GameDev.net Staff Journal

Article Updates.. And Search Can Be Challenging

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 18:11:00 +0000

First off I am utterly blown away by how the community is coming together to start posting articles.   One of my biggest hopes for this approach is that we can really start exposing the very best articles available on the internet in one place.   At the end of the day learning is the most important thing for all of us.. and while stackoverflow is great for short answers, there isnt' really a good research counterpart for game developers.

This idea reflects a certain reality that at the end of the day people are going to write about what interests them, and a clinical treatment of a topic with rigid constraints isn't necessarily all that appealing. So my challenge instead is to automate the connection-building between articles.. which given the state of information retrieval is certainly doable without having to invent any new IR algorithms.

The ultimate goal is to really start scouring the Internet for game development resources so commonly scattered across blogs in varying formats and reproduce them in a common article format for everyone to freely use. If we are able to expose all the connections between articles it should make for a nice information archive with some permanence.. unlike some articles that just drop off the net once they close up their wordpress account.

My first tests have involved using Apache Solr to create an article index.   Out of the box it's turned out to be quite versatile for this purpose.   Over the past few days I did go about getting a little crazy though.. extracting all the document term vectors from the Solr Lucene index and running a cosine similarity check against them exhaustively.   I had to write a job that would utilize Amazon's Elastic MapReduce service and turn a problem that was going to take roughly a week to process down to one that would take roughly six hours.

The funny thing is, after doing all that I ended up discovering a feature in Solr that when turned on would meet about 75% of my immediate needs.   The next challenge is going to be finding a way to build document clusters.

The approach I'm currently shooting for may involve the community training some sort of learning machine to have an ideal model of articles for a particular subject and then it would work to classify other articles that match up closely.   That way if you create a class of documents called "Component Entity Systems" then you would hopefully be able to find all articles that match up.

At the end of the day single well-organized lists of articles can still be very useful if they are well-organized.   That is challenging to do automatically..

In my ideal world, as you use the site the site would begin to morph to show you more stuff that matches up with your tastes.   Apache Mahout exposes something like that.. but I haven't experimented with it too much yet.

What I'm up to

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 14:40:00 +0000

Forgive the lateness of my reply

Actually, I'm here to give y'all an update as to what I'm doing regarding gamedev lately. Since the release of the Gamedev Collection series (still available at Amazon, go get them now), I have been doing very little (and by that I mean no) billable work for Gamedev. I was getting pretty burned out by reviewing "version 2.3.00001 of WhateverSoft's latest entry, now with antialiasing", so I decided to just stick with unbilled short-form book reviews. So I'd write just enough book review to be justified by the value of the book. Which means I'd get new books now and then, and Gamedev would get a modicum of free content.

Here's the latest if you haven't noticed (and if our hit-count is any indication, you haven't)

http://www.gamedev.net/page/books/index.html/_/creative/visual-arts-3/blender-master-class-a-hands-on-guide-to-modeling-sculpting-materials-and-rendering-r1469

In the next few weeks, I'll probably start posting these reviews as featured articles rather than featured books in the book section. They'll still be short and funded by the book itself. Book publishers get a plug. Gamedev gets a short article they don't have to pay for. I get a shiny new book. Everybody gets a very small something, and it doesn't take up much of anyone's time so I can get back to more rewarding pursuits like "actually developing games".

Oh, and we're now posting some articles from the Gamedev.net collection books if you don't have the series.

http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/graphics-programming-and-theory/dynamic-2d-soft-shadows-r3065

Reputation Breakdown

Mon, 21 May 2012 11:32:00 +0000

In my last post you got a chance to Read about some major changes to our site reputation system in the works .   This post will discuss some of the preliminary point breakdowns.

Your goal hopefully is the same as our goal:  use this special place that we developers have here to help each other as much as possible.   This means starting to adopt a mentality that we all do our best to do what is good for the community.

