I've been using experts-exchange for a while. They have a method of answering questions where-by, once the orginal poster feels they have a satisfactory answer, the accepted answer is labelled and the discussion is closed. This has the effect of there being a lot of threads which are standard answers to common questions. People will quickly be pointed towards them. Also you get accredited points for accepted answers. So the people who are genuinely helpful and knowledgable become known. I've suggested a gamedev wiki in the past and maybe that is too different to the current forums to be easily done. What about experts-exchange as an example of how to build a more accessible and useful repository? It is tempting to point people over to that site in reply to standard questions but I tend to use the C++ Faq Lite, Bjarne's Faq and gotw.ca as they aren't competitors to gamedev. I have recently witnessed people, sometimes anonymous posters, opening up old threads (sometimes divisive ones), long after the original interested parties have moved on. The amount of heat without light that these generate, the time people waste there and the atmosphere created that will affect the whole forum, the dilution of onetime good threads, are all a real shame. Dunno, I keep banging on about this. Anyone else know other examples of how to organise and channel discussion so that it is productive and helpful? [edited by - petewood on March 29, 2004 11:58:56 AM]

this is green hat thinking about a blue hat task which I guess most people aren''t interested in.

Ironically enough, there is a *lot* of relevant game-dev-type information on the c2.com wiki (which you linked to in the second post); I frequently link there when posting here. It would be nice to have a real GD-oriented wiki somewhere though, even if it had no actual affiliation with GD.com.

I very much agree that a game-development Wiki would be good thing - the c2.com Wiki has been a great (and often entertaining) source of information about programming in general for me. The problem is that starting a good Wiki is hard - as long as there is little content there will not be much visitors, and as long as there are few visitors there will not be much content. A possible solution would be a team of volunteers putting lots of time in ''starting up'' the Wiki by putting lots of information in it. If anyone wants to try this I''d volunteer for putting all my (modest) GD-knowledge into it...

Ill start one, heres the ip, if anyone actually changes it ill get a domain

http://68.99.221.114

[edited by - sarsdp on March 30, 2004 5:58:17 AM]

quote:Original post by SarsDP
Ill start one, heres the ip, if anyone actually changes it ill get a domain

http://68.99.221.114

I can ping you but nothing else.

There was actually a half-hearted wiki effort that niyaw and I tried about a year ago. He's not been around for a while and the site is no longer accessible.

[edited by - petewood on March 30, 2004 6:17:37 AM]

you can''t access it? one of my coworkers just did a second ago, and it had one or two people other than me in the log, could you please try again, you might of acessed it while i restarted the server, also if anyone can access it and wants to make a better logo let me know

quote:Original post by SarsDP
you can''t access it? one of my coworkers just did a second ago, and it had one or two people other than me in the log, could you please try again, you might of acessed it while i restarted the server, also if anyone can access it and wants to make a better logo let me know

nope, not working. are you behind a firewall? (that''s me at my most technical and I probably won''t understand your answer)

im going to take it down(even though its not working anyway), ill try to get it set up sometime later today or tomarrow

Anyone got any other examples or ideas for how to build a good repository of information.

Something that we will be able to use and point people towards... other than google of course

[edited by - petewood on March 31, 2004 9:34:43 AM]