Whats up with Gamedev.net

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Original post by HAM Looking at the articles and features there hasnt been too many technical submissions in the last couple years. Most are more than three or four years old. Why is this? I suppose this is a bit more wide spread then just Gamedev.net: Nehe Productions have been very slow producing new content, Gamasutra is just about entirely Industry news now, Flipcode crashed and burned. Anyone have any suggestions for the cuase of this? Anyone have any suggestion for an alternative resource to Gamedev.net with modern upto date technical articles? Thanks, HAm

The current problem with GDNet is that it's being run completely bad. The senior staff isn't actively running the site, and the other staff are 'fighting' over new features to be added and such.

Then we still have the server problems(500.13). GDNet needs a huge re-organization, or it might end up going out of business.

Re-organization means changing the staff and mods(And kick a few out), get someone to check up the DB server to solve the issues, get more people to post content such as articles and expand the site(Or rewrite it).

Toolmaker

We definitely need more quality articles. After my frustrating experience with the lack of documentation on the more advanced Xerces features, I feel inspired to write an article! I'm sure the feeling will pass soon enough though.

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Original post by HAM Looking at the articles and features there hasnt been too many technical submissions in the last couple years. Most are more than three or four years old. Why is this?

That's because not you nor I have been capable of taking a few minutes and write some tutorial on stuff we know. If you have read the articles you may have come across some stuff that's far from being expert advice and yet be very useful.

I call for a new site feature: A user-wiki in which gamedev users can annonunce and write their own articles for the community.

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Original post by owl I call for a new site feature: A user-wiki in which gamedev users can annonunce and write their own articles for the community.

I think that's a good idea.

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Original post by LessBread Quote: Original post by owl I call for a new site feature: A user-wiki in which gamedev users can annonunce and write their own articles for the community. I think that's a good idea.

I totally agree. After so many times I see a question ("How do I find game servers on my LAN?"), I stop answering it. A well-organized wiki of user-written articles could go a long way around here.

I completely agree with the idea of a wiki.

Funny thing... I find that alot of the new "articles" are now in the Journals.

That's funny because, when I was still the Dictionary Administrator Excellentė, I wrote a GDNet proposal for a wiki-style solution that would also integrate with the forums to enable [[Wiki Tags]] in posts. Both the articles and GDNet dictionary would have been combined into this wiki. I even said I'd do it all myself.

...

This was 2 years ago. Back then when I was Dictionary Administrator, I would have had all the time (and ability, of course) to do this for GDNet. Nobody ever gave me the go-ahead. I wrote the proposal, talked to Kevin and Dave. Turnes out, nobody cared about anything on this site. Thus, I quit.

GDNet would have already had a freaking wiki by now.

There's already a Game Programming Wiki.

Haha, I was just about to mention the Game Programming Wiki

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Original post by Alpha_ProgDes Funny thing... I find that alot of the new "articles" are now in the Journals.

Seconded, the journals are a mine of useful information. And because they're mostly written by people as they're working on their own games they tend to have lots of practical notes from real-world usage that you don't usually get in articles.

Other than that I don't think I've read a good article on GameDev for quite some time. NeHe seems to be firmly stalled due to Second System Effect. And the showcase is still ridiculously limited, even after multiple suggestions and complaints, and doesn't seem to have been touched since it was first setup.

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Original post by Toolmaker The current problem with GDNet is that it's being run completely bad. The senior staff isn't actively running the site, and the other staff are 'fighting' over new features to be added and such. Then we still have the server problems(500.13). GDNet needs a huge re-organization, or it might end up going out of business. Re-organization means changing the staff and mods(And kick a few out), get someone to check up the DB server to solve the issues, get more people to post content such as articles and expand the site(Or rewrite it). Toolmaker

Agreed. And the 'For Beginners' page has been in need of a complete rewrite for the past 5 or 6 years. Not only does it recommend C/C++ as beginner language, but it also has tutorials on DirectX5!

The articles page is not only bloated with distractions, the one sentence descriptions for most of the articles isn't very helpful. And I do not much appreciate the lack of theme support (I use the classic theme). I think a great redesign of GDNet would include integrating the tutorials and articles into the forum.

And.. for the love of all that is good, please get rid of that fucking &#106avascript navigation bar. It is cumbersome, buggy (it does not stay up when I right click to open a new tab), and I'm sure web enthusiasts would agree it is bad web design. Several of the links in the menu are useless anyways -- when I want to get a definition or review, I goto Google&|Wikipedia. And considering the lack of content activity on this website (and the need of activity elsewhere), said links were a horrible idea to begin with.<br/><br/>Thus (and coinciding with Toolmaker), the website is being run completely bad<br/><br/><!--EDIT--><span class="editedby"><!--/EDIT-->[Edited by - Thevenin on January 26, 2007 7:08:35 PM]<!--EDIT--></span><!--/EDIT-->

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Original post by Toolmaker The current problem with GDNet is that it's being run completely bad. The senior staff isn't actively running the site, and the other staff are 'fighting' over new features to be added and such. Then we still have the server problems(500.13). GDNet needs a huge re-organization, or it might end up going out of business. Re-organization means changing the staff and mods(And kick a few out), get someone to check up the DB server to solve the issues, get more people to post content such as articles and expand the site(Or rewrite it).