GameDev.net was created over 10 years ago by a rag tag group of people with the idea that it is the COMMUNITY that can lift each other up, help one another, create articles and share information.   The reputation system is going to begin to award members points for different actions on the site and especially those that benefit the community at large.

As a member you’ll be able to earn points for basic site participation activities, for posting helpful replies in the forums, policing the community using moderator actions, and ESPECIALLY for authoring tutorials and helpful blog posts.

Points are split into 4 categories:

Scholar - Any up/down votes you receive from posts in the technical, business, or creative forums will be added to the scholar category.
Moderator - Points given for moderator actions (activities such as submitting moderator reports, voting on content, providing feedback, etc)
Author - Points given to authors who write articles, get them peer reviewed, get articles favorited, etc. This is where people can pick up a lot of rep points if they get an article granted with a peer-reviewed status
Participation - Points given for everyday site activities - logging in, up/downvoting others, even signing up!

These 4 categories will combine to create your overall reputation number on the site.

Below is a listing of our list of ways to earn reputation. At the moment only those items with an asterisk are active. While this list is by no means final, it should serve as an idea for members as to how reputation can be earned.

Some key terminology:

Default Amount - this is how many points a member will earn as a result of this action (note that a negative amount can be applied to rescind an original transaction)
Max Per Day - this is the maximum number of times this action can be taken for points, it is NOT the number of points you can earn per day
Max Amount - this is the maximum number of times this action can be taken for points over the lifetime of your account

Participation Points
Rewarded for actions taken around the website in general

Title	Default Amount	Max Per Day	Max Amount
Sign up for site *	100	1	1
Sign up for GDNet+	100	1	1
Login *	1	1	inf
Opt-in to Newsletter	50	1	1
Post an abusive / spammy message If a post of yours is reported to a moderator and a moderator approves the report, you will suffer a point hit for the offending post *note that this is still under consideration	-20	inf	inf

Moderator Points
Rewarded for actions that involve policing the community or reviewing content

Title	Default Amount	Max Per Day	Max Amount
Report Post to Moderator * Use the "Report" feature of posts and comments to flag inappropriate items for moderator review	5	100	inf0
Moderator resolves report *	10	inf	inf
Moderator rejects report * Moderators review all submitted reports. A report can either be marked "completed" or deleted altogether. Only blatantly false or spammy reports will be deleted.	-10	inf	inf
Vote and Comment on Article Vote on an un-reviewed article and offer constructive criticism (requires both a vote AND a comment, can only be done once per article)	5	inf	inf

Scholar Points
Rewarded for actions that work to benefit the knowledge of community members

Title	Default Amount	Max Per Day	Max Amount
Legacy Point System Transfer * Points transferred from the old reputation system	1	0	0
Your topic is bookmarked *	5	inf	inf
Your post is upvoted/downvoted * Additional scholar points are added/removed based off of the reputation of the user doing the rating - the higher their rating, the more they contribute	1/-1	inf	inf
Bookmark a topic	1	50	inf
Your Reply is Marked as Answer	15	inf	inf

Author Points
Rewarded for actions that create content for the community to learn from

Title	Default Amount	Max Per Day	Max Amount
Submit a news item Send in a news item via the front page Submit News button	5	10	inf
Submit an article Submit a full article for editing	15	5
Article Content Approved A content moderator has taken a look at your submitted article and approved it for the community to begin viewing	100	inf	inf
News Content approved The news item article the user submitted is cleared through the moderation queue	15
Article Granted "Peer Reviewed" Status The article you submitted was not only approved for initial publication, but is in good enough form to be considered "Peer Reviewed"	50
Create a journal entry	10	1
Your content is voted up/down Additional points are added/removed based off the reputation of the user doing the rating of the user’s article or journal post	1/-1	inf
Your content is commented on	1	25
Write a book review	15	5
Submit an IOTD	10	1
Your IOTD is featured	15	1

So Everyone Gets a Reputation Boost

Fri, 11 May 2012 01:29:00 +0000

Everyone this week got a pretty sizeable ratings boost.   Why?  Because you guys are all so awesome.   One of the core objectives that we as a site set this year was to give our members more of a chance to shine.   It's tough as a site to figure out ways to do that, and we've tried to do that sort of thing each week by showing off the developer journal posts from our community members in a summary post called Weekend Reading: Tales from Journal Land .   We also have shown top members in each forum on the side of the forum and really tried to localize all the resources related to a topic to the forum itself to make it easier to see what the people within your own little nook of the site are doing.

