repeats "Look, I told you!! I deal with the GD customer's so the engineers don't have to". Ultimately, management was about to be reorganized and made to work when the office mysteriously burned down...
I think we need that here, now, because the end-result of moderation should always be either:
The question being answered

or
The question being deleted

The current moderation system guarantees neither. The many thousands of moderated, but unanswered, questions lingering highlights that. If our true purpose is to answer questions and not just to sort them, we're only being about 50% efficient.

Obvious question does not mean on-topic question. Also, I believe this post is a duplicate: http://meta.gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/542/request-relax-a-bit-on-moderation-and-dont-be-so-eager-to-shut-down-questions?rq=1 We're certainly open to suggestions, but I'm not seeing actual solutions proposed. You're suggesting the entire stack exchange network change its moderation strategy? High rep users do get moderation privileges as you're suggesting.

Agreed; definitely similar to that 4-year old post... So that clears up "recently" for me. At least it wasn't closed by a moderator yet.

Well... I was going to close it as a duplicate, the reasonable thing to do, but I don't think you'd take it well :)

"Commoderators should earn "moderation points" by participating and spend them when moderating. This prevents users from getting moderator status and then clocking out." was my suggestion.

Right, maybe you can remove most of the rant part of the post and just detail your suggestion? Also, users don't just "get moderator status", there are elections. It may appear that it happens to high rep users because Josh and I have been very active participants on the site (both of us having 900+ answers), but we were elected in a regular election.

You are one of the most consistent, Byte, and that's not a bad thing; I usually take what you say to the bank (even when I grumble (especially when you're right :D )). I think if there weren't 10000 other moderators, this wouldn't seem so rampant. Edit: I did see the voting mechanism and don't actually believe there are 10k moderators, LOL.

There are four moderators on this site; everybody else is a regular user (some of whom may have earned additional privileges based on the aggregate community's consensus of their participation here. But, I'm really not sure at all what you're trying to suggest or convey here, other than a rant about something you're not happy with.

@JoshPetrie, the preceeding comments are not clear or you don't have the time to read them?

@Byte56, as usual, you are right. Other than the Office Space analogy, I have removed the non-constructive elements. Thanks again

No, your original post was unclear, the edit is much clearer.

Growing pains :D   Byte is always immensely helpful curbing my guttermouth. Also, I use the term "moderator" loosely referring to "Commoderators" more than actual moderators.

What exactly do you mean by "moderation"? Voting? Closing questions? Answering? Editing? Are you familiar with the reputation system of StackExchange, and how it relates to privileges? What are you exactly suggesting when you say "Commoderators should ... spend ["moderation points"] when moderating"?

Refer to linked question; assuming voting war is over, many people (as of 4 years ago) support squelching moderators. Only the moderators do not support it. Moderator-types vote up the pro-moderator answers, while users vote up the anti-moderator answers. Moderators have the final word, so you do the math. My desire to help has been completely crushed and I have no further opinions or words to waste.

Not a complete answer but to touch on some of your points:

More spam than they prevent:
  Many of the Commoderators spend 10 seconds moderating/closing a question that could be edited and answered within 60.
  It's not someone else's job; supposedly, we are all "the community".
  Why, then, are "they" allowed to act so far above it all?
  Click "edit", you lazy @#$@#$.strong text

I think you highly under estimate the time it takes to edit an answer so that it makes a bad question a good question and additionally answer the now good question with a good answer.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with closing bad questions. I believe that with the size of the voting community that this site has the mods do a good job picking which questions to unilaterally close as opposed to ones they vote to close on (if that is even your argument; maybe you don't like questions that do get 5 close votes getting closed either). Whenever the community gets more close voters you should see the unilateral closing reduced to a minimum.
There is absolutely nothing stopping good community members from taking the effort themselves to fix bad questions after they've been closed and turn them into good ones. That can get reopened. When I see a question I'm passionate about that I think has the potential to be good for the site and provide good information I have done this. The system works. You should leverage it.

Close it if you want:
  I'm still going to answer perfectly obvious questions; except, instead of using formulas, line-spacing, etc. to make it understandable, I'm going to cram it all into comment and help the user, despite you. Even on aged questions, my little blurbs still get positive responses and thank you's.

Don't do this. If you have a quick link to a resource outside of SE that should help them... yeah sure. Even I've done this before. If you are going to cram a huge amount of information into a tiny comment (or more) just to spite the system please just take it somewhere else. Work with us to improve the system via meta - preferably in less of a rant and anger and with genuine interest in improving things. Don't abuse the system just because you don't like it.

