Black Theme for sure, and for the rest I don't know because I just joined this community :)

As I've mentioned a few times, I think the site should change to actually cater to people working on games. The state of the site is just a programming forum and intelligence insulting fake product reviews by everyone's favorite autodesk stooge.

That attitude is complete bullshit. Sites like TIGSource and ScreenshotSaturday are overflowing with great content made from small, often one-man, teams. The difference is they have talent, skill, and can-do attitudes. The front page of TIG is full of screenshots showcasing the talent and creativity of the community. Their forum is full of dev logs where people post constant updates and have actual design discussions. The difference is that these other sites realize that creating a game is more a creative endeavor and less a technical one.

So the site could do a lot more to cater to a actual game making crowd. The forums could be reorganized to focus on creativity and actually getting games done, instead of shoving it into a corner ('The creative side'). That in itself is only a testament that community itself just doesn't 'get it'.

I've been visiting over ten years now, and I have seen the site change many times, but never for the better. I've seen lots and lots of buggy re-skins over what is effectively, in spirit a 1996-era C++ forum. It's always just lateral moves, and the site never moves forward. It's just a new coat of paint for the same dated site, with the same functionality.

What happened to the articles? And the front page? Although I prefer no front page to the old spam, ad filled age that was just links to other people's content. It's all been replaced with just a forum that has shoehorned social media widgets and links to other people's businesses. Do articles on making games conflict with sending traffic to your affiliated partners?

We could have a great community here that focuses on both the technical and creative. Community members can focus on promoting their skills and creative backgrounds, and possibly use the site to facilitate linking up with like minded people to work on projects. There should be be a focus on member's work.

There is a lot of sites that offer a good example of what a better GDNet could be in the coming years. TiGSource, ScreenshotSaturday, AltDevBlogADay, and DeviantArt. DeviantArt is a great showcase of user's creative works, and has a forum full of good creative discussion. They successfully offer a subscription service that many pay for too! Taking all the things that these sites are doing right could make for a great ideal GD community site.

You could have a great social network + forum here focusing on enabling people to connect and get stuff done. Wouldn't it be great to able to see who locally is interested in game development, what their skills and interests are, and be able to form a team? Then we could have a wiki for the technical stuff. Keep it current with info on how to get started, platform details. Language specifics, and what tools are available, etc...

edit: forum keeps eating my posts.

Well the programmer-centric part of Gamedev.net has been a long time byproduct of having the site created and run by programmers. I've always wanted to move the site into a significantly more creative/artistic side. I created the publisher guidelines page and I had a number of people talking about the stupid characters that were on the page. It always perplexed me why in a medium such as game development we can't see more game elements overflowing onto our pages.

There are a lot of great suggestions here and one of the common themes to these sites is just make it easy to share what you are doing. ScreenshotSaturday is interesting in that it requires a very low amount of effort to post your screenshot. Just all around great simplicity and execution. Maybe we need to figure out how we can absolutely lower the barrier to share all the cool stuff people are working on.

The idea that we are just a forum now has come from both our 2012 redesign and our inability to make significant progress with our article process. We've definitely struggled with ways to present information to people because there is just so much output from the community but it isn't necessarily at a consistent rate.

We need to flesh out ideas like yours and the other ones here. I think the idea that the staff can do this on our own leads to limiting results.. having you guys involved would certainly help out but we need ideas on how we can all work together as a team on this as well.

I'd also like getting notifications when people post a comment on someone's journal that I've also posted a comment on.

It would be good to open up an HTML5/JavaScript/WebGL forum for browser based games. Many people are in the learning stage right now with HTML5, so it would be good to start a section for it at some point in the (near) future. I'm sure a lot of people come to this site looking for HTML5 and are forced to go elsewhere.

I joined this website right before the change and I think this is a fantastic website and community and I'd love to see improvements over time. I've experienced issues with renewing adverts in the classified section. Essentially, once my ad expires, it asks me to renew. If I click renew it starts with "$0.00" and whether I leave it or enter a different number, it says it's an invalid format or "Oops, something went wrong" and then my adert goes into a "Time Left" but doesn't actually show up in the classified section (Since I never technically paid for it). I'm not able to renew it again nor am I able to view the ad so I can copy and paste into a new one which is a bummer. This is more of a technical issue for the website but I think it's still something worth mentioning and I'd be happy to give information to help resolve that issue.

A tutorial for C++ game programming that doesn't use VC++ 6.0. I mean, come on, have you guys made a book on C++ in the last 5 years? I have a ton of books on C++ from you, but all are old. So would it hurt to have something new?

P.S. I might be wrong though, so don't take any offense by this.