We have some big changes to the site in the works, and we know we can do much better to put so many hardworking members in the spotlight.. so we are starting with some big changes to our reputation system.

For the TL;DR folks out there, here are some links to play around with:

View the reputation of all members by segment, see how you rank (try searching for your own name!)
http://www.gamedev.net/sm/

Individual member reputation profile
http://www.gamedev.n.../33873-apochpiq

Still reading?  Great!   Here is some backstory on our reputation system for members..

Gamedev.net has employed some form of reputation/rating system for over 10 years now. Pre-2011 we had a lot of success with a rating system that was modeled after the USCF chess rating system.   The idea was that a person with higher rating should be considered more experienced than someone with a lower rating.   The original system had one member directly rating the helpfulness of another member.   What was different between our system and some of the others out there was that how much a member could contribute to another member was not only related to how many points the rating member had, but what the DIFFERENCE between ratings was.

Basically, if I have a rating of 2000 I was able to have a more profound impact when I rate someone who has 1000 points versus when I rate someone at 1900 points.  Granted, it takes time for a person to accumulate rating points but in the end if a person is actively participating on the site they should see a higher rating for themselves.

Old Forum Top Member Listing

In migrating to a different forums we adopted the reputation system built into that native forum. Under this system members gained reputation largely by up/down voting particular posts.   This was actually one of the more frequent suggestions we received on how to tweak the old system to make it better.   While the system itself is fine, one of the problems we often see is a failure to recognize those who take the time to help each other..

GameDev.net will soon be getting a brand new reputation system for all members.

When we came up with the idea behind GameDev.net’s new reputation system we decided to take a good hard look at some of the more modern technical resource sites out there and see what they were doing.   Now we have been using reputation for years, but a number of sites have expanded well beyond what we were doing.

Reputation is a point value that represents how much the community trusts you and how much you give back to the community.   You can accumulate reputation points through answering questions and creating articles/journals.   What is cool about reputation is that under this new system the more reputation you earn, the more privileges you'll unlock on GameDev.net.

Originally you could only earn reputation by convincing others that you know what you are talking about, but it is far too easy to contribute and not receive proper recognition.   We want that to change.   Not only are we doing much more to encourage your fellow members to give you recognition for your contributions, but we are putting you in the driver’s seat with a slew of new ways to directly advance your rank within the community.

As a member you’ll be able to earn points for basic site participation activities, for posting helpful replies in the forums, policing the community using moderator actions, and ESPECIALLY for authoring tutorials and helpful blog posts.

Points are split into 4 categories:

Scholar - Any up/down votes you receive from posts in the technical, business, or creative forums will be added to the scholar category.
Moderator - Points given for moderator actions (activities such as submitting moderator reports, voting on content, providing feedback, etc)
Author - Points given to authors who write articles, get them peer reviewed, get articles favorited, etc. This is where people can pick up a lot of rep points if they get an article granted with a peer-reviewed status
Participation - Points given for everyday site activities - logging in, up/downvoting others, even signing up!

These 4 categories will combine to create your overall reputation number on the site.

Stay tuned for more information on the new reputation system.. it will include a new Q&A format as well as brand-spanking new way to post articles!

Introducing "Classifieds"

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 03:45:00 +0000

Some of you may have noticed our new “Classifieds” system, created to replace the Help Wanted forum (now closed to new posts) and address a number of issues resulting from the use of a simple forum for recruiting.  In a moment we’ll take a look at some of the features Classifieds offers and the reasons for its implementation, but first we’ll take a brief look at the history and problems with the Help Wanted forum.