Moderation is overhead and does not directly contribute to the purpose of this/these sites, which is answering questions.

If you feel this way then you don't fully understand the purpose of these sites. The blog post on good subjective vs bad subjective has some good blurbs on why we are the way we are, and while it talks specifically to subjective and discussion oriented questions the general philosophy applies to all bad questions really.
To quote the blog post:

Most forums and chat rooms have a scale problem. As in, they don’t. The more people that join the discussion, the more noise each of those connections bring. So the forums get progressively noisier and noisier, and suddenly one day … you stop learning.

and

Because we believe so deeply in learning, we are willing to go to great lengths to suppress the discussion, debate, and opinions that — while plenty entertaining — cause most forums to inevitably break down.

Without the rules we have and the moderators that are incredibly passionate to uphold the rules StackExchange sites will live on and continue to serve as useful places to gather and consume information. You may or may not notice a lot more noise (not useful information / answers) on other sites such as the Unity Answers site. They don't follow and enforce the same type of philosophy that StackExchange does.

This is a good example: "..not sure at all what you're trying.." Yes you are... YES, you are! You (Commoderators in general) say things like your stupid, but your really not. Neither of you is stupid, so why did Byte choose to reply with "do this to your answer" (and a link to the duplicate) and you replied with "WTF are you talking about"?

It is also clear, based on the linked question, that end-users tend to agree and upvote things like this, while Commoderators disagree with and downvote things like this. This site promotes "popular" answers, not "good" ones.

First, it was me, not Spartan, who said "not sure at all" in a comment. Second, I wasn't sure. You can't read my mind, just like I could hardly make heads or tails of the message in your original post.

@Jon, I'm still a bit confused, can you define "Commoderators"?

Yeah, I lost that with the edit. Commoderator == comment + "moderator". People with very high rep, that post answers as comments, contributing to the list of unanswered questions. For example, as you are aware, I just flagged a comment for the third time. It is the answer, per the OP, but no one cares. I have personally witnessed you move my comments to answers and answers to comments but, certain moderators contend it is impossible.

I have learned my lesson and will just stay out of it from now on.

@Jon I have not moved any comments to answers, since that's not possible for moderators to do. We can move answers to comments however, but that's because sometimes people post answers that are actually comments and those need to be corrected.

Instead of simply being, or not being, a moderator, I suggest giving
  users the ability to earn "moderation points" based on their answers
  to questions.

This already exists, more or less. Regular users have throttles on their ability to perform moderation actions via flag and review limits per 24-hour period. The amount of flags a user can raise (and the weight of those flags) is governed by the software based on how valid those flags were as reviewed by others. Similarly, reviews have built-in checks and tests (although I don't think this site specifically is large enough to have them active) and there must generally be a consensus on a review vote from regular users to actually have any action.
The few diamond moderators the site has (who were elected; there is no other way to become one) have more-or-less unrestricted ability to moderate the site and serve as community exception handlers. We mostly deal with the obviously horrible crap, like spam and other sorts of offensive behavior. We also frequently make unilateral decisions based on the policies that have been agreed upon by this site's community to close, modify, or other moderate certain questions. Campaigning to change those policies is (to an extent) a better way to enact a change than proposing getting rid of diamond moderators altogether (which, incidentally, is something only a StackExchange staff member could put into effect).
To address a few of your specific points:

"Answering a question", from a moderation standpoint, could be as
  simple as deleting a question rather than just marking it as "not our
  problem" or "try again" (and letting it sit there for years).

(Most) users don't get to see deleted posts, so simply deleting them can be confusing. That's why instead, we put them on hold, with information about why the question is on hold and what can be done to improve upon it. We generally see this to be nicer than simply deleting; you don't appear to agree, but this is sort of one of the fundamental things StackExchange does so I'm not sure there's a lot we can do to make you happier about this.
Closed questions below a certain threshold are eventually deleted, but generally we don't manual delete closed questions because they serve as signposts and precedent for what is or isn't considered on-topic.

Likewise, frivolous and/or excessive moderation just needs to be
  (re)defined. A user that flags a question for editing, rather than
  make the edit that they are (overly)qualified to make themselves,
  should lose "moderation points" to encourage them to "get dirty".

