text:
Abused by High-Rep members
A couple of days ago, I posted a question on the Game Development Q&A site. It got +6 votes but nobody could answer the question. However, there appeared to be a war of comments below the post, and this war was caused by a high-rep member who happened to hate the question I'd asked.
Basically, the whole conversation could be summarized by "The high-rep member trying to excuse his hateful comments and all the others trying to defend the question against him." What's more interesting is that the high-rep member even knew that his comments might be considered abusive and kept deleting them after a couple of minutes.
Back then I didn't really care about what was going on in the comment section. I just kept checking the page to see if an answer pops up. After a while, I got disappointed and left; 2 days later I came back to the question, and noticed that it was voted down 9 times, edited down to a point where the friendly tone of my question was removed (even though the question was crystal clear before the edition), and was closed as not constructive. Additionally, all the comments addressing the high-rep member as abusive were removed as well.
Now I understand the "Not Constructive" part (since my question was not really constructive), but the edition and the -9 vote downs makes me feel abused by high-rep members. Additionally, when I tried checking the report on the -9 votes, I noticed that the user was intentionally removed:
https://i.stack.imgur.com/dTIqY.png
Here's the link to the question I'd aksed:  https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/56689/3d-object-manipulation-framework
The name of the high-rep member who started the comment war is among the people who closed the question. Now again, I have nothing to say against the question being not constructive (hence being closed), but voting it down intentionally and editing when there's no need to sounds unfair to me. What should I do in this situation?

I can't comment on the rest as I'm not active on Game Development, but that -25 has nothing to do with the downvotes on your post. A user's account was removed; that user had upvoted some of your contributions in the past. The reputation that you gained was removed along with the user's votes on your content.

4 minutes after posting your question you get 5 upvotes in a couple minutes (which then get reversed the next day). This smells fishy.

@hammar No votes were reversed in the traditional sense. What happened here was that 5 users who upvoted this post were later deleted.

@Pekka I agree with the closing of the question, I disagree with voting it down. You don't have to vote down the question in order to be able to vote as 'not constructive' do you?

@DarrenVortex: "You don't have to vote down the question in order to be able to vote as 'not constructive' do you?" No. But it's a crap question. A question so bad that the person asking it (ie: you) knew it was a crap question yet asked it anyway. Indeed, you expressed the hope that it would be answered before it was closed. So basically you were trying to game the system by crudding up the site with your crap in the hope that someone would grace it with an answer. I have no problem with that question being downvoted.

No "friendly tone" was removed. Fluff was removed from your question that should not have been there to begin with and would have made it downvote fodder from the very start.

@DarrenVortex no, it's not necessary to vote down (and I'm not sure whether I would have) - but it's the community's prerogative to vote as it pleases. That's not "abuse".

@DarrenVortex The question was not closed as "not constructive". It's closed as "not a real question" because it's rather unclear what the actual question is. You have a few screenshots, a description of what you're doing, and (now) a link to a "might be useful" library. What exactly are you having trouble with there?

@AnnaLear "which lib to use?" is the question, based on the provided situation.

There are a few points in here (and the answer below that I want to address) You were probably upvoted for your comments against Byte56, the sockpuppets were anti-him in their behavior. Your question was likely downvoted because it was a "which technology to use" question, they are considered off topic here (by meta discussion) and people consider that they are lacking research except for a few long-tail problems.

Finally, we actually do a bit of the "What should I use" kind of discussions, we just keep them contained to our chatroom. http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/19/game-development stop by sometime.

Even though this discussion really is over, just wanted to point out 2 things: I was upvoted before any comments addressing byte56, byte56 was the one removing his comments, and byte56 in a private chatroom clearly stated that he was "Trolling". Doesn't matter now anyways. I just think that the rules should change and allow for "What should I use" types of questions because there are wide examples of these questions being asked, favored and answered, yet closed as not a real question or not constructive. But that's not my decision to make...

Hey @DarrenVortex, sorry this is so confusing for you as a first visit to the site. I can explain again what happened, but I suspect you may know, I wasn't trolling you. Your question was just caught in the cross fire between me legitimately commenting on why I thought it should be closed and another user controlling his sock puppets. The sock puppets were removing my comments, so you couldn't have know the real reason your question was being voted on.

the edition and the -9 vote downs makes me feel abused by high-rep members.

First, your question does not have -9 downvotes, so I have no idea where you're getting that from. Second, in the recent past, there was a rash of sock-puppetry on GDSE. That's probably where the -25 came from. The sock puppet owner likely upvoted your question from 5 different accounts. When those sock puppet accounts were removed, the votes were undone, hence the -25.
Third, your question was edited to remove the "friendly tone" because what you call "friendly tone" is just pointless noise. If you think your question is "not the most 'constructive' question to be asked on a Q&A forum", then you shouldn't be asking it to begin with. Indeed, such declarations are basically you showing disdain for the rules of GDSE and Stack Exchange as a whole, knowingly posting an inappropriate question.
We don't need introductions and friendly "hello, how are you doing" stuff in questions. We don't need "Any suggestions" stuff at the bottom. To put that in your question at all just makes your question take longer to read, for no real purpose. Just state your question plainly and straightforwardly; if it is reasonable, it will be attended to.
Nothing of substance was removed from your question.

Yes, that's where the -25 came from. I removed a few accounts earlier this week that committed various kinds of vote fraud. I should also note that DarrenVortex's account doesn't look to be at all related to them.

Interesting, now I understand the vote counts on my question. But why would the sock puppet want to upvote my question?

I'm against pure, dry, hard questions. When I personally see these, I feel like someone is throwing homework at me, expecting me to do it without a word. I try to be nice when I ask my question so that the other person doesn't feel disrespected. I post 'Thank You' comments and things as such. I think that this is better than a plain old question and there's nothing in GDSE rules that says this is bad or should be removed.

@DarrenVortex: "But why would the sock puppet want to upvote my question?" Because the sock puppet in question was being malicous. You asked a bad question. And upvoting bad questions makes the site worse by making it seem like these are the kinds of questions we want.

@DarrenVortex: Your question does not exist to get you help; it exists to get the next person who has that same question as you help. The longer your question is, the longer it takes for that person to realize that your question is the same as his. And thus, the less useful your question is to the "not you" demographic. The goal of an SE site is to create a knowledge-base; we answer questions as a means to achieve that goal. Having questions which are clear and direct serves that purpose. Having questions with a lot of irrelevant fluff does not.

@DarrenVortex: Also, it's been well established on MSO that people can, and will, remove irrelevant material from questions. And that this behavior is perfectly valid.

If that's the case then you're right, even though I find the longer questions getting more upvotes.

But why is asking for library / toolkit suggestion considered 'a bad question'? I'm pretty sure that tons of other people find themselves in my shoes, looking for a place to start from but are not sure what tool is suitable for what they want to do, and more experienced developers can help you decide, is that not right?

@DarrenVortex: "longer questions getting more upvotes" There's a difference between a question that gets its length from having meaningful content and a question that's padded with filler.

@DarrenVortex: "But why is asking for library / toolkit suggestion considered 'a bad question'?" Because Real Questions have Real Answers. If every answer is as good as another, if there's no one direct answer, then it's subjective. And since your question is purely a list question (give me a list of things that do X), we don't allow that here.

No. I didn't ask for a list. I asked for 'the' most suitable framework for what I want to do. Even if I did ask for a list, such questions ("http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9729416/lightweight-opengl-framework") still get answered and even upvoted, regardless of getting closed (which doesn't make sense), and that's what I was hoping for. On the subject of length, I have to agree with you and thank you for explaining the reasoning to me.

I mean the fact that they get upvoted, answered and an answer is chosen by the asker means that these are useful questions and Can be answered.

@DarrenVortex: "such questions still get answered and even upvoted" The fact that some people get away with breaking the rules doesn't mean that there aren't still rules. Crimes are crimes even if some criminals escape prosecution. We close questions based on objective properties of the question, not based on subjective issues of whether someone might find them "useful".

Well then why are these questions getting closed? They're favored, answered and have real answers. What's wrong with that?

Even you asked a question like this (and surprisingly this wasn't closed...): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9387610/what-xml-parser-should-i-use-in-c Maybe this bows down to 'How' I ask the question. If it's clear enough then it's considered ok, i believe.

I asked another question. I tried to follow your advice, keep it short, be clear and frank, don't ask for a list (even though it seems ok to do so). Let's see how this one goes.

@DarrenVortex: "Well then why are these questions getting closed? They're favored, answered and have real answers. What's wrong with that?" Because they're against the rules. As previously stated. "Even you asked a question like this (and surprisingly this wasn't closed...):" I also answered that question almost immediately thereafter. I only posted it because we kept getting repeated questions like that on the C++ tag, and I wanted a single place where that stuff could go.