It’s obvious that any online community focused on the creation of any product – and especially one so often requiring multiple disciplines – will find members wanting to band together to help each other create bigger and better products than they would be able to make alone.  The obvious solution to this is to set aside a forum specifically recruiting and looking for teams.  Enter the Help Wanted forum.

Things initially went fairly well for the Help Wanted forum; ads were posted, the occasional member offered their services to others (although this was much rarer in the early days), and lots of feedback was given to those trying to recruit.

It was all very unstructured and a bit of a mess, but a make-shift solution was found with the introduction of a required template that posts had to follow, ensuring that at least in theory all of the necessary information would be presented in a logical and ordered fashion, and that at least some thought (though still unfortunately often just the minimum to fill out the template) went into projects before a topic was posted.  The template was a simple text layout provided in a sticky/pinned topic for people to paste into their new Help Wanted ads, and those who failed to use it were pointed in the direction of the topic and instructed to edit their posts.

Then arose the first big problem with the Help Wanted forum – one that seems to pop up anywhere such a service is offered and sees a lot of use – the feedback started getting nasty, and a large portion of it stopped being constructive.  Some members visited Help Wanted purely to poke fun, beginners were regularly chased away from the site, and even projects which may have otherwise seen success went down in flames or were buried in the fast moving forum by pointless project-bashing topics.  For a time, replies were simply dis-allowed in the forum – a solution other such forums on other sites have stuck with – and were eventually re-introduced in a more controlled manner via a “feedback” section on the end of the required template, where users could specify what type of feedback they felt they could handle.

After all that, the forum had another large problem resulting from its popularity; there was no ability to easily sort or filter the types of content displayed.  Projects offering help, paid, unpaid, beginner and advanced projects were all jumbled together, and unfortunately for a lot of users who were hoping to find a good project to join, the much more numerous unpaid beginner projects vastly out-numbered those offering payment or a higher chance of a successful release.

Introducing Classifieds

The Help Wanted forum is now closed to new posts, and will soon be phased out entirely in favour of our new Classifieds system.  The classifieds section unifies the old careers section and Help Wanted forum so that professional, independent and hobbyist positions all appear neatly in the one section of the site.  There is a separate section for contractors to advertise their services, and projects are listed in a number of categories.  Jobs can be filtered by whether or not they are paid.

The new section also has a simple form to fill out, eliminating the need to paste in and work with a plain text template, and also allowing new ads to be displayed immediately rather than having to await approval.

By leveraging a properly designed system rather than a simple forum, we open up the option of sorting and filtering content as well as easily providing more exposure elsewhere around the site – as an example of this, you might have noticed that recent and featured jobs now appear in a sidebar in the forums.  Developer time is also freed up to work on exciting new features for the site rather than simply supporting basic functionality.

In line with the revamped GDNet+ subscription and the new Marketplace feature (which allows content creators to sell their work), the Classifieds system also represents a move towards supporting the continued operation and development of the site based on offering the community valuable services rather than having to rely solely on advertising.  Money raised by the site through the Marketplace and Classifieds sections goes directly towards the site’s operational costs and towards future developments, whilst offering our community valuable services at very reasonable prices.

Personal not-for-profit projects can be listed at no cost in the “hobbyist projects” section, and we’ve done our best to provide great value for our very affordable prices for indie ads, with a 45-day listing costing you less than many take-out lunch options!

Initial feedback on the classifieds section has been very positive, and we’d love to hear your thoughts on how we could continue to add more value to this new site feature.

System Change: Viewing Your Warning Level

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 01:35:00 +0000

I want to make everyone aware of a change we made during a recent review of our moderating procedures and policy. We've enabled the option for users to see their warning level - this will appear as a bar beneath your avatar under each forum post you make and also in your profile page. It appears exactly as the moderators see it and it will only appear visible to you when you are logged in.