I don't agree with this because this seems to say that the only way to "be helpful" is to complete edit the question. It excludes the possibility for a graduated continuum of "helpfulness" that a user can exist on based on their current ability to commit time to the problem, comfort level with the topic at hand, or mood for the day.

Does a second moderator really need to be notified and manually come
  in after XX days/months to re-moderate it? Why is one moderator not
  enough?

I don't know what specific instance you are referring to here, but generally this only happens if things get out of hand or if somebody has flagged something. It's usually flags that draw my attention to old questions, for example, or some similar activity that bumps the question up to the front page of the active questions list.

If our true purpose is to answer questions and not just to sort them,
  we're only being about 50% efficient.

That isn't the purpose of this site at all. It is to provide a collection of a certain kind of questions and their objective answers. This necessarily involves a process of "sorting" out the questions that are not of the correct kind (as defined by some combination of the overall StackExchange philosophy and the community consensus on meta).


text:
How can I follow question/user/topics on this site?
There is no "follow" button. How can I follow a question or user or topic?

Welcome to the site. You should post questions about the way the site works itself on meta, rather than the main site. See the [help] for more details. I have moved your question there for you.

This site is not a social network. It's a Q&A site. There is therefore limited support for the kind of thing you are asking for.
Below the up/down vote buttons on a question is a "favorite" button. You can click this, and it will add the question to your favorites list. You view that list from the "favorites" tab in your profile.
You can't "follow" a user (or answer) in the same fashion, although you could bookmark the user's profile or the answer's permalink.
You can acquire an RSS feed of user activity by hitting the URL https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/feeds/user/<user number>. For example, the feed for your own activity would be here.

You can follow a question by using the star button on the left to favorite that question. When changes are made to that question, you'll see an update in the favorites tab of your profile.
There is no way to follow a user.
You can follow tags, which are kind of like topics, by marking them as a favorite. Or you can just click the tag you're interested in to see the latest questions for that tag.

In addition to following the user activity as mentioned by Josh Petrie, there is also the possibility to follow specific tags. For example:
http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/feeds/tag/ogre
http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/feeds/tag?tagnames=ogre&sort=newest


text:
Reasoning for "Illuminator" badge
I just realized that there is an "Illuminator" badge:

That really surprised and baffled me and ultimately lead to the following question:

Isn't that already going in the direction of bad / misguided incentives and leaving the realm of sensible gamifaction? I fear that this kind of badge can coerce people either into sinking a huge amount of time into this site. This is of course beneficial for the community, but could lead to neglection of "real-life" duties / tasks. Especially considering that if someone is striving for this badge, they will need multiple attempts given that the probability of coming across 500 questions that one can answer properly (score > 0) within 12 hours is rather low.

Given that only 24 members ever received this badge on SO.SE and none here on GameDev shows how improbable it is to get this badge. I however assume none of the current recipients specifically aimed for this badge as a concrete target but rather simply spent more or less 12 hours non-stop on the site.
So, after all this is most likely not a critical issue, but again it just baffled me and I would like to here what you think about it. Discuss!

To gain one "action" towards this badge you must edit and answer the same / one single question within 12 hours. Do this 500 times over however long you want and you get the badge. You don't need to edit and answer 500 questions within 12 hours.

Related: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/239898/new-three-tiered-badge-idea-explainer-refiner-illuminator

As Spartan says, the individual action you need to do to earn this badge is to edit and answer (within 12 hours) a question. Your answer has to have a non-zero score. You must repeat that 500 times.
You don't have to do all 500 edits within a 12 hour period.
Getting the badge isn't improbable, it just takes time, and many of the ways you could try to abuse/game the system for this badge will raise flags for moderators or sufficiently-high-rep users to deal with (excessive edits, review queues, et cetera).

Okay, that is indeed much more sensible. Thanks for the clarification to you and SpartanDonut. In retrospect, I should probably have realized that on my own: Doing those 500 edits + answers in 12h would mean that for each thread you would only have 1.44 minutes...that is without any breaks.


text:
You've earned the "賛成投票する" privilege! (Bug)
Okay, I've searched for duplicates, but couldn't find any (which is odd, is this bug only for me?). Today I was checking my mail, and got the notice that I just got access to a few privileges due to upvotes of my answers. However, one of them seems to be in the wrong language. 賛成投票する translates to "to vote", so the entire phrase is "You've earned the to vote privilege", and as expected the link in my mail goes to the upvote privilege page. I grabbed the HTML of the inbox notification, this is what it looks like.