@DarrenVortex On SO those type of questions exist usually for the close as duplicate path, instead of having thousands of questions with the same answers repeated.

@Darrenvortex The discussion on why those questions are closed is had here: http://meta.gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/695/are-what-should-i-use-to-do-x-questions-really-on-topic-and-good/700


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I am new to X, ... <actual problem with X>, ... please help, thank you. Edit, flag or what?
I've seen handful of questions beginning with "I am new to X" which is sometimes followed with an actual problem with typos and lack of formatting, then a plea for help and a "thank you". While browsing meta, I found in this question: Abused by High-Rep members that "friendly tone" is not really welcome.
Now, I often see these questions in "review", under first posts. If I edit the question, what should I do with those polite phrases?

Any edits that get to the point of the question faster is a good one.
Remove openers.
Remove closers.
Make the title of the question the actual question being asked.
Fix spelling/grammar so it's easier to read.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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Request for new shortcuts to the new help pages
So, we now have help instead of the FAQ. Not really a fan of the new layout, in my opinion it's harder to find info. Regardless, it would be nice to have some proper shortcuts to the specific pages of help.
As some users here may know, I linked to the FAQ a lot. I used the shortcut [FAQ] to link to the FAQ quickly and easily. It would be great to have some similarly short and simple links to link to specific parts of the new Help pages.
My suggestions:
Comment input == Comment parser output
----------------------------------------
[help]        == [help](https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/help)
[ontopic]     == [on topic](https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic)
[dontask]     == [don't ask](https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask)
[closed]      == [closed](https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions)
[reputation]  == [reputation](https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation)

Recognizing capitals in the comment input, and converting appropriately for the output would be nice too.

I like this. Also, it would be great if this related issue was finally fixed: http://meta.gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/999/why-can-i-not-link-directly-to-faq-anchors

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


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getting-started for continuous noob onslaught
It seems almost daily there's a new question about getting started something or other.
There were a bunch of these "getting started" questions in untagged which looked really crufty to me.
I created getting-started just now and I think it's reasonable to have just one question for "getting started", under each category.
Yay?  Nay?

Absolutely not. We don't want to encourage "getting-started" questions. We want to discourage them. By giving them a tag, it makes it sound like we want them. So when we tell people that we don't want them, it seems like we're indecisive.
Also, you should bring this stuff up before you crud up the front page by bumping a ton of crap, closed questions. Don't edit a closed question unless you're trying to turn it into a question that deserves to be opened.

No.
getting-started is the same as beginner in that it's a meta tag.  http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/
untagged questions should be retagged to something else, or if they're worthless they should be deleted.  Edit: I just did that to all the questions you had tagged like so.  (The only reason they're untagged was due to admin-level tag deletion.)

This depends on how one interprets "getting started", and there are two main classes of "getting started" questions I see as relevant here.
The first class includes questions along the lines of "which language should I choose", or "how do I set up my development environment", or the ever-dreaded "should I choose OpenGL or D3D" (I feel dirty even mentioning it).  These are the kind of questions we should be clamping down on - hard.  They're too subjective, too open to extended discussion, could be addressed by R-ing TFM, generate a poor signal-to-noise ratio and degrade the overall value of the site.
The second class may include a hypothetical "I'm getting started with <X> and have run into <insert specific problem here>".  This has potential to be a good question and generate good and useful answers that may help others too (so long as it's not a one-liner with a code-dump, that is).  This kind of question, when done well, is worthy of encouragement, and should not be clamped down on.
As it is, maybe the very term "getting started" is itself a mite ambiguous as it's open to interpretation either way?  Maybe a reconsideration of the wording used might be in order?

You can just lose the "I'm getting started with " part of the question and leave behind the specific problem and you'll probably have a fine question. As long as it's not a code dump or programming 101 question.


text:
2013 Moderator Election Q&A - Question Collection
In connection with the moderator elections, we will be holding a Q&A with the candidates.  This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation.  Participation is completely voluntary.
This is an alternative form of the Town Hall Chat system we've done in previous elections, we're trying some new things to test out how a different approach works.
Here's how it'll work.

During the nomination phase, (so, until June 17th at 20:00:00Z UTC, or 4:00 pm EDT on the same day, give or take time to arrive for closure), this question will be open to collect potential questions from the users of the site. Post answers to this question containing any questions you would like to ask the candidates. Please only post one question per answer.
We, the Community Team, will be providing a small selection of generic questions. The first two will be guaranteed to be included, the latter ones are if the community doesn't supply enough questions. This will be done in a single post, unlike the prior instruction.
This is a perfect opportunity to voice questions that are specific to your community and issues that you are running into at current.
At the end of the phase, the Community Team will select up to 8 of the top voted questions submitted by the community provided in this thread, to use in addition to the aforementioned 2 guaranteed questions. We reserve some editorial control in the selection of the questions and may opt not to select a question that is tangential or irrelevant to moderation or the election. That said, if I have concerns about any questions in this fashion, I will be sure to point this out in comments before the decision making time.
Once questions have been selected, a new question will be opened to host the actual questionnaire for the candidates, containing 10 questions in total.
This is not the only option that users have for gathering information on candidates. As a community, you are still free to, for example, hold a live chat session with your candidates to ask further questions, or perhaps clarifications from what is provided in the Q&A.

If you have any questions or feedback about this new process, feel free to post as a comment here.

The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it here.

One of the biggest schisms the site has is the divide between the experienced developers who are active on the site and the mass of inexperienced but enthusiastic people wanting to develop games.  What is your stance on the issue, and what role, if any, do you see diamond mods as having on making sure the site remains a useful tool for getting answers to game dev questions?

The issue of...? The ratio between experienced developers and inexperienced developers? The flood of "getting started" questions?

Take your pick, there are a lot of discussions on meta already that touch on the issues.  e.g.  http://meta.gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/542/request-relax-a-bit-on-moderation-and-dont-be-so-eager-to-shut-down-questions?rq=1  http://meta.gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/826/getting-started-questions-shouldnt-we-have-something-for-this?rq=1 http://meta.gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/879/12-hours-of-gdse-is-quality-going-downhill?rq=1 http://meta.gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/985/should-we-be-more-exclusive?rq=1 I purposely left it vague to let people fill in the blank.

How do you compare against the other candidates?

+1 But I liked your unicorn question too!

Here is a set of general questions, gathered as very common questions asked every election. As mentioned in the instructions, the first two questions are guaranteed to show up in the Q&A, while the others are if there aren't enough questions (or, if you like one enough, you may split it off as a separate answer for review within the community's 8).

How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?
How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?

In your opinion, what do moderators do?
A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?
In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?

Cynical, just how I like it. :D

Do you want to make this site more friendly to newcomers and beginners? If yes, how do you want to do it when these people are most likely to ask questions, that are discouraged here?

It's much better to post these as separate questions, so they can be voted on separately. My example was a little different, as it contains two questions that will definitely be on the list, followed by three more that might get on the list if we don't collect enough questions here. Please go ahead and add two more answers - these are good questions!

Alright, edited this one and posted two more :)

This is truly meta when you say: Add two more answers with questions.

There are infinite levels of meta. I just meta'd your meta on my meta. Yeah, meta.

Being a moderator will definitely take some of your time. Candidates are usually people with reputation gained by answering questions. Are you still going to take the same time to actually answer questions? Or are we losing some of the great answers because you are becoming a mod?

Aren't you afraid, that you will burn out solving mundane issues that you could ignore before?

I'd replace the word "stupid" with "mundane" since that's most of what moderators do. Deal with boring stuff.

I'll add it to my vocabulary, thanks.


text:
2013 Community Moderator Election
The 2013 Community Moderator Election is now underway!
Community moderator elections have three phases:

Nomination phase
Primary phase
Election phase

Most elections take between two and three weeks, but this depends on how many candidates there are.
Please visit the official election page at
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/election
for more detail, and to participate!
If you have general questions about the election process, or questions for moderator candidates, feel free to ask them here on meta -- just make sure your questions are tagged election.


text:
Why can't we embed a video in a question or answer?
Or maybe we can and I just don't know how to do it? Sometimes it's easier to display a video of gameplay and since I understand you don't want code, why not just remove the possibility of putting code here.
I've recorded a demo of the scene:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PF_UzoOXD0E

Here's the research so far:
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/56711/how-to-make-my-jme3-character-walk-over-slopes-and-stairs-instead-of-sliding
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16782375/how-to-improve-character-control-for-my-3d-game/16988342?noredirect=1#comment24704812_16988342

"I understand you don't want code" You clearly misunderstood the difference between "not wanting any code" and "not wanting a ridiculous wall of code."

If the problem is reasonably scoped (and truly needs a video to explain it), then that video ought to be extremely short.  And space is a concern, so give it high compression and no sound.
Make a gif!  It sure helps make this question more answerable.
Of course, the best gif in the world won't save an otherwise broken question.
"WHAT'S WRONG WITH MY RAGDOLL PHYSICS?"
"See my video.  What's wrong?  Thanks in advance."