This warning level is mainly a tool for the moderators to help them track behavior that skirts the boundaries or lightly tests the limits of our posting guidelines. This behavior generally does not warrant a ban or suspension, and in this case you may notice a bump in your warning bar in addition to a PM from the moderator who adjusted your warning level.

Please note that this warning history is taken on a case-by-case basis - you do not need to have a full warning bar for us to consider suspending or banning you from the website.

Warning levels can be adjusted up and down, but they do not fall on their own over time. Please do not ask for your level to be lowered. If your community actions give reason for this to be done, it will.

In addition to seeing your warning level represented as a bar under your avatar, you can click on it to view the notes moderators have left when they increase or decrease your warning level. They can also leave notes without altering your warning level. This ensures that all moderators can be made aware of any past problems when they approach an issue involving a member they have not directly dealt with before. Either way you will also receive a PM from the moderator informing you of this change as it appears the system does not automatically provide such notification.

Again, this warning meter is primarily a moderator tool, however the mods and staff don't see any reason to not make available the comments being entered into your account for other moderators to view and reference when performing their duties. These comments will still be reflected in PMs sent directly to you and quick access to these warning comments can be your reference as well to actions that should not be repeated here on the site.

Moderation Team Changes and Additions

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 18:12:00 +0000

Just want to make a quick official update about some of the changes and additions you may have noticed we've made to the moderation team over the past few months.

New Senior Moderators

Community Manager Washu and myself appointed two new moderators to the Senior Mods council - swiftcoder and jbadams. They join both Washu and Sneftel as head of our moderation team. Senior Mods are generally who interface with the Staff the most and help resolve any disputes that occur between moderators as well as setting/enforcing moderator policy.

New Moderators

We value the time each and every moderator here on the site puts in to making this such a great community and we recognize that their availability can change, often drastically, depending on life conditions. At some point a mod won't be able to come by the site often enough to feel they can properly do their job and while we know they will still stop by every now and then, it's time to fill out the ranks a little bit with new mods to help fill in the gaps.

So with that the mods and I put our heads together and evaluated community members to select new moderators. We decided on three - Hodgman, rip-off, and frob.

New Forum Moderators

Not every moderator is in charge of a forum - the majority are just "roving moderators" who are around to handle issues that crop up anywhere. In fact, all mods can moderate across the forums, it's just that "forum moderators" are the go-to mod for issues that pop up in specific forums when a user wants to contact someone, and are also responsible for keeping the forum tidy and any FAQs or such material.

Game Programming - Zahlman had to step down from his duties. swiftcoder stepped up to take over his duties.

APIs and Tools - with swiftcoder shuffling over to Game Programming we assigned Hodgman over here

Mobile and Console Development - Sneftel also announced he needed to take a step back from forum mod duties, and we brought on frob to take over for him

Visual Arts - dbaumgart had to move on from moderation duties and JTippetts volunteered to step up and take over

Once again a thank you to all our moderators, past and present - all 50+ of you!, for the time and effort you put in to helping shape this community.

Opening up the tagging system

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:35:00 +0000

Open Tagging vs. Closed Tagging

When we launched the site upgrade and announced that we had a new tagging system, it was also made clear that this system was closed, which meant that we supplied the tags you all could select from. The primary reasoning behind this closed system was to reduce what I call "tag fragmentation", which would eventually make tagging content a useless exercise if left unchecked and unmoderated (read the link for more on this issue). However beneficial it is in the long run though, the closed system does have drawbacks. For one, you simply can't add a new tag for anything that we may have missed considering tag-worthy, which is probably a lot. Another drawback specific to this software was that the tag list drop down did not sort tags alphabetically, which meant finding the tag you wanted to include was a bit difficult.