You've earned the "賛成投票する" privilege! Learn more about it in the help center.

What I think is odd about this glitch is that the main part of the notification I got was in the correct language, and only the part of it that read "vote-up" was not.
Is anybody else seeing this glitch?

Japanese StackOverflow is the only site where that would make sense, but you don't even have an account there. Fascinating.

Yeah, although I don't see why the rest of the message would be in english if it even were from Japanese StackOverflow. Hmm...

That's going to be a hard one for others to test... should probably notify the devs.

How do I do that?

I'm pretty sure that this was fixed a few weeks ago; apologies for not seeing this report sooner.
Unless you've seen more instances of this issue... and if so, please just keep it to yourself (kidding :)


text:
How can I render math formulas from StackExchange in my web browser?
I would like to see maths formula in rendered form instead of code in Firefox. It is possible? For instance, in this answer, there is a formula:
$$(v_{x,i},v_{y,i},v_{z,i}) = \frac{(x_{i+1}-x_{i},y_{i+1}-y_{i},z_{i+1}-z_{i})}{t_{i+1}-t_{i}} \; .$$

I just see the formulas as code ($$...), and I would like to see interpreted formulas instead.

Related: http://meta.gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/351/math-markdown-on-this-site

I believe most people use MathJax / ChatJax. Give this page a read: http://www.math.ucla.edu/~robjohn/math/mathjax.html
You will find this bookmarklet which installs ChatJax into the current page:
javascript:(function(){if(window.MathJax===undefined){var%20script%20=%20document.createElement("script");script.type%20=%20"text/javascript";script.src%20=%20"http://cdn.mathjax.org/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS_HTML";var%20config%20=%20%27MathJax.Hub.Config({%27%20+%20%27extensions:%20["tex2jax.js"],%27%20+%20%27tex2jax:%20{%20inlineMath:%20[["$","$"],["\\\\\\\\\\\\(","\\\\\\\\\\\\)"]],%20displayMath:%20[["$$","$$"],["\\\\[","\\\\]"]],%20processEscapes:%20true%20},%27%20+%20%27jax:%20["input/TeX","output/HTML-CSS"]%27%20+%20%27});%27%20+%20%27MathJax.Hub.Startup.onload();%27;if%20(window.opera)%20{script.innerHTML%20=%20config}%20else%20{script.text%20=%20config}%20document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(script);(doChatJax=function(){window.setTimeout(doChatJax,1000);MathJax.Hub.Queue(["Typeset",MathJax.Hub]);})();}else{MathJax.Hub.Queue(["Typeset",MathJax.Hub]);}})();

Thanks ! I'd like to vote your answer up, but I can't right now !


text:
how I can add or upload picture or photo to this site (stackexchange) in a comment?
how I can add or upload picture or photo to this site (stackexchange) in a comment ??

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it asking about functionality of the stack exchange network.  This question might be suitable for meta, but the correct answer may be a lot simpler than that (you can't put an image in a comment).

You would do so by creating a link to the image and posting that. Preferably using Imgur.
It should be noted that you will also need the required reputation to post comments (on questions and answers other than your own), which is currently 50 reputation.

If you're asking how to add inline images in comments, the answer is probably no, not for any site in the StackExchange network. It is easy to abuse and goes against the idea of comments as short requests for clarification. Useful information should always be in questions and answers themselves; comments are treated like red-headed stepchildren.
IIRC this feature exists in SE-like sites like Unity Answers, so it's not like the software doesn't support it. It is however a feature that would go against some pretty fundamental philosophies of StackExchange, so I wouldn't even bother asking for this.


text:
Would questions about game-engine recommendations be on-topic, given they have clearly stated needs?
Is a question asking for a recommendation of a game-engine fitting one's needs on-topic or off-topic?
There are SE formats such as rpg.stackexchange.com which allows for recommendation questions about game systems, which seems to be a similar case. What is GDSE's stance here?
example:

I am looking for an engine to create a 3D, space game with 3 dimensional space and movement (Homeworld-esque).
  I hence need an engine that doesn't limit my scene to a definite ground and/or top.What would you recommend me and why?
  I am looking for answers based on your own experience or clearly stated facts & properties

Looking at the help centre:

What topics can I ask about here?
...
and it is not about...

how to get started making a game
what language/engine/SDK you should learn
where free assets can be found
which technology is better
which technology to use for your game idea
what technology some particular game used
how to make (or start making) a particular type of game

So you're example question would be off-topic.