Physics don't operate the same in Sparta. Without the GIF I wouldn't have known enough to answer.

Embedded videos are essentially pretty-looking links, susceptible to undesirable link rot.
Stack Exchange sites protect images from link rot when uploaded using the  Add Image button (or Ctrl+g): a separate copy is uploaded to https://i.stack.imgur.com/ in partnership with imgur.  This is currently not possible for videos, likely because they tend to be huge in comparison.

Excellent answer.

Images are protected from link rot by StackExchange sites. Great!  Why then is it that I continue to find relatively recent questions lacking images, such as this one?

@ArcaneEngineer Sorry, I should have been more specific. That question's images were uploaded to a different site and only linked here. One should use the Add Image button (or press Ctrl + g) to upload images, as they go to StackExchange's dedicated http://i.stack.imgur.com/ site. I'll edit to clarify.

Hm, really, adding images in any other way should be disallowed then because it's counterintuitive for SE as a knowledgebase when links break. Thanks for the info.

@ArcaneEngineer No problem. I found a Meta SE question requesting that same thing.

Are *.webm's supported on this site?

Im a little confused, Stack Exchange at least partially supports videos, as this is no problem on Arqade.

@Timelord64 Like using "password" as your password, it only becomes a problem when it becomes a problem. An external video host can take down videos for reasons we don't control, thereby rendering our posts useless. I'd rather not put the fate of our preserved knowledge in someone else's hands without a strict contract, especially someone as trigger-happy as YouTube.


text:
Migration path to Blender.SE
What needs to be done to set up a migration path to the Blender Stack Exchange?
The site is still in public beta, but seems to be growing quite well day by day. Does the site need to be out of beta before a migration path can be made?
I have noticed a few new questions that might be sutiable for migration, but there is no option to do so.

Note that we generally don't migrate old questions to new sites.

The pre-defined migration paths are set up based on how common manual migrations are to the other site.
Remember, you can always flag as "other" with the comment telling where you think the question should be migrated to.


text:
Off Topic variations
As some of you may know from MSO, there will be changes coming to how we close questions. Among them will be the removal of "too localized" (see below for how that will work) and the addition of various of "off topic."
The "off topic" variations will each come with their own specific message, representing the different ways something can be off-topic. Also, the specific "off topic" variations will vary from site to site. So I wanted to ask what it is we should provide for various versions of "off topic"-ness. I'll put my suggestions in an answer below.
What we currently call "too localized" will simply be variations of "off topic", as it will on SO.

Thank goodness for [tag:discussion] on this post; I was going to say, aren't discussion-oriented questions a poor fit for the Q-and-A format?

@ShotgunNinja the meta sites follow a different structure than the main site does.

Here are my suggested off topic reasons.:

Getting Started (though technically the "too broad" reason would apply, this one would be a much clearer way to close)
Which tech to use
Pure-programming question with nothing Gamedev-specific; should be migrated to SO.
plz debug mai codez

Here's a first-pass at the wording for these reasons (attempting to be polite):

Questions about how to begin developing a whole game, or otherwise how to begin developing games are not permitted on this site, per the FAQ.
Questions about which programming language, game engine, library, or other tools to use in developing games are not permitted on this site, per the FAQ.
This site accepts programming questions, but only when that question represents concepts and scenarios that are specific to game development. General programming problems that come up during game development can be handled on Stack Overflow.
Questions should contain more than a block of code and a short description of the apparent problem. Please use existing debugging facilities to narrow the scope of the problem.

I think we should have some wording beyond just "see the faq".  It would be better to have some succinct reason for why a question is bad other than "the faq says it's not permitted".  There's a reason those kinds of questions get closed, let's make that reason more apparent.  With the exception of the generic "off topic" close reason in the MSO thread you linked to, all the other close reasons are good examples to follow.

@Tetrad: The reason is "we don't want them." To add anything to that would require an explanation of why we don't want them, which goes into the nature of SE sites and other things that can't be summarized in one or two sentences. The "succinct reason" is "we don't want it." Furthermore... why does it matter why we don't want it? It's not going to help them fix their question.

I think the "getting started" questions easily fit under the "too broad" example, and the "which tech to use" questions fit under the "primarily opinion based" example from the MSO

@Tetrad: But this way, the message is tailored specifically for those kinds of questions. It's much clearer what the problem is than the generic "too broad". Also, it makes it more clear that the problem cannot be rectified. If you ask a broad question about game design, you can make it reasonable by adding details that narrow the scope. However, if you ask a broad "getting started" question, you can never add enough details to make it reasonable.

I'm mainly going off the examples in the question you linked to in the OP as well as the examples given here in the accepted answer about how to solve the "off topic is too vague" problem (we've been typically using as "not constructive" instead of "off topic" to close those kinds of questions)  http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/169824/149294.  Some of those reasons go into detail (e.g. "mobile phones are not considered computers"), but then again some do not as well.

A mere "not permitted on this site" or "we don't want it" is exactly the kind of problem that's discussed here: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/169814/help-us-make-off-topic-close-reasons-clearer-to-the-op - the intention is clearly "We can do a much better job helping posters to understand why their question is off-topic" and it's worth reading that entire topic because it shows how this line of thinking is not in the spirit of the new closing reasons.  Also "we need to convey that information with as little dependence on other sources (FAQ, etc.) as possible".

@mh01: "we need to convey that information with as little dependence on other sources (FAQ, etc.) as possible" I don't agree with that at all. Quite frankly, the kind of person who won't read the FAQ is the kind of person we want to not be here. It is not wrong to be selective about the kind of people who come here. And I'm perfectly happy with a basic criteria of selection being the willingness to follow a link to find out what you did wrong. Remember: they are the ones who screwed up, not us.

I don't disagree with you on that; it's also the case that the type of person who asks this kind of question is generally the type of person who doesn't read the FAQ.  Nonetheless, "per the FAQ" isn't going to change that (it's basically just an instruction to read something they're not going to read anyway, so it accomplishes nothing), and if doing it by the current guidelines helps turn even one bad person into a good one, it will have been worth it.

@mh01: But I've suggested will already be saying more than they do now. The nebulous "Not Constructive" reasoning would be replaced with a clear message that what they specifically asked for is not appropriate on this site. The person who wants to ask a "getting started" question is going to consider most attempts to explain why such questions are bad to be specious. Just look at people on meta here or MSO who just don't understand why those are bad questions. Do you honestly think a couple of sentences is going to change their minds?

But the purpose is not just to say "this is not appropriate", it's to say why it's not appropriate, and it's not aimed at the ~99% (or whatever) of people who will just ignore it, it's aimed at the remainder who may just pay attention and start asking good questions (a secondary purpose is to discourage "why was my question closed as X" questions on meta).  Remember - this is not what I think, these are the guidelines we've been given to work within.

@mh01: "Remember - this is not what I think, these are the guidelines we've been given to work within." All that means is that the "guidelines" are hopelessly naive. Furthermore, none of the suggestions on that MSO page explain why any of those things are bad. They don't say why shopping questions are bad. They don't explain why SU believes Smart Phones to not be computers despite that being prima facie stupid. So if those are the "guidelines", they're doing a poor job of meeting them; all of the suggestions are about what was done, not why that was bad.

@mh01: Indeed, the "guideline" seems to be "how can we make the system convey what specifically made a closed question off-topic, with as little navigation as possible?" So what specifically made a "getting started" question off-topic? The fact that it's a "getting started" question and we don't accept those. Explaining why "getting started" questions are off-topic is not part of the guideline.

@mh01: Ultimately, the point of the exercise is not to explain why the rules are what they are. It's to explain exactly which rule they broke.

For what it's worth I do think you have the bulk of the reasons that we close questions down.  Going by the "being more specific with the reason the question is closed" logic, I like your wording for the most part.  I'd just drop the "per the faq" as it's redundant, and change "can be handled on SO" to "should be asked on SO" in #3.

I'd also drop the "per the FAQ". It makes it sound these are the Tablets of Law. I'd rather like a softer "check the [FAQ] for details".

I'd also change "not permitted on this site" to "not appropriate for this site" - again, to make it sound less draconian.

I would like to keep something in the spirit of the original too localized, because sometimes it was true.
"This question is unlikely to be helpful to any future users.  It covers tiny typo errors, simple misuse of libraries, or custom code that will never be reused."

Definitely; the "Closing Changes" post includes this text: "Today, TL is used helpfully on code dump questions on SO, but the new OT reasons are where this is now correctly addressed. SO can use 'Large blocks of code with requests for debugging without meaningful supporting info' as a specific OT reason." and the same would be valid here (for much the same reasons).

... that will probably never be reused. You never know, if it ends on the interwebspace, somebody is gonna copy-paste it.