Fortunately we've added some functionality to the software now that gives us more control over tags being used, and we can now monitor how many uses a particular tag has, indentify and merge similar tags, etc. This means that we can switch to an open tagging system and let you use whatever tags you want for content you post on the forums or in your journals. Well, whatever tags you want within reason. As I said we will be moderating tag usage and will be removing anything like "my first journal entry" - not to mention tags that don't follow our terms of use for language and stuff. Tagging should be relegated to keywords only. Any tags with more than two words will immediately be suspect for removal.

There's still a downside, although we hope to tackle this problem soon - you can't see other tags that have been used while making a post. So unless you've already seen another piece of content tagged in the subject you're posting about you may have to guess at what an appropriate tag name would be - for example "Direct3D" or "D3D"? Eventually we hope to make it so you can find this information easier while posting so your content is immediately included in the larger pool of other tag uses without waiting for us to spot the dupe tag and merge it.

Open Tagging, Closed Prefixes

While we're able to open up the tagging system, we've decided to keep prefixes on a closed system. Prefixes are good ways to let people sort content in a forum topics list faster with just their eyes by picking out the prefixes that are important to them. This ability breaks down rapidly when there are a lot of different prefixes in use.

If you can't find a prefix you feel suits your topic, you are still welcome to use the [] characters at the start of your topic to define your own prefix. If the moderators see it used often they may add it to the prefix list and can easily go back and bulk-add this official prefix to the past threads. We're also working with the individual forum mods to add additional ones we may have missed in the initial building of the prefix selection.

The Purpose of Prefixing

If you're a bit uncertain as to the use of prefixes, the idea is to identify a large amount of similar topics quickly and easily. Older members may recall that we had a couple more forums than what you see in our current index. Merging several of the low-traffic forums with ones of similar nature and greater traffic is a benefit to the lower-traffic forum participants now posting threads that get many more views. However at the same time the participants of both forums now have more topics to wade through to find what they like to read. Enter prefixes. Think of them as forum sub topics. Anyone visiting the API and Tools forum to read up on SDL discussions, for example, can spot them easily with a prefix. Anyone visiting the DirectX and XNA board looking for SlimDX topcis can also spot them easily with prefixes. And so on. This lets us combine many like-minded people in one area but still sort out discussion amongst groups of interest. For this reason we encourage everyone to prefix their topics whenever possible for the benefit of others and yourself in attracting the proper readers to your thread.

Prefix Colors

A quick note on prefix colors - currently they are all the same shade of blue. In a short while, after we nail down the prefixes a bit more, we will start coloring them to make it easier to identify an individual type or group of prefixes in the forum topic listings (for example DirectX prefixes may be varying shades of green, or a single shade of green).

Questions? Concerns? Share them in the comments below!

5 Lessons Learned and a Sneak Peak into the Future of the GDNet Community

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 22:31:00 +0000

Note:  This post contains images from the next version of our site from areas still under development and are subject to change

In shaping our future we have developed a number of principles that will shape our future direction in a way that will be very positive for the game development community.   Over the past year we have implemented a considerable number of changes to secure the longevity of our site and community, and now we're looking to improve what you get out of the site and make it a valuable resource.

The idea behind these five items is to allow us to help each other much easier.   Sites like StackOverflow have done a great job with quick questions and answers and the interface is simple to use for people to contribute answers.   The forums on our site have long been immensely popular as a way to communicate, and the ease by which people can contribute responses is a huge factor in it's success.   Our own developer journals have resulted in the publication of a number of really great articles as well.

Above: Sharing resource links with fellow members using a special bookmarklet is quick and easy

Lesson learned?
Provide an environment that makes it easy for members to publish information on game development

When we originally made the site back in 1999 were nothing but a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears programmers who wanted nothing more than to provide a cool place where people could share game development information.   What a simple concept.   Over the years we've heard complaints of us becoming too "corporate" with our look, but the truth is that for anybody running a large web site you have to appeal to both your audience and advertisers.   It may have been just us going from a black background to a white one though..