For engine recommendations (and software ones in general), try http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com which is a site tailored for this stuff. Note that they have pretty strict requirements for their questions; you must clearly state your needs/criteria, to avoid poll-like answers that devolve into popularity contests. But it looks like in this case you should be ok.
Personally I see a problem with your stated needs; you ask for a 3D engine that "doesn't limit my scene to a definite ground and/or top", but I'm not aware of any popular engine that has such limits, so to me it sounds like you should do a bit of independent research first.

It was more meant like a general example, not a definite thing.

@dot_Sp0T That is essentially the problem we've had with most people asking for technology (or specifically engine) recommendations. Most requests aren't so specific that one piece of technology is objectively better for it than others.


text:
Should or shouldn't we introduce a format to ask about game-engine suitability?
This question is a follow-up to the question: Would questions about game-engine recommendations be on-topic, given they have clearly stated needs?
The help-centre states:

What topics can I ask about here?
...
and it is not about...

how to get started making a game
what language/engine/SDK you should learn
where free assets can be found
which technology is better
which technology to use for your game idea
what technology some particular game used
how to make (or start making) a particular type of game

The question is:
Should or shouldn't we introduce a format to ask about game-engine suitability?
I'm not asking if we should start answering every should I or shouldn't I question regarding choice of libraries, frameworks, engines, and so forth. I am aiming to provide a possibility to share knowledge and experience, to be able to point out flaws or obvious shortcomings that seem clear to an experienced user of certain engines but are not clear to a newcomer.

Questions would have to be limited to answers based on experience and/or clearly stated facts/properties of such engines.
Questions would have to mention at least one engine the user thought about using and state what experience the user has with said engine as well as why they think about choosing it for their project.
Opinion-based answers would not be allowed.

An example from another SE site which does allow for suitability/recommendation questions (rpg.stackexchange.com): Game Recommendation Info

Game recommendation questions, also known as "shopping questions" must
  be tightly scoped to be allowed on RPG.SE; see our Game
  Recommendation Q&A Guidance for more.  Closely define what you
  need in the question, and then answers must follow "Good Subjective,
  Bad Subjective" criteria and only recommend products the poster
  has experience in for those exact criteria, and not just toss out
  Googled lists or "their favorite product".
You can modify game-recommendation with
  published-adventures, campaign-settings, or similar to say
  what kind of product you're looking for (the default is a RPG system).

"Which engine do I use?" questions are just too broad. There are too many confounding factors in determining which to use.

Cost
Asker's skill with relevant languages
Suitability to team size
Which version control is supported (and how well)
What kinds of assets will be needed, and how well does it manage those

The chat room is a GREAT place to ask these questions, since they will invariably involve a ton of back-and-forth on the way to getting an answer.
So my answer to this is "no", we should not open up the site to these kinds of questions.

I am not necessarily opposed to changing the policy in this area, but I am opposed to your specific change.

Questions would have to be limited to answers based on experience
  and/or clearly stated facts/properties of such engines.

It's a bit self-defeating to restrict questions based on the potential answers. We only very rarely do it. Further, saying that answers must be "based on experience" means one can argue that any answer is applicable if it starts with some variation of "in my experience with engine Foo... totally baseless statement here." This creates a scenario where we have to police those answers and curtail the inevitable back-and-forth discussion in the comments that will happen as a result of said baseless statements.

Questions would have to mention at least one engine the user thought
  about using and state what experience the user has with said engine as
  well as why they think about choosing it for their project.

I don't really see how this requirement sufficiently narrows the scope of the question, other than to potentially rule out one of the many hundreds of possibilities. It also allows for weasel-word lawyering of the rules: somebody who asks which engine to use without an example has their question put on hold for not satisfying this guideline and so then search for the first engine they can find and claim they "tried" that one. Now we're back in the realm of having to police the veracity of a user's statements, as with the first rule.
Essentially, I feel the way you are proposing to limit these questions primarily saddles the user base with additional tedious self-moderation duties, and I don't think that many people will commit to them.
Any proposal to allow engine recommendations is going to need to provide a way to address the extremely broad nature of the question. The issues pointed out in Almo's answer are among the many that need to be dealt with.


text:
What makes a game development tools question acceptable?
Background: This recent question about Unity's machine identification was put on hold, while this question about installing Unreal Engine 4 survived the close-vote queue. Both have comments about whether to close them. (Links to further case studies would help.)
Our site tour states that we accept questions about "game-specific programming issues (engine architecture, game-related APIs, networking, tools, etc)".
What (if any) are the exceptions? When does a tools-question become too much about the tool and too little about game development? Where should such questions be asked instead?

