I would like to see a rehaul of the "projects" feature under Community>Gallery. I feel this should be a prominent feature of the site and should be a separate tab on the navigation bar, or at least its own link under Community (rather than somewhere in Gallery). The layout of projects need to be updated as well. It seems projects are generally being used to upload pictures. For each project, there should be separate pages for images, videos, a written game design outline, concept art/sketches, where to download, and about (for information regarding the game's development and the team, etc).

Also, these projects should be featured on the main page the same way articles are. I think members would make more use of the "projects" feature if these changes took place.

Just on a personal note.. I have recently become EXTREMELY interested in seeing this happen. I feel like a combination of new articles and seeing great projects could serve as a pretty good heart beat for the site. To be honest, I think once you start mixing in all the creative Indie projects out there you start getting a sense of just how frickin creative people are. We need a "Your Announcements" on steroids.. with all sorts of mixed in projects. While I'm not sure the gallery is the best place to start with this, I think I can overhaul the old GDS quickly enough to make it work really quite well.

Audio forum. Sound and music are unique challenges that should have their own home in the forum, rather than being spread out through game/general/directx/etc.

Not sure if this has been suggested before:

A small tag or indicator by the poster's name if that posted is the one who started the thread - something like [op]

I think this was implemented on the mmorpg.com forums

The reason I suggest it is because I often don't look at the original poster's name, i suck at remembering names in general, and when browsing on page 2+ of a thread, I often wonder who original poster was. Yeah, having unique avatars, as many do, helps a lot, but not everyone's avatar is that memorable.

Funny you mention that, I'll often post my thoughts for users facing issues I've dealt with in the past. Unless i see certain avatars in the thread that is, (hodgman, here's looking at you) and then i just shut up and listen

At the moment I can say there would be two features I would suggest that could be beneficial to the community/myself.

I hope I am forgiven, but this is a feature that I actually liked in the MSDN forums, one of the few things I like about that place. In those forums you when you are going to start a topic you can choose either between starting a discussion or ask a question. Depending the choice the icon in the forum list change giving a visual hint what the topic is, a question or discussion.

For example: If I want to ask in the General Programming forum what encapsulation means I can tag it as a question an icon (question mark perhaps) appears next to the title. However, when I want to discuss the merit or folly of making a 16-bit retro games in the Game Design forums the icon of two speech bubbles appears next to the topic. This will give forum users a clear indication of the purpose of the topic, asking a question or starting a discussion.

Building upon this and once again stealing a feature of forums such as MSDN, but also StackOverflow is the ability to inform other users that a certain reply on my topic was the answer to my problem. This reply will be distinguished by a clear green border perhaps. Other users should be able to suggest a reply as being the answer. This will help others who delve in the same issue to find answers much quicker. This feature should only be available, if the first option is a go, for questions.

I find it a pity that the book segment has been seemingly neglected. I, personally, find it a dreadful undertaking to find and buy good reference material in my pursuit to learn C++ and game programming at the moment. Perhaps it might be interesting and a nice source of income to expand the book segment and become a reseller of books aimed towards programming and game development. Another way is to perhaps look into the option of community written book reviews.

Oh and perhaps mobile version. The site is fine as it is on tablets, but on my smartphone it is rather annoying and I do like to visit fora on the road using my phone. Of course, this could also be done with an app (Android!!!).

At the moment I can say there would be two features I would suggest that could be beneficial to the community/myself.

I hope I am forgiven, but this is a feature that I actually liked in the MSDN forums, one of the few things I like about that place. In those forums you when you are going to start a topic you can choose either between starting a discussion or ask a question. Depending the choice the icon in the forum list change giving a visual hint what the topic is, a question or discussion.

For example: If I want to ask in the General Programming forum what encapsulation means I can tag it as a question an icon (question mark perhaps) appears next to the title. However, when I want to discuss the merit or folly of making a 16-bit retro games in the Game Design forums the icon of two speech bubbles appears next to the topic. This will give forum users a clear indication of the purpose of the topic, asking a question or starting a discussion.

Building upon this and once again stealing a feature of forums such as MSDN, but also StackOverflow is the ability to inform other users that a certain reply on my topic was the answer to my problem. This reply will be distinguished by a clear green border perhaps. Other users should be able to suggest a reply as being the answer. This will help others who delve in the same issue to find answers much quicker. This feature should only be available, if the first option is a go, for questions.

I find it a pity that the book segment has been seemingly neglected. I, personally, find it a dreadful undertaking to find and buy good reference material in my pursuit to learn C++ and game programming at the moment. Perhaps it might be interesting and a nice source of income to expand the book segment and become a reseller of books aimed towards programming and game development. Another way is to perhaps look into the option of community written book reviews.

Oh and perhaps mobile version. The site is fine as it is on tablets, but on my smartphone it is rather annoying and I do like to visit fora on the road using my phone. Of course, this could also be done with an app (Android!!!).

When you go on your phone what things would you liked to see improved on the mobile side? I'm using a galaxy s4 and don't have any problems as of a small tweak I made last night that tells mobile browsers it's okay to render in a native mobile resolution rather than scaling down an 800 pixel wide browser version of the site.

First the aspect about load time, this is of course tested in my environment and thus applies only to my current specific situation. I am currently using a Sony ST24i (Experia U), which has a 3.5 inches screen. Due to me living in a rural area in Belgium my 3G network is not quite as stable as it ought to be (at home I use WIFI) and because it seems the sheer amount of data that needs to be fetched for the current version makes the load time extremely long for my case.

The current load time of the website at home on the 3G network was on average 3 minutes. This, of course, makes the entire thing rather unpleasant. I would suggest, as I always suggest for mobile sites, to have a minimalistic approach so to reduce the load and thus improving load time and data since mobile internet is still quite expensive in a lot of areas.

Secondly for people, such as myself, who have smaller screens the menu buttons, which work fine, might be a little too small to be suitable for touchscreens. For this website the main issue is the blue ribbon which I mainly use when navigating the site.Though that is entirely subjective.