The new off topic mechanism is in place, and we only have space for 3 custom close reasons.
The top close reasons seem to be the following, so this is what I would propose:

"Which tech should I use to X" (off topic because it'll usually just be a list of answers.  More detail here: Are "What should I use to do x?" questions really on-topic and good?".   I'd probably add "consider changing your question to be 'how do I do X' instead of 'what can I use to do X'"
non-game-dev-specific programming questions (should be on stack overflow)
"how do I get started?" (design paralysis, not really answerable, too broad, etc.).

The "dump of code" type question might be mergeable with #2 if worded appropriately, but I feel they're really separate reasons.

I don't think the second one should be limited to programming, as we've also had off-topic questions regarding asset creation, security etc. It could still mention though that generic programming questions should be asked in Stack Overflow.

Such a shame there's not room for the 'OT because it is about debugging your code for you.' Do we have usage stats on the OT close reasons? I wonder if the in-practice reasons might actually show that the frequencies of the various reasons aren't what we expected when we picked the top 3...


text:
How can the moderators and community managers ensure a fair election?
With the amount of sock puppet activity on the site, and the apparent inability for the community managers and moderators to control it (though I'm sure they're trying hard!), I don't see how the elections can be fair.
Comments I make on my nomination post continue to get flagged for removal by sock puppets, as well as comments of other users supporting me. I've also seen evidence of more sock puppets being created, so the problem only appears to be getting worse.
Clearly someone has it out for me, and I have no doubt the full sock puppet force will be voting in the election.
How can the we possibly have a fair election if the votes can be so easily fabricated?
I'm aware that a user needs at least 150 rep to vote in the election, but I fail to see that being an issue with the apparent free time this person has.

I think the answer is "they can't" :(

@Almo Luckily for everyone else running, I think it'll only affect me :)

Of course they can. Mods don't just edit posts and announce elections. They remove sock puppets, protect us from bad things and make rainbows! Or unicorns do that?

The moderators have done an excellent job of cleaning up. Hopefully this won't be an issue (knock on silicon).

Disclaimer: community manager here.
There aren't any rings on the site right now that are capable of seriously skewing the voting in the election. Getting 150 reputation on enough accounts to be able to seriously affect an election is not trivial, especially on a site the size of Game Development.
The fact that a few people/accounts colluded on removing comments and just generally misbehaving during an election is certainly unfortunate, but I don't think there's much to be done here beyond monitoring the situation and catching these accounts. From experience with past elections, I doubt that having your comments removed would have a strong effect on the outcome of the election. Plus comments are easy to replace.
Our best defense is and continues to be to monitor voting patterns and interactions on the site. We always pay closer attention to sites when an election is in progress, so we should be able to stay on top of this easily enough and ensure as fair a process as possible.

Thanks Adam. This is the response I was looking for.

@Byte56 Any time. :)

This is encouraging :)

As raised on Meta SO, attempts to cause noise during this process have been mitigated, and will continue to be mitigated if they persist. However, that's all someone determined to be a pain can do here - make noise that quickly vanishes without much of a trace.
They will get bored, or the election will conclude uneventfully, whichever comes first. As Anna noted, sometimes all we can do is closely monitor things, and that's what we're doing. This is when having close to 24 hour coverage really comes in handy.
I'm hoping that it just becomes obvious that time spent like this is simply wasted, but we'll of course continue to deal with it while it continues.

Elections can be:

online
secret
fair

pick two, you can't have all three.
Stack exchange community it all for secrecy (vs. transparency), so elections will never be fair, and nothing can fix that.

All for secrecy? I don't think so. That may apply to votes, but not accounts, questions, answers, comment history, review history, edits, etc. The key one here being accounts. With better enforcement of one account per person, you could easily have all three.

@Byte56: The point he's making is that you won't ever be able to prove that an election was fair if the ballet is secret and it's done online. There's always a chance that someone hacked the system.

OK, I can agree with that. I think the likelihood of the voting system being hacked is far lower than the system being gamed by sock puppets. So, with proper steps, the chance of a fair election goes way up.

Also you can't prove that there are no sockpuppets, while if votes weren't secret, you could have much more chances at least of detecting suspects.


text:
Deleted comments in 2013 moderator election
I am concerned about the deletion of at least several comments that have been made on the 2013 Moderator Election nominations page. What is going on here?
I had posted a fairly innocuous comment on Josh Petrie's nomination (which had a few upvotes), endorsing said nomination. It is no longer there.
And Byte56 is claiming to be being harassed by someone flag-spamming comments. Certainly a lot of comments have gone missing. See this post. Also he posted an image of some of the deleted comments.

If there is manual moderation being done on the comments posted to the election page, could the moderators responsible step forward and justify their actions?
If the comments have been deleted through flag-spamming, is it possible to (A) tell us if this is the case, (B) restore them, and (C) do something to stop this happening in the future?
If these comments are being deleted through some other process... what is that process?

I am strongly of the opinion that a fair election should involve a very light hand in moderating comments associated with that election.

Please note that the above commentor with the username "Byte56" is NOT the real Byte56! (See links, compare user creation dates). Please be aware that we have a problem user running around creating sock-puppet accounts, including accounts with the same name as legitimate accounts.

Aaaand [one of] his account[s] was deleted... thank goodness. What a pain in the ass.

The sock puppets have been flag spamming. There isn't an interface for mods to restore comments as far as I can see. On the election page there isn't even a mechanism to see deleted comments directly, I have to go through the users history to see them (which presupposes that I know who posted them in the first place).
I also don't think the mod tools have a way of viewing all recently deleted comments site-wide, nor a mechanism to see who flagged a comment (but if I look at the user history and see a deleted comment I think I see the person who cast the last flag to cause the system to delete it).
As far as how comments get deleted, this is all I could find on the matter: Who has the power to delete a comment?
The election page obviously doesn't have as many mod features as the rest of the site, which is unfortunate but understandable.
Thanks for mentioning that your comment got deleted, I can see the user and have suspended him.

Thanks for the details Tetrad :) Is there a process for making the SE folks aware of the issues we've been having with sock-puppets? Seems like a bug to me.

When a user is suspended it notifies the moderator staff.  But at the end of the day I think this is one of those things that doesn't really have a software fix.  SE in general has a policy of trying to avoid false positives when it comes to detecting belligerent users, preferring to rely on 0) the goodness of most users 1) the rep system 2) the users, and finally 3) the mods to try and make everything run smoothly.

Very true. Although what I should have said was - the specific exploit that's being used to flag-spam comments seems like a bug. 15-rep seems mighty low threshold to be able to get stuff deleted, certainly without any other balances, and especially stuff posted by high-rep users :\

Yes, it appears many of my comments have been deleted off several of the pages, too. It's unfortunate that users are doing such a thing.

@Tetrad: How have the sockpuppets not been IP-banned yet?

Because they can change their IP and use VPN servers.


text:
What is the suggested action for users that post comments as answers?
Most of these users are looking at our site to post a comment - which is harmless, but they usually only have one reputation. So, instead of doing this they instead end up in the review queue with a very short "answer".
How can we prevent this? To my knowledge, the 50 reputation minimum is a SE imposed limitation - but it does seem to make things a tad bit more complicated than need be. Is there a reason for this?

It is intended to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high. The SE sites try to minimize discussion, and the comment system is really only intended to get further clarification on questions / answers.
In the case of when this is done, moderators possess the ability to convert an answer to a comment. You just need to flag it when necessary, of course, it's not necessary in the case of every comment.

Downvote the answer and flag it for deletion as "not an answer." That's the best way to handle these sorts of things.


text:
2013 Moderator Election Q&A - Questionnaire
In connection with the moderator elections, we are holding a Q&A thread for the candidates. Questions collected from an earlier thread have been compiled into this one, which shall now serve as the space for the candidates to provide their answers. Due to the lack of submission count, we have selected all provided questions as well as our back up questions for a total of 10 questions.
As a candidate, your job is simple - post an answer to this question, citing each of the questions and then post your answer to each question given in that same answer. For your convenience, I will include all of the questions in quote format with a break in between each, suitable for you to insert your answers. Just copy the whole thing after the three dashes.
Once all the answers have been compiled, this will serve as a transcript for voters to view the thoughts of their candidates, and will be appropriately linked in the Election page.

One of the biggest schisms the site has is the divide between the experienced developers who are active on the site and the mass of inexperienced but enthusiastic people wanting to develop games. What is your stance on the issue, and what role, if any, do you see diamond mods as having on making sure the site remains a useful tool for getting answers to game dev questions?
How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?
How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?
In your opinion, what do moderators do?
A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?
In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?
Do you want to make this site more friendly to newcomers and beginners? If yes, how do you want to do it when these people are most likely to ask questions, that are discouraged here?
How do you compare against the other candidates?
Being a moderator will definitely take some of your time. Candidates are usually people with reputation gained by answering questions. Are you still going to take the same time to actually answer questions? Or are we losing some of the great answers because you are becoming a mod?
Aren't you afraid that you will burn out solving mundane issues that you could ignore before?