This isn't really a full answer so I'm posting as a comment - I think the question is possibly more about when should mods unilaterally close something. I think the first (closed) question wasn't in need of any immediate attention and could have stayed open until it received the standard 5 close votes, if it even ever made it to that point.

That said, the original question posed here is still a good question to answer... just my two cents on the scenario as it went down :)

@SpartanDonut The linked questions were intended as examples. I'm interested here in the guidelines we should use—their enforcement is separate. (You might like this Meta SE question about when moderators should insta-hold questions.)

I know. Which is why I said the original question is still a good question to answer.

This question has come up around our big sister Stack Overflow.
I like Kevin Bourrillion's guidelines:

Where-to-post summary:

How do I? -- StackOverflow!
I got this error, why? -- StackOverflow!
I got this error and I'm sure it's a bug -- file an issue!
I have an idea/request -- file an issue!
Why do you? -- the mailing list!
When will you? -- the mailing list!
You suck and I hate you -- contact us privately at me@glennbeck.com!
You're awesome -- aw shucks!

Jon Skeet adds:

Topics requiring "deep" knowledge and discussion are likely to be best on a specialist list - whereas questions which "dabblers" can answer easily would do well on SO.

Here's an attempt to condense those into guidelines that would work on GDSE:
A tools question is on-topic if

the tool in question is specifically for game development, and
the problem can reasonably be answered by that tool's users.

A tools question is off-topic if

the tool is not game-development-specific, or
the problem can only reasonably be answered by the tool's developers (it's about a bug or feature request, or requires deep knowledge that isn't present in user-facing documentation).

Consequentially:
That question about installing UE4 is on-topic because UE4 is game dev specific and users can be expected to know how to install it.
That question about Unity's machine identification is probably off-topic, because although Unity is game dev specific, the question isn't reasonably answerable by a user: The hardware changes necessary to invalidate Unity's license are undocumented and would require a large amount of experimentation for a user to derive. (It sounds like a documentation bug report actually.)

The questions are actually pretty different in my opinion.
The Unreal question is about using the interface provided by Unreal to modify the available components. In this case, it's a fairly large component, being the engine itself. This is a standard workflow task that everyone will come across when installing the engine.
The Unity question is asking how Unity does something in the background. There's no standard workflow task about it. It's not something inside the tool that people use, it's asking what Unity looks for in changes to the machine for their copy protection feature. How the tool works in the background is not something that's game development specific.


text:
Glow is synonymous with bloom
15 questions on glow and 12 on bloom while they describe the same effect, only bloom has a tag-wiki description.

Does anybody else have an opinion on this? Pro or con?

I know this is a rather old question, but nothing appears to have been done about it yet.
I would argue that they should both be synonyms of graphic-effects, glow and bloom seem a bit too 'low-level'  to be useful in their own right. Also 15 questions is a pretty low number to be a reasonable categorization.
I would expect someone who was interested/knows a lot about bloom effects would also be interested/know a lot about glow effects.

I don't think they're synonymous.
When I think of Bloom I think of Wikipedia's definition

The effect produces fringes (or feathers) of light extending from the borders of bright areas in an image, contributing to the illusion of an extremely bright light overwhelming the camera or eye capturing the scene.

Where as I think of glow as just making something emit light.
I like to think of it as you can make an object glow in a game, then you can apply bloom to it.

So you want glow to be synonymous for emissive textures?

Possibly. A texture could produce light that could be used in lighting equations, i.e a object textured with a green emissive texture goes near a white wall it will light the wall green. You could then apply bloom to it to create the illusion of light overwhelming the camera.

Glowing could also be interpreted as putting an outline around a character, which doesn't really have anything to do with lighting.

Yes they should be merged.  <EOM>
Just kidding; not end of the message.  I just don't have any particular justification for my opinion other than generally disagreeing with the other answer.  Even if there is some slight difference in some definition, on this site they are used interchangeably.


text:
What should I do if I get conflicting answers?
Yesterday,I asked What is better? Lots of small TCP packets, or one long one?. At first, the answers tallied with what I thought the answer would be.