The "huge re-organization" already happened two months ago. As you can tell, since nothing miraculous has really happened since then, we all have a lot of work on our hands. We're still trying to figure out the best way to approach handling a LOT of issues I'm not even at liberty to speak about. I'm not even going to try to hide the fact that GDNet is going through a lot of turmoil right now - it's going to take some time for the waters to smooth out again. We're trying to knock things off the ToDo list as fast as possible and set a lot of things straight. The trouble lies in our limited pool of volunteer/part-timers finding time to maintain what we already have as well as work on improvements that are much needed. It's either deal with what we have now and wait for it to improve (which it will now that I have a lot to say about it) or let us shut down this site entirely and re-launch in like, a year. No joke.

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Original post by HAM Looking at the articles and features there hasnt been too many technical submissions in the last couple years. Most are more than three or four years old. Why is this?

This is because everyone who ever wanted to publish an article with us got completely turned off when they submitted their article into the Black Hole that was our publishing system at the time. Now I've been handling all article requests directly until our new system is up and running. I've been talking with a lot of people interested in contributing things, and I hope to gather up more at GDC this year.

Ok look,

Firstly the site is based on volunteers and so expecting others to spend time and contribute content to the site for free when you yourself don't contribute to the content or running of the site is just damn rude. I'm targetting that statement at those who are no subscribing to GDNet+.

I agree that of late there hasn't been much activity on the articles front but it has already been pointed out that there are alot of good posts in the journals.

Secondly, alot of the early content is still very relevant. Yes there is alot of old stuff in there and it would be good if that could be archived into a legacy section or something.

Thirdly, i agree that the showcase is weak. The problem here is that if we are not to have a very simple showcase, we end up leaning towards a SourceForge style solution. Getting this up and running is a big job and it cant be expected to arrive any time soon because of my first point.

Fourthly, in regards to the wiki suggestion, i think it would be nice to archive threads that are of supreme quality.

Fifthly, I also think that we have too many mods and staff, one look at the forum listing shows you this. There are some mods who are very inactive. I think a tighter group of senior staff/administrators is needed to move the site forward. It seems to be a case of too many cooks at the moment.

Sixthly, i also don't like the &#106avascript menu. There is so little on it that it becomes a bit pointless and i just use bookmarks anyways.<br/><br/>I don't want to see this site die. It is one of the largest sources of programming infomation on the web, one of the most active programming forums also.<br/><br/>Dave

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Original post by Dave I agree that of late there hasn't been much activity on the articles front but it has already been pointed out that there are alot of good posts in the journals.

But they simply aren't accessible. You have to browse for people who write quality journal entries vs those who write about how bad their day has been. Something along the lines of featured journals might be a nice addition that would bring some attention to journals that deserve it. Maybe provide some of the excellent journal posters with a more public (as in more visible) journal exclusively for programming or technical posts. I think a lot of people could benefit if there was a Ysaneya's corner that was semi-permanently linked from the forums or a side bar somewhere.

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Original post by Dave Thirdly, i agree that the showcase is weak. The problem here is that if we are not to have a very simple showcase, we end up leaning towards a SourceForge style solution. Getting this up and running is a big job and it cant be expected to arrive any time soon because of my first point.

IMHO the problem with the showcase isn't that it's simple, it's (as I've posted numerous times to CSI) that it assumes far too much and plays the "mummy knows best" approach all time time. For instance, if you don't/can't submit your game as a single, <50Mb .zip file then you can't use the showcase at all. The entry won't even show up (click my showcase button for a perfect example).

The fixes for this are pretty simple (eg. allow the user to specify an url of their own rather than forcing them to link to a file in the GDNet+ webspace) but the answer is always "too busy doing critical forum maintanance, try back next month/year".

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Original post by Dave Fifthly, I also think that we have too many mods and staff, one look at the forum listing shows you this. There are some mods who are very inactive. I think a tighter group of senior staff/administrators is needed to move the site forward. It seems to be a case of too many cooks at the moment.

You say that, but most of us stick to our areas and look after them, we don't have any say as to what goes on in the Big Picture of the site, that is indeed left to a small group of mods. and staff. However even they have limited time to do these things and 'streamlining' would just end up increasing their work load even further; bad plan.

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Original post by Alpha_ProgDes Funny thing... I find that alot of the new "articles" are now in the Journals.

True dat!

Er... yeah.

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Original post by Alpha_ProgDes Funny thing... I find that alot of the new "articles" are now in the Journals.

The journals really are a wealth of information, and since most entries are written about existing projects, you can be sure the techniques discussed at least somewhat work, under some context or other.