Could this post be edited to show more clearly where one question ends and the next begins?

@NicolBolas I added some numbers

Where is everyone? Why have only two potential moderator candidates answered these questions? Or is this an indicator as to who's serious about being a moderator?

The post for collecting the questions said: "Participation is completely voluntary.". I would also like to see posts from more candidates, but I suppose they're not compelled to answer.

@Byte56 There's still six days left in the final election phase - don't forget you can change your votes up until it ends. Some may still be working on their answers and intend to post soon, it's not uncommon to see a few answers added in the last few days.

@TimPost Great. I'll be interested to see what the others have to say.

It's been a busy week -- I'll post tomorrow, promise!

1: One of the biggest schisms the site has is the divide between the experienced developers who are active on the site and the mass of inexperienced but enthusiastic people wanting to develop games. What is your stance on the issue, and what role, if any, do you see diamond mods as having on making sure the site remains a useful tool for getting answers to game dev questions?

I think the inexperienced but enthusiastic people bring some of the most interesting questions. They bring up the questions that many of us take for granted. The answers given to these questions can even be informative to experienced users who just hadn't thought of other ways of doing things. I think the moderators task is to ensure these questions are within a reasonable scope and on topic. They do that by commenting, editing and closing.

2: How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?

I think that a user in that situation clearly finds value in the site, but is overzealous in their reactions. A conversation with a diamond moderator about the situation would be a great first step. If the behavior continued, and further conversations were fruitless. The next step is a temporary ban. Even if a user is contributing to the site, being hostile to other users doesn't support the kind of community we want here.

3: How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?

Talk with the other mod about it. Attempt to compromise on a version of the question that both of us can agree on. I believe the other mod would be reasonable too, and we'd come to some kind of agreement.

4: In your opinion, what do moderators do?

Moderators are here to make things run smoothly. They both guide the community and are guided by the community. Keeping the site clean by closing or migrating blatantly off topic questions and responding to user flags. Since their votes are binding, moderators take more of a background role in closures. Only for the extreme cases do moderators act first. Moderators are judges in a community that primarily police themselves, they don't have to act often, but when necessary they act impartially and with conviction.

5: A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?

I already attempt professionalism in all my questions, answers and comments. I don't have any problem with my activity being seen in the new light.

6: In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?

I frequently see spam or other blatantly off topic content sit on the site for more than a few hours. Since I'm on the site regularly throughout the day I can be more effective with moderator powers because I can respond quickly to content that doesn't belong here. I don't have any epic plans for changing the site, I just want to continue to ensure it's welcoming and helpful to beginners and professionals. Having the powers of a moderator would make me more effective in that goal.

7: Do you want to make this site more friendly to newcomers and beginners? If yes, how do you want to do it when these people are most likely to ask questions, that are discouraged here?

I think getting started questions are caused by being overwhelmed. There isn't much we can do to stop these questions being asked in the first place, but we can try to help those users by ensuring they know the resources available to them. Typically more research is the answer to these types of questions, and that's something the user will have to do on their own (we can't know what they know already, their style of learning or their end goal). A comment outlining the high level steps they should take and closing the question are sufficient in this situation. I'd make sure they know what kind of questions are on topic here, we want them to come back if they run into an issue that would generate a good question.

8: How do you compare against the other candidates?

My primary differences are how active I am on the site and my passion for teaching. I've also given a good amounr of rep in the form of bounties, this was primarily to bump a few users up to their next privledge level so they too could be participating in the managment of the site (and a few bounties for newer users that wanted new answers to old questions). Otherwise, you can learn for yourself how we compare by reading through these posts and our nomination posts :)

9: Being a moderator will definitely take some of your time. Candidates are usually people with reputation gained by answering questions. Are you still going to take the same time to actually answer questions? Or are we losing some of the great answers because you are becoming a mod?

Absolutely I'll still answer questions! I have one of the highest answer counts on the site, I'm not giving that up anytime soon. I really enjoy helping people understand the fun and power of programming and design. It's a passion I'll have even with my additional duties of being a moderator.

10: Aren't you afraid that you will burn out solving mundane issues that you could ignore before?

As the second most prolific flagger in the running (way to go Anko), I've been going for two years strong and still haven't burned out. I do care about this site and it's quality, it's not something I'd give up so easily on.

One of the biggest schisms the site has is the divide between the experienced developers who are active on the site and the mass of inexperienced but enthusiastic people wanting to develop games. What is your stance on the issue, and what role, if any, do you see diamond mods as having on making sure the site remains a useful tool for getting answers to game dev questions?

I wish that more of my fellow professional developers would openly contribute to this site, and sites like it. But I think that the reasons they don't have more to do with issues surrounding their own free time and the legal restrictions they are bound by. Any developer who has day-to-day issues concerning the Xbox One SDK won't be able to find help here because of the NDA they've signed (for example). Even developers on PC titles may worry about accidentally revealing things considered trade secrets by their employer.
I think we can do more to increase the appeal of this site for more experienced developers (professional and otherwise), but I'm not convinced there's anything that could be done on our end to encourage more professionals to visit and participate specifically.

How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?

I'm not familiar with the functionality afforded to moderators to communicate directly with members. Presuming there is some mechanism by which I can talk directly, in private, to a troublesome user, I would start there. I'd review the flagged actions and ask the user to correct the undesirable behavior. If necessary, I'd interject in the actual comments/discussions to suppress flame-wars (but I don't believe that the first response should be to delete a comment thread without warning or without public record).
However, in the long run I believe there are more users willing to contribute value to the site than want to harm it. A user who was doing too much harm to the site, and was not responsive to civil suggestions to change that behavior, is not something we need to keep around, regardless of how useful their future answers might otherwise be.

How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?

I would raise the issue in the chat or, if possible, privately, and attempt to come to an understanding as to the other moderators reasoning. "Revert wars" (or their equivalent) among moderators are uncalled for.

In your opinion, what do moderators do?

Moderators keep their fingers on the pulse of the community and act in such a way to provide agency to that community. They try to understand where the community wants the site to go and then provide guidance and support towards achieving that goal. When there is debate, they act as objective mediators (or at least respect when their objectivity has been compromised and defer to another moderator's judgement). When there is undesirable behavior, they police the site and work to correct any issues in a fair and reasonable fashion.

A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?

I don't believe in obscuring who I am or what I have done on the internet. I've comported myself in a manner that I'm proud of since I joined this community, and happily remain accountable for everything I've posted in the past.

In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?

I expect having extra visibility in to site activity will help me better understand where to focus my attention. I also hope to be able to use my binding votes and other moderator powers (sparingly) to achieve a swifter resolution to obvious spam, troll, or otherwise unpleasant activity.

Do you want to make this site more friendly to newcomers and beginners? If yes, how do you want to do it when these people are most likely to ask questions, that are discouraged here?

Yes. "Bad" questions (in the sense of questions that aren't welcome here) are almost always an opportunity to teach the asker about what a good question will look like, and thus hopefully grow them into a more productive contributor to the site. I think the majority of the population at close-vote level does an excellent job of explaining to users why they've posted a bad question and guiding them to ask better ones or to seek what answers they need elsewhere, if applicable. I would encourage more of that behavior.

How do you compare against the other candidates?

I think I differ primarily in the issues outlined in my nomination post: I'm one of the few professionals who actively contributes to the site, and I'm one of the highest-rated users here. Regardless, I don't believe the role of a moderator is to reflect his or her personal bias onto the site, but rather to gather an understanding of the community's view as a whole and act as agent for that view.

Being a moderator will definitely take some of your time. Candidates are usually people with reputation gained by answering questions. Are you still going to take the same time to actually answer questions? Or are we losing some of the great answers because you are becoming a mod?

I don't answer as many questions as others on this site, although when I do I try to put as much polish, research and depth into them as I can. But proportionally, the time I spend answering is less than the time I spend reading, processing review queues, exploring meta, and generally surveying the site. I don't feel that taking on a moderation role would negative impact the way in which I answer questions here.

Aren't you afraid that you will burn out solving mundane issues that you could ignore before?

This is a valid concern, and one that I considered before putting my name into the running. However, I ultimately decided that it would not be a problem since I've been moderating forums for years now without feeling that burn out. I expect it to be even less of an issue when there are many other skilled moderators on the team; we will be able to complement each other's occasional lapses in monitoring due to external pressures (like real-life concerns).
I am fully prepared to step down should I ever be unable to fulfill the time commitment required of moderation duties.

Nice answers Josh, you have my support.