""

However, as the question got more and more views (How on earth did I get 1000+ views in a day??), I got more and more conflicting answers:

""

I am getting more and more answers which keep contradicting each other. They all have upvotes, which means that people must obviously agree with them.
What should I do in this scenario to try and get an understandable answer?

For future reference, this kind of broad, discussion-oriented question (your original question, not the meta one) is better asked in [chat].

"All the previous answers are incorrect."  So... you're going to ignore all of the "edit" links and post another answer?? Ok. In my opinion, THAT is a problem with this format, not the questions. [Many] people [, here,] have an innate need to be "righter" than the other guy; "one-upper's". As if they are the only person in the universe with that specific knowledge. Like most cooperative/multiplayer games these days, most of the players are pursuing singleplayer goals.

From your description, I could visit the [deleted] question, compile the 3 partially-correct answers into "my" completely-correct answer and "induce" cooperation.

In other words, many of the "superusers", that you'd think would know better, still provide THEIR best answer, not 'A' best answer. (Not realizing that edits can quickly outpace answers, "point-wise")

The "problem", in this case, is that for any "What is better?" question, the answer will inevitably be "Well, that depends".
Phillips answer looks at it from a pure network protocol standpoint, pointing out that each packet will have overhead that could be avoided and things like packetloss and the routers in between the host and the client.
My answer doesn't delve into that (though that is part of the reasoning behind it, Phillip's answer is better) but notes that in standard TCP this doesn't really come up either way due to Nagle's algorithm.
Panda Pajama's answer points out that TCP is a stream protocol, you're not sending packets, your adding data to a stream that may be send in a single packet, it could also be split up at arbitrary point (even inside of one of your calls to send!).
All of these answers are different points of view on the same question, they don't contradict each other as much as complement each other. The reason you are getting multiple answers is that there are multiple answers, in some cases, small packets are better, in others larger. You're gonna have to figure out what is best for your application.
How you figure that out is typically by implementing the easiest and seeing if there are problems with using it in your application, if there are, you can see if it's worth trying out an alternative to make it work better.


text:
"You can't" answers: better to accept or leave unaccepted?
If the answer to a question is "you (currently) can't", is it better to accept it or to leave it unaccepted?
While the "you can't" may be the correct answer now, it might easily change in future: if the asker leaves the question unattended it will be better not to have an accepted one, rather than having a (now) wrong accepted one.
Yes, the correct answer may change in future for any questions, but I think most of the "you can't" are much more prone to change, since someone else with the same problem might come up with a solution that was formerly unavailable (while if there already is a solution, a better one could come out but there are less incentives).

There's really no point to our trying to set a policy here, since accepting answers or not is entirely at the asker's discretion and cannot be overridden by moderation in any useful way (except to flat out delete the answer, which is generally not acceptable).
That said, I think it's fine to accept an answer that states "you can't." Acceptance is not a measure of the best answer (that's what voting is for), only a measure of the answer that the asker decided worked for him or her. It will always be possible to come back and add additional answers later, which would bump the question and allow additional voting.
Plus, the answer might never change from "you can't," and we don't know because we can't predicate the future.

"You can't" is also useful information; it may help prevent the asker from wasting time going down a false trail.


text:
Downvoting a downvoted question of a 1 rep user
Is there a point to downvote a question from a user that has the minimum reputation score available and which question has already a negative score?

Yes, the same reason you'd downvote any question, for the downvote reason:

This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not
  useful

Downvoting questions lets the OP and future visitors know that questions like that are not a good fit for the site in their current state.
I see downvoting questions as a way to show my opinion of the question. I don't think of it as a way to punish the user by taking away reputation. It doesn't matter if they have a lot of reputation or 1 reputation, the downvote is for the question, not the user.

This. It's a like / dislike button for me, not a reward / punish button.

Unfortunately, I do believe that haters will hate, so I'm sure there are a lot of "punishers" out there. That's what I think when I see questions with -5... "Ok, the op got the point now, get on with it.." There is no way to prevent that behaviour though.

Well yes, you asked for a reason. This is the legitimate reason. There are certainly those that abuse their power and anonymity, it's the internet after all.

I don't think a -5 necessarily indicates punishment. -1 means someone didn't like a question. It gives no indication of how the community actually feels on the question... it just shows the opinion of some person on the internet. A vote is your voice. Regardless of the vote count you should vote to make sure your voice is heard. If people follow this questions will get to -5 and lower.