One of the more interesting things we have experienced on this site was seeing how important reputation and recognition really is to our members.   Quite honestly, to go and give hours of your time to help others is very selfless and in many cases our members don't quite get the thanks they really deserve for all of their efforts.   As we go forward we're going to do a much better job giving credit where it's due.

Lesson learned?
Encourage members to communicate and share information with each other and recognize those who take the time to contribute

The next area we've already spoken about at length in previous blog posts.   But when you run a site for 10 years you accumulate cruft.. lots of little odds and ends that really serve as distractions more than anything.   We're going to be doing a MAJOR house-cleaning going forward and allowing you to focus on just the topics that you are interested in most while adding new ones where needed.

So instead of 30 forums you get half that.. and it's going to be extremely easy to access not only forum posts, but everything related to that topic.

We're also going to be combining all the different resources you can use into one area accessible from the very forum you are used to using now.   As you can see in the following picture, it is possible to post a new article on the very same page you can post new topics just by clicking a different tab.   While this page is still heavily in development, you can begin to get an idea of what we are shooting for here.

Note:  Resources shown above are for testing purposes only and do not reflect the DirectX and XNA category just yet

Lesson learned?
Allow members to easily find information by providing a very focused number of topic areas

We have a very large base of moderators actively patrolling the community and making sure that our community maintains a high standard of conduct.   This has been great and has really worked well to reduce the amount of negative community interaction.

One of the staples of more modern websites though is how much the community is allowed to take ownership of their own identity.   Sites like Wikipedia have pushed this idea to the extreme, allowing anyone to contribute to the site for the better good.   Being more open makes it extremely easy to publish information, and that's awesome.   While complete openness also makes abuse a bigger potential threat, we strongly think that their are more benefits to allowing members to easily publish.

So this next lesson learned ties in with two of the previous lessons.   By opening up some moderation responsibilities, community members will have an easier time policing the community and promoting great content. The amount of responsibility you are granted is largely going to be based on your site reputation - which will take on a whole new meaning as our site moves forward.

Lesson learned?
Allow trustworthy members beyond elected moderators to take ownership of information and participate in the moderation process

There is one more core principle we will be working on, and that is to allow employers and team leaders to connect easier with potential employees or contractors.   "Help Wanted" continues to be one of our most heavily visited forums, so we're going to greatly expand the number of job listings we make available by tapping into every resource we can find to obtain job listings.  We will also make it easy for contractors to post advertisements with high visibility detailing their own needs so others can take advantage of their services.

In summary, these lessons have established our new set of core principles for 2012.. and it's with these items that we will move forward and provide the kind of site that can help you become a better developer.

GameDev.net will:

Provide an environment that makes it easy for members to publish information on game development
Encourage members to communicate and share information with each other and recognize those who take the time to contribute
Allow members to easily find information by providing a very focused number of topic areas
Allow trustworthy members beyond elected moderators to take ownership of information and participate in the moderation process
Allow employers \ team leaders to connect easier with potential employees or contractors

Content Revamp Part 3: Tagging

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 14:01:08 +0000

The Series:

Overview

The addition of tags to the Invision suite of products is, in our view, one of the more significant steps forward with their latest version of the software. Tagging has proven itself over the years to be a very useful and efficient means of organizing massive amounts of information. In our original system, prior to the advent of tagging in general, we had a list of categories nested several layers deep that was used to sort out articles into specific groups so it was easier to find what you were looking for by drilling down to more and more specific topics. In addition to collapsing this all down into a few high-level categories as I discussed in my previous entry, we can now leverage the tagging system to help you fine tune your search for information.