One of the biggest schisms the site has is the divide between the experienced developers who are active on the site and the mass of inexperienced but enthusiastic people wanting to develop games. What is your stance on the issue, and what role, if any, do you see diamond mods as having on making sure the site remains a useful tool for getting answers to game dev questions?

Leaves need roots and vice versa. Experienced devs' questions are good, but so are newbies' questions. Mods prune the hedge.
All is well that is on-topic, constructive and useful.

How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?

Good answers from idiots are still good answers. Unhelpful comments from geniuses are still unhelpful comments. Anyone more helpful than unhelpful is welcome!
The rare others should be handled case-by-case, with fair warning always given, and the boot only if it's not heeded.

How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?

Talk.

In your opinion, what do moderators do?

As mentioned for the first question, I see mods as gardeners trimming the Grand Hedge of Knowledge. Another (hilariously incompatible) analogy, to reiterate: Moderator-powers should be used to keep a boat afloat, not to steer it.

A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?

I've done my best until now and will continue that way, mod or not.

In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?

Some mod tools, such as handling "needs ♦ moderator attention"-flags or closing questions with a single vote can't be done by 10k "mini-mod" users.
I've flagged a lot of stuff (a lot) and I know moderator-level problems when I see them.

Do you want to make this site more friendly to newcomers and beginners? If yes, how do you want to do it when these people are most likely to ask questions, that are discouraged here?

Yes, but quality content always takes priority. I am against off-topic, unconstructive or "debug mai codez plz"-posts from any user regardless of how new or experienced they are.
The most important thing is for the reasons for question closure or deletion or anything else really to be explained to anyone (newcomer or not) who wants to understand. That's what StackExchange is about after all!

How do you compare against the other candidates?

I draw more and write less.

Being a moderator will definitely take some of your time. Candidates are usually people with reputation gained by answering questions. Are you still going to take the same time to actually answer questions? Or are we losing some of the great answers because you are becoming a mod?

Think of it this way: Both people writing answers (making more useful information) and people moderating (making more information useful) are needed. The reason we're having this election is because someone wise concluded we could use more of the latter. I answer the call.

Aren't you afraid that you will burn out solving mundane issues that you could ignore before?

Nah. How do you think I flagged those 590 posts? :)

A whole 7 minutes before my self-imposed deadline! :D

One of the biggest schisms the site has is the divide between the experienced developers who are active on the site and the mass of inexperienced but enthusiastic people wanting to develop games. What is your stance on the issue, and what role, if any, do you see diamond mods as having on making sure the site remains a useful tool for getting answers to game dev questions?

For me, the site is only useful if random people can Google-search for questions, get directed here, and find answers quickly. Sure, it's great if one person gets their question answered. But the whole point of an SE site is to become a repository of useful questions-with-answers. This means that the diamond folks need to help keep the site on topic, lest it degenerate into a what you would get with a poorly-moderated forum.

How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?

Keep informing them through comments that their style of comment-interaction should be "toned down". If they continue causing trouble, I would use whatever tools I have in increasing order of restrictiveness to pull them into line.

How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?

I would discuss it with them and try to understand why they did it. If I continue to disagree, it would then depend upon the consensus among the other mods.

In your opinion, what do moderators do?

They keep the site on topic. As a crowd-sourced system, SE sites need tending to stay on track. Without tending, they will tend to drift off topic and/or become more like forums.

A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?

I'm used to being careful with my words as I represent both a corporation and an alliance in EVE-Online. I don't think there is anything in my past here that I need to be ashamed of, and I don't foresee my style of interaction changing much were I to become a mod.

In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?

I want to contribute to making this a better place from a management perspective, and getting that much rep will take me a very long time.

Do you want to make this site more friendly to newcomers and beginners? If yes, how do you want to do it when these people are most likely to ask questions, that are discouraged here?

I think the most important thing is to make it easier to understand how the site is supposed to work. Without new users, the site will die. But without training those users on how the site should function, it will degenerate quickly. We have to strike a balance in that regard.

How do you compare against the other candidates?

I have less rep, but I have the right attitude and take the site seriously enough to make a good moderator.

Being a moderator will definitely take some of your time. Candidates are usually people with reputation gained by answering questions. Are you still going to take the same time to actually answer questions? Or are we losing some of the great answers because you are becoming a mod?

I do not have a load of answers on the site, as I only answer questions I can with authority. I will still browse for questions that I can answer well.

Aren't you afraid that you will burn out solving mundane issues that you could ignore before?

As a professional programmer, I deal with mundane issues all the time. :)

1: One of the biggest schisms the site has is the divide between the experienced developers who are active on the site and the mass of inexperienced but enthusiastic people wanting to develop games. What is your stance on the issue, and what role, if any, do you see diamond mods as having on making sure the site remains a useful tool for getting answers to game dev questions?

So-called ``noob'' questions should be answered but relegated to fixed set of questions.
Questions can't be closed because they are "too basic".  At the same time we don't want endless discussion on "getting started".  Having a canonical answer to "getting started", and always linking there every time a new question like that opens, can't really hurt.
So I see a need to keep the site fairly 1337 in terms of most of the questions, but I still think "noob" questions should be answered or linked to another question that already has an answer.

2: How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?

You have to review the flags objectively.  If the flagging is flagrant, then decline.

3: How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?

Vote to re-open.

4: In your opinion, what do moderators do?

They basically have a big mallet they use to close or delete things.

5: A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?

The diamond more says to me "oh, he thinks he's important." (sorry mods).

6: In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?

It won't.

7: Do you want to make this site more friendly to newcomers and beginners? If yes, how do you want to do it when these people are most likely to ask questions, that are discouraged here?

Not really.  I don't really care one way or another.  I just like things organized.  If newbies will continue to come, you can beat them back with a big stick.  Or you can redirect them.

8: How do you compare against the other candidates?

Well, I'm Galvatron, so like,

9: Being a moderator will definitely take some of your time. Candidates are usually people with reputation gained by answering questions. Are you still going to take the same time to actually answer questions? Or are we losing some of the great answers because you are becoming a mod?

No. I'm not going to spend extra time on moderator duty.

10: Aren't you afraid that you will burn out solving mundane issues that you could ignore before?

I will not spend extra time on mundane issues -- I see it as a privilege to make decisions on what to accept or reject in the community.  If "modding" takes too much time from a single person, then you simply need more mods.
The group of mods should act like a sort of hivemind.


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Users with less than 150 rep getting the Constituent badge? Voting?
Uh... how? Shouldn't people with less than 150 rep be unable to vote? But they appear on the Constituent list.
Waiting to hear whether these are votes - or if they're only getting the badge without voting.
A few of these were our sock-puppety friend - and they've been cleaned up. But still.

Hmm, I think I have more than 21 rep :) I guess Byte56 is a common name.

Those users had more than 150 reputation at some point, and lost it again when some of their posts where removed. That is the reason they were able to vote.

Beat me to it. That's it exactly. Many of these were around the ~300 level prior to deleting their positively scored posts over time. It's tedious, but I'm going through it now.

Makes sense. To be fair: They appeared from the outside to have naturally low rep - because the evidence of them ever having been upvoted was removed.

@TimPost Do their votes get removed when they drop below 150 rep after voting?

@NathanReed No, but account removal does remove them (which is what I did).


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Can we have MathJax on gamedev.SE?
Other sites like math.SE, physics.SE and chemistry.SE already have it.  We get enough questions about math that it would come in handy here as well, though probably not as often as on those sites.
For example, here's an answer where I would've liked to use a math formula if possible.  I wrote pseudocode instead, which I think is what a lot of people probably do in cases like this.
I guess it could be argued that since we're (mostly) coders here, pseudocode is an appropriate form of expression of formulas.  I for one would like to have the option of actual math notation, though.

This would be very cool and very useful.

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

Ahh, I did a search for "MathJax" and that didn't come up.  But anyway, same issue as with my other meta question: that post was over 2 years ago, and the discussion just petered out without any action being taken or a decision being made.  How can we get this issue in front of someone who actually has the power to make it happen (or, for that matter, to say no - although that would be very disappointing)?

Out of the several times I've found this to have popped up, there isn't an actual compelling reason against MathJax. It would certainly make a notable number of things clearer. It's pretty frustrating to read opposing positions that seem to be founded in fear or ignorance of mathematics; especially since it wouldn't be forced on anyone.

Nicely formatted math does look nice.
However, do we really need it?
Stackoverflow.com doesn't have it because ("it is an extremely heavy dependency.").  I presume Jeff meant in terms of page load/page render (the math renders a second or two after the initial page load).
Anyway, the majority of questions and answers are about games and game development, not "neato math tricks."
Joe's comment here says it better than I have here, I'll repeat it:

I'm not against it, but I also feel like if a question requires that much math in its answer, it's probably more suited for math.se, not here. Math here needs to be translated into readable code eventually anyway, so I'd encourage code-like answers rather than math answers.

