I think this community is pretty positive. I read a lot of messages from people trying to help each other. Sometimes they just provide keywords, sometimes links. Some questions are interesting, some are not. Every now and then, they make me think.

Just to say I don't feel this "judging" vibe.

Ego.

The ego comprises the organized part of the personality structure that includes defensive, perceptual, intellectual-cognitive, and executive functions.

This site simply would not exist without ego. There certainly wouldn't be any quality information to be had here without ego. Now, I know you meant ego in the negative connotation, but my point still stands.

What are the reasons someone posts something informative on these forums? A very great deal of it is aimed at influencing how they are perceived by others in the community. We all want to be perceived as knowledgeable by our peers, and so at least a portion of the reason of why we post is driven by ego, by the desire to be accepted, to appear knowledgeable, to garner praise. If ego weren't a factor, this forum (and any forum on the internet) would be a deserted wasteland. Nobody is 100% perfectly altruistic and self-effacing, and so absent the ego there would just be no point in trying to help others. It's just not human nature to discard ego completely.

So, no, we won't be eliminating ego here at any point, even if that were possible or desirable.

As far as the IOTD goes, just be patient while they work on it. Michael and the others have a lot of good ideas for this site going forward. Trust me when I say that they really are personally invested in seeing gamedev.net become the place for game developers. Their success, though, will hinge a great deal on the community here.

What can you do to help make the community stronger so that it in return can benefit you? Would it be best to post constructive criticism and comments regarding specific aspects of the site or specific events that have occurred? Or would it be best to post a vague, passive-aggressive, all-encompassing attack against some nebulous "they" whom you mistakenly perceive to be somehow determined to lessen your enjoyment of the site through overwhelming abundance of ego? Isn't (ahem) egotistical of you to assert that everyone else must subvert their own ego in deference to yours?

In other words: get over yourself.

The pedantic attitude taken with beginners mistakes here is actually a gift, a personal gift from the heart of the coder who criticizes. He wants the beginner to have his foundation right, so as to spare him suffering and misfortune later.

So, whenever you next see someone go "D*** noob, your f****** program only works because debug mode initializes your variables", just think this:

I think a lot of people misinterpret the vigorous correction of misinformation as somehow stamping out legitimate debate. However, that is what separates these boards from the many lesser boards out there. Debate is good and healthy for the forum culture but allowing misinformation to proliferate quietly erodes the integrity of these fine boards. [...]
Beginners by virtue cannot distinguish the wheat from the chaff so minimising the level of noise on the line is essential

QFT.

This site is about the development of games. How one chooses to develop a game is irrelevant. What matters is that they make a game, not how proficient they are at a language, or how indepth their understanding and grasp of math or networking is. There is no need for constant correction and ridicule. What there is a need for is praise and commaraderie.

I have rarely seen people say anything truly negative to decent ideas. Yes, when someone comes here and says "I want to make the best 3D MMORPG ever in Html and use Bitmap to make the graphics, how do?" - they need to be told how stupid that is.

Telling them "You can do it if only you believe!" is not actually helping them. If one of your friends thinks they "drive better when drunk" would you suggest encouraging them? Some ideas are bad, and some people are clearly incapable of success with their current plan. Lying to them does not help them.

Nothing good has ever come of an anger post, especially one as vague as this one.

I'm going to have to disagree with this one. Those "Who rated me down!?" posts were wonderfully entertaining

Nothing good has ever come of an anger post, especially one as vague as this one.

I'm going to have to disagree with this one. Those "Who rated me down!?" posts were wonderfully entertaining

If we could vote in the lounge, I'd vote this post down in the hopes that you'd make a "Who rated me down!?" post, and then I would upvote that "Who rated me down!?" post. Just to be a punk.

Nothing good has ever come of an anger post, especially one as vague as this one.

I'm going to have to disagree with this one. Those "Who rated me down!?" posts were wonderfully entertaining

If we could vote in the lounge, I'd vote this post down in the hopes that you'd make a "Who rated me down!?" post, and then I would upvote that "Who rated me down!?" post. Just to be a punk.

I learned from observation that mentioning a rate down was a very bad idea. Of course we didn't have the post as a visible reference back then. Your user rating would just mysteriously decline and you'd have to guess which helpful post some Hitleresque person had used as justification for dropping your user rating

Trolls will be trolls, but this site has never been a gamedev-buddy-sing-along, its here to foster young and amatuer game developers yes, but also to educate them.

Poor coding practices often don't scale well, either in terms of performance or maintainability, so when someone encourages you to do the right thing in your code, they very much are encouraging you to be successful.

That said, a lot of the older, wiser, and more-helpful members here are steeped in the professional programming world (or are just similarly skilled), and one of the things everyone looses with experience is a certain kind of "sympathy" for younger and less-experienced developers. It's not the kind of sympathy that means "I care", its the kind of sympathy that means "I remember what it was like when I was green." This is why the grizzled veterans sometimes seem to look down on you and offer solutions that are beyond your needs or possibly your capabilites, rather than the simple solutions you might be looking for. Our minds just go straight to the industrial-strength solutions because our minds have been conditioned in an environment where industrial-strength considerations are necessary and expected.

Aside from the trolls, its not malice at fault here, its just an impedence mismatch.