Closed Tagging System

I should say right up front that we're going with a closed tagging system rather than an open system. This means that we will have a predefined list of tags for you to select from, and you will not be able to enter in your own tag names. The reason we are going with a closed system is because the Invision tagging system is still very much in its infancy, and as such the tools they have in place for moderating tags is practically zilch. My main concern in terms of moderation is what I call "tag fragmentation". You can come up with all sorts of different tags to refer to the same subject - for example: DirectX 11 can be referred to as DX11, DirectX11, DirectX 11, D3D11, etc. I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this. If people use multiple tags to refer to the same topic, it essentially "spreads out" that information rather than consolidating it like a tag should. We want you all to be sure that when you click on a "DirectX 11" tag you're getting all the tagged information on our site related to DirectX 11.

We've polled the moderators as well as other staff to compile a starting list of tags and will be building from there. We will announce an informal method for suggesting new tags directly to us, and hopefully down the road Invision will add the ability within a content piece to submit these suggestions in a more formal fashion. My dream system would be giving you all the freedom to tag things however you want and us having a moderation panel that lets us see how many items of content are being tagged by what words and then merge tags together, much like we can merge forum posts, to consolidate the various tags under one tag. While typing in your tags, you will be given suggestions of already-existing tags to choose from. Are you listening, Invision? ;)

Tagging/Prefixing Forum Posts

Tagging in the forums works in two main ways. The common method is to add tags that describe the content of your post. This is done through a drop-down list that will provide you with a list of tags to select from. In case you're worried about getting presented with a huge long list of tags, not to worry. While we will indeed maintain a large global list of defined tags for eventual use in places like journals and articles, each forum can override this huge list with its own select set of tags. This is also so that no one in the OpenGL forum is somehow tempted or able to tag something as "Direct X". The tags selected will appear listed below the topic title on the main forum page and the topic thread page.

Another option is to select a topic prefix. You see these in the forums already manually created by users like [XNA] or [PAID]. These will be text labels that show up before the topic title in the forum listing and can be colored to match certain prefixes to make it easier to pick out different forum topics. Currently you set these prefixes using the first tag you attach to the thread, meaning this is also a closed system, although you are free to choose your prefix. However some forums may have a predefined selection if prefixes to use rather than allowing you to choose one out of the tag pool, mainly to keep prefix clutter down and make prefixes more easily identifiable. Some forums may also require you to prefix topics, while others may not.

Both tags and prefixes are clickable and will bring up a search result listing all forum content tagged in a similar manner.

Tagging Other Content

Currently only IP.Content, the Invision application running our articles system, is the one lacking tagging support; however Mike Tanczos has written some custom tag code that we will be using until Invision ties IP.Content into their tagging system hopefully sometime next spring.

Until then, and possibly after depending on how the tagging system in general has evolved, Articles and resources will also have an open tagging system although it will be moderated by me to match up with the predefined tags we have already for the forum system, all other tags will be considered suggestions. Clicking on the tags listed with an article will bring up a list of similarly tagged article content, however from the search page it is one click to run the same search on forum topics, which is why these tags will be moderated to match up.

Journals will continue, for the present, to have an open tagging system as these tags are currently only used within that individual journal. So when I tag posts as "Weekend Reading" and you click on that tag link it will only bring up posts with that tag in my journal, not from other journals and not from the site in general. IP.Blog, the application behind the journal system, supposedly is tied into the Invision tagging system so this may change rapidly after we update the site and bring onboard any new features Invision has for this application's latest version.

Tying It All Together... Eventually

As the tagging system continues to roll out and evolve we will continue to weave it into our site so that tags become the basis for searching and finding specific topics around GameDev.net, with our high-level categories being the initial guide-post towards what you are looking for. With one tag you'll be able to find articles, resources, journal posts and forum topics. I personally am really excited about finally being able to regain some type of real organization to our huge and varied resource database ever since the categories method grew beyond its capacity and usefulness way back in the early 2000's, augmented at that time only by a better search engine thanks to Google. This is an update that has been too long in coming and it's finally almost here!

Coming Up Next...

Nope not done yet! Next entry I'll go over the improvements we've made to the way articles are being delivered, as well as helping you to find other content in case what you selected wasn't quite what you were looking for.