Outside of the occassional exponent or subscript (for which we can use HTML), do we really need 1st class presentation of other mathematical constructs?  I would vote that we don't need them at the moment.

I can't understand how MathJax is an "extremely heavy dependency".  I have it on my personal site; it required adding about 2 lines to the head section of the page.  Also, that answer of Jeff's is 3 years old, so it may well be out of date.

Also, the tone of your answer seems to suggest you look on math notation as somehow unnecessary ("neato math tricks", "showing off"). I don't know why that may be, but I'd argue for looking at math notation as simply a concise language for people with a math background to communicate with each other more effectively.  It's no different to using jargon in any other field.  We don't stop to explain what a "pixel shader" is in English every time we mention it on this site, and nor should we shy away from math notation where it's appropriate to use it.

I've spent quite a lot of time translating mathematese into working code.  Mathematese is not the preferred syntax to communicate algorithms.  Pseudocode is.

"I've spent quite a lot of time translating mathematese into working code. Mathematese is not the preferred syntax to communicate algorithms. Pseudocode is." GDSE is not purely a programming site. Graphics work can be game-dev specific, and graphics work is, at its foundations, math. And communicating a mathematical algorithm is not something pseudo-code is useful at. Showing how to construct parts of a matrix in pseudo-code is far less effective than, for example, this.

@NathanReed: "I can't understand how MathJax is an "extremely heavy dependency". I have it on my personal site; it required adding about 2 lines to the head section of the page." It is extremely heavy. Unless you honestly believe that those two lines simply tap into the latent ability of all web-browsers to translate LaTeX formatting into math equations. The MathJax Javascript code that must be compiled and used every time someone loads your HTML is gigantic. It is a non-trivial dependency, no matter how easy it is to include.

@NicolBolas It's nowhere near as bad as you say.  Yes, there is potentially a large amount of Javascript involved, but MathJax loads components only when needed, so pages that don't contain equations incur negligible cost.  Moreover it doesn't start rendering the math until the rest of the page has been loaded, so the presence of math doesn't prevent you starting to read the page while the math fills in.

Mathematese obscures meaning.  Case in point, a definition of a convex polygon from a game dev book.  I'm not discouraging the use of pretty matrices, I'm discouraging the use of that type of language. Although most people won't write in mathematese, there's always the person that will describe a line from P to Q as "the set of points (1 − t )P + t Q for t ∈ [0, 1]"

@bobobobo: And yet, the fact that SE's comment system doesn't have MathJax support did not prevent you from writing "the set of points (1 − t )P + t Q for t ∈ [0, 1]". People are going to write what they want to write. The fact that some people can incorrectly use a tool does not mean that people who can use that tool appropriately should be denied it's use. If someone's going to obfuscate their text, they can do it just as well without MathJax as with it.

How about some box drawing characters.


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No color change when code snippets used inside links
I enjoy using backticks to format names of code symbols, like gluPerspective, in monospace font even in the flow of normal text.  I also enjoy linking the names of such functions to some documentation about them, like gluPerspective.  Unfortunately, when I do both at once, the result doesn't change color and therefore doesn't look like a link: gluPerspective.  (If you mouse over it, it'll get an underline, but if you didn't happen to mouse over it, there's no way to tell it's a link.)
On Stack Overflow this problem doesn't happen. See for example the first paragraph of this question, where the link is in monospace font but also colored like any other link.
Can we fix our CSS here so that links show up properly in the monospace font?

Okay...but that question was opened months ago and there is no sign of any actual action having been taken in response.  How do we bring this to the attention of whoever has the ability to fix it?

I have no idea; I upvoted both.

I've just noticed that this has apparently been fixed recently.  See this answer for example, where code in links shows up underlined.


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Why are people so eager to close questions as duplicates?
Why are people so eager to close questions as duplicates? I can give only two examples and only because I answered the questions, so I believe there must be a lot of such duplicates, but in what universe are the linked duplicate questions really duplicates?

Betatesting an android game. Best practices?
Is it possible to design Android game(AndEngine) levels using XML?

Sometimes I have a feeling that somebody who doesn't understand the question but read something similar will just post the link and hit flag...
And just as related reading, this blog entry.

My two cents - the first question does not appear to be a duplicate to me since one is around bypassing the market place so that the testers can play the game and the other (closed) question to me appears to be about services for getting users (Betalize.com is "WORLD'S MARKETPLACE TO FIND BETA TESTERS"). The Android question needs improvement but isn't necessarily a duplicate either. The reason I feel this way is because AndEngine, as shown by the answer posted, has its own set of answers that aren't specific to Android. Where would these AndEngine specific answers go?

Possible 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

@Byte56 Hahahaha, that made my morning. But that question should be closed as "Too Localized" as it clearly states "The moderation lately has been getting harsh"

@sm4 Heh, yeah I thought you might enjoy that. Though, this question could fall under the same "too localized" category since it doesn't have much evidence supporting it as a trend.

Also [tag:rant] is a meta tag and should be obliterated.

@Tetrad All meta posts are rants ;)

The general criterion I would think is this:
Does having this question remain open add anything that's not already covered by the other question?
It's possible to have countless minor variations on essentially the same question, and arguments could be made that they are in fact different questions, but are they really?  If the original question contains information in it's answers that also answers the new question, then - IMO - it's a clear case of "close as duplicate".
The point I'm making here is that if question A was "what's 2+2?" and question B was "what's 2+3?", yes they are different questions which do have different answers, but if question A was answered in a way that explained how addition worked, then question B is clearly a duplicate.
This all depends on perspective.  For me, close as duplicate is not a slap-down and it's not harsh moderation.  It's actually something very different to those - it's actually a valid way of providing an answer to a question.  So when I vote to close as duplicate, I'm most definitely not saying "you stupid person, that's been asked before, ha ha"; what I am saying is "here, read this other question, it contains the answer you're looking for".
So although it might not seem so on the surface, closing as a duplicate is really just another tool to help someone find the answer they want.  That's a key distinction, and maybe it needs to come across more clearly in the stock text used for closing duplicates.

Closing questions as duplicates also allows more people to vote on the original question and answers, or submit different answers, or edit the questions or answers.  A process of gradual refinement.

Plus it keeps the info in one place rather than scattered around the site in many different questions.

WHat you are saying would work better, if you were to just post the link there. "Here, someone already answered that".

My two cents are that both of those example questions are really broad and asking for discussion points.  People don't like the question so they'd prefer to close it.  But they also see that some smaller aspect of the question has been answered by somewhere else, so they close the question as a dupe because they feel it's better than saying "not constructive".
The first question is a good question but a bit on the broad side. In particular, asking for "is there a good platform to do this" is begging for a list of links which doesn't make for a good answer.   Even though the title of the "duplicate" question doesn't really match the question in the one you're pointing out, if you read it the guy is asking for the same thing, namely " I would like to release a partially complete, unpolished game on my website so people can try it out and give me feedback."  Which makes it a dupe in spirit at least.
The second question doesn't pass the "what have you tried" smell test.  So I think it's also too broad. "Give some link or example so that i can understand easily..." just shows lack of research/understanding on the issues.  Also it seems like one could easily copy/paste the answer from the linked duplicate question and it would still work.

First question: "I would like to release a partially complete, unpolished game on my website so people can try it out and give me feedback." - I don't agree that this is what the asker is looking for. Second question: what about answers that aren't specific to Android since the asker has (poorly) called out AndEngine. Where would those answers go?

Tetrad, you answers always have a perfect form. That confuses me :) And my form will never be as good, but I will try:

First question is too broad, how else would you ask if you want to know, where/how to get beta testers? (this is a hint that the question should have been edited and not closed).

well, that is AndEngine, a lot of young programmers, not enough good sources. I knew the answer because I went through the one specific tutorial, where it is used.

To add to that, because its "broad" isn't a reason to close as duplicate because another question kind of sort of not really touches on the same question. Close it for its real reason if the "duplicate" answer doesn't actually answer the question.

@sm4 My comment on the second question leads to: Do we want young and inexperienced programmers here? How do we teach them to ask good questions?

@ToddersLegrande what would you say the first question is asking for?  How to find testers?  If so, then it's kind of a dupe of this question: http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/957/finding-testers  As for the second, the person called out AndEngine since that's what they're using.  If somebody else has a question about how to store level data then they're free to ask that.  Specificity isn't necessarily a bad thing in questions.

And to be clear, I don't necessarily agree with the idea of closing a "bad" question as a dupe.  Close it as a bad question or edit it to be a good question and leave comments saying "you might find relevant stuff here".

@sm4 That's the million dollar question now isn't it.  http://meta.gamedev.stackexchange.com/a/1170/51


text:
Proposal to remove the reputation barrier on chatting in user created chat rooms
As per usual, a few of us were in the chatroom talking about code dump questions, subjective questions, localized questions, and other general off topic questions trying to figure out what to do with them because some of us REALLY WANT TO HELP but the question is inappropriate for the site so we end up in a moral grey area in trying to figure out how to handle it.
One way we have started helping people who ask bad questions is by encouraging these users to join the chat so we can have a discussion on their question or problem. As I touched on a previous meta question (I really want to get people into the chat as you can tell) a lot of times these bad questions are from new users without the reputation to chat though.
As I and a few other users were once again talking about this problem in the chat room we came up with the idea that user created chat rooms could be used for this purpose.
In an ideal future scenario, you could keep the scope of a room to a single question and the room could be removed after a certain amount of inactivity so that it doesn't get too cluttered. In the ideal future, there would be a button on a question that you could click to create a chat room that would automatically grant the OP access to chat in the room and there would be a very obvious notification in his site inbox and on the question itself that the question has been promoted to chat, or something like that. I think a notification of a new chat room in the main site chat room would also be useful, much like the meta question notifications that show up nice and big right in the chat area.
In a more realistic, near future thinking world - this could be as simple as letting anyone join user created rooms. Someone with high enough reputation already has the ability to create chat rooms so there is a limit/barrier as to who can do this. This high rep user would create the room, probably as a gallery to prevent bots from coming in and spamming (I assume this is why there is a low rep barrier) and leave a comment on the soon to be closed question inviting the OP to chat with a link.
Getting these users into chat to talk out their (inappropriate for the site) game dev related questions and problems should result in the users having a better understanding as to why their question is inappropriate for the site, because I'm sure it would come up in the chat conversation, and get them coming back for help in the real chat when they have enough rep for off topic questions, and on the QA portion of the site for on topic questions which is an improvement in community as well as site question and answer quality... hopefully.

Thinking about this, I think the only user created room the OP should be able to enter is the one created for them. Otherwise anytime anyone creates a room to talk about something, the spammers can auto jump in. Likely not be too much of a problem, but it might be prudent to include that restriction.

Would an invite mechanism be a possible way of working around this?  I.e. don't remove the barrier (it serves a useful purpose in dealing with spammers) but allow explicitly invited people who are below the required rep to participate?  It may also help to encourage them into the chat as well.

@mh01 That's what this question is about. Though, there doesn't appear to be action on that front, so we were discussing alternatives to help bring the issue into view again.

Actually I just found this: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/99491/newbie-doesnt-have-enough-reputation-to-talk-in-chat?lq=1 It appears mods can already do this in essence. Create a room and give a user explicit write access.

I just checked, I have access to give a user explicit write access to a chat room. I'm totally going to start using that.

@Byte56 So the barrier can be lifted for each individual. But only if you have 10k+ rep or you are a mod, right?

@sm4 I'm not sure what the lower limit is. I know it's available to me, but I don't know when it started being available. I can allow any user write access to a room, regardless of their reputation. I have the following options under info->access: http://i.imgur.com/Ajm33Al.png

@Byte56 The question you linked says anyone with 100 rep can do that in their own room. But 10k rep gives you priviledge to use mod tools. Can you do this in any room or just in the one you created?

Interesting find. Who knew. I imagine its the "owner" of a room that can do it. I know Josh was promoted to be a room owner a while back... maybe that's why? I wonder what it would take to get more chat room owners for the main chat... though I suppose user created rooms is enough.

@sm4 Only on rooms where I am the owner.

You own any room you create.

Correct. Also, Josh could likely give people access to the main chat since he's an owner of that room too.

We have successfully tested the method I described in my comments. The steps are:

Ask the new user to create an account for http://chat.stackexchange.com/
Create a new chat room for the issue you want to talk with the new user about
Add the user to the Explicit Write Access list (see image below).
Give the user a link to the chat room to join in and talk

You should be able to use their user profile URL to have SE automatically find their chat user account. If you add them using their profile URL and no user is added, it means they haven't created a chat account. Their user ID on gamedev is not the same user ID as their chat account.
Requirement for using this method:
Once the chat is finished, try to get a useful question and answer out of it and post it to the main site. These chat sessions are not in a format that's useful to anyone searching for a similar issue in the future. While it's a good thing to help a new user, it's also important that we're not spending all our time doing that in chat, since it doesn't help the next new user.


text:
2013 Moderator Election Results
Game Development's second moderator election has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the new moderators are:

They'll be joining the existing crew shortly — please thank them for volunteering, and share your assistance and advice as they learn the ropes!
For details on how the voting played out, you can download the election results here, or view a summary report online.

Congratulations! I'm sure you both will do excellent.

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


text:
Code dumps/too localized
So I came across these questions (https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/58168/java-animation-memory-overload + https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/58167/animation-color) and I don't see how the close options cover too localized situations or code dumps.
duplicate

Too localized to be a duplicate.
off-topic

Probably would be better on SO than here but either way I want to close it not get it migrated to a place that would instantly close it.
unclear what you're asking

It is obvious what is being asked.
too broad

This is exactly what the question isn't
primarily opinion-based

Nope there is a single absolule answer.
So I know people were not a fan of Too Localized but it seems to fit perfectly here. But anyways my question is with the current close options which ones are best suited to code dumps? The changes seemed to focus around better feedback to the user about closures so it seems odd that telling them "we're not here to debug your code" by saying its off topic.

Off topic includes subcategories that can be optionally specified.  http://meta.gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/1179/off-topic-variations

@Tetrad In other words the transition to the new system isn't over and the close options are going to change? Anyways I don't like how things not related to being off topic are going to be under off topic. The point of all of the changes seem to be better feedback and stashing "pls debug my code" under off topic kinda goes against that.

Off topic means "outside the scope of the site".  Custom options can say whatever we want, which could include "code dumps are not welcome" or whatever.

@Tetrad However you said that there is only room for three options and "too localized" is not among your suggestions or the current list. I would really like to have what Seth suggested

Does GameDev have "Off-Topic" -> "Questions must demonstrate a minimal understanding of the problem being solved. Tell us what you've tried to do, why it didn't work, and how it should work."?  If not perhaps it should as this exactly describes both of these questions and includes advice on how they need improving (tell us what you tried)

Agreed; GD is a site where this is appropriate; see http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/184154/closing-changes-on-hold-unclear-too-broad-opinion-based-off-topic-reasons ("Today, TL is used helpfully on code dump questions on SO, but the new OT reasons are where this is now correctly addressed.").

Observation:  Today, code-dump questions are being closed as "Too broad" where previously we were closing them as "Too localised".  As I type this, there are four code-dump questions in the review queue.  Each of these have attracted several "Too broad" votes, and no other votes.
I guess the mental logic behind voting code-dump as too broad goes something like this:  "you're not focusing down onto a specific question, you're just throwing code at us".  And that makes sense to me.  But that's not what the "Too broad" close-reason shows to a user whose question has been closed;  that notification says:
"There are either too many possible answers, or good answers would be too long for this format. Please add details to narrow the answer set or to isolate an issue that can be answered in a few paragraphs."
That's got to be confusing to a user who's just trying to solve a problem they're having;  it doesn't explain what's actually wrong with their question or what they need to do to make a better question that will actually get an answer.  We don't actually want them to add details -- we want them to diagnose their problem to the point where they have an actual question, not merely a cry of befuddlement at their specific code.
Personally, I'd be much happier with an OT reason explicitly for code-dump questions, as they do make up a pretty sizable chunk of our questions which get closed.

+1 For a specific off-topic close reason for those questions. The notification could be along the lines of: "Large chunks of code without a definite question are hard to answer by anyone else than yourself. You should try to use a debugger or simple print statements to trace your variables. Please try spotting your issue more precisely and editing your post to formulate an actual question."


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How to flag for moving to blender.stackexchange.com
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/58184/blender-to-collada-to-assimp-rigid-non-skinned-animation
I wanted to flag this as off-topic for migration to another site but the only option is to move it to meta.gamedev.stackexchange.com.  I flagged it as "other" instead, but it seems like more options (at least the common ones) should be displayed in that list of sites to suggest migration to.

Moderators can move to any site.  If you'd like to make a suggestion for a moderator to move to that, just use the regular "flag for moderator attention" feature.

Still, it seems silly that I can't just mark which site to move to (for the moderator's convenience if anything else) but rather have to type in the suggested destination site or leave it up to the moderate to figure it out.

Blender.SE is just getting off the ground; it's much more useful if you send folks over to ask their own questions, since that gives them an opportunity to look around, read the docs if they want, etc... Just shipping questions over can create a lot of unpleasant effort for a younger site, especially in cases where the asker doesn't immediately follow to clarify if there are questions on the question. @Sean

Fair enough.  I still think going forward it'd be a nice feature, but maybe not critical.

I had the same problem when trying to move question from Stackoverflow here. GD is not in the list of on-topic sites when you select off-topic.