I left this forum for a few months recently. Here's why:

• People listing their idea and then asking a couple (shoehorned in) vague questions like "What programming language should I use?"
• People trying to "recruit" team members. "I'll pay you once it's done. It's totally going to be a hit."

This has got to be at least half of the posts in the For Beginners section (the most commonly trafficked part of this forum). I'm in this cycle of leaving this forum for a few months, coming back (because of the great long-term community), and then leaving again because this seems to be all I can really find. Just listing ideas and asking something like "What programming language should I use?" should be banned. It's been asked many times before, the forum isn't for simply listing ideas (there's a whole other forum for that), and there's been many, many posts written (which all come to the same conclusions) answering the Programming Language question. It's a waste of people's time which could be used, you know, answering real questions.

The whole recruiting team members, stealing game ideas, blah blah blah questions should be banned. If people can't use the search function, we shouldn't all have to deal with their question.

The main problem is these people listing ideas, and then saying "Yeah, I can't program at all. How do I make this?" It's just so annoying to see this post over, and over, and over, and over again.

EDIT:

For clarification, I don't want to ban the users who ask these. I want to ban the posts. I think the moderators should delete posts like these and direct them to the FAQ or some of the other times their exact question has been asked.

You'd ban a lot of folks who are asking honest questions.

If you searched this forum for "programming language", you'd get recommendations ranging from C to Ruby .

Edit: the official "FAQ" is too narrow.

(

seriously, there are more than 2 game engines in existence for new folks -

Only listing Python and C# for new folks ?

Not giving reference links for new folks to follow ?

Listing XNA as a viable game library - when support was cut ?! List Mono instead !

)

If you're getting so sick of reading posts in those particular subforums, why are you frequenting them? There are other areas of the forums with much less noise.

I left this forum for a few months recently. Here's why:

• People listing their idea and then asking a couple (shoehorned in) vague questions like "What programming language should I use?"
• People trying to "recruit" team members. "I'll pay you once it's done. It's totally going to be a hit."

This has got to be at least half of the posts in the For Beginners section (the most commonly trafficked part of this forum). I'm in this cycle of leaving this forum for a few months, coming back (because of the great long-term community), and then leaving again because this seems to be all I can really find. Just listing ideas and asking something like "What programming language should I use?" should be banned. It's been asked many times before, the forum isn't for simply listing ideas (there's a whole other forum for that), and there's been many, many posts written (which all come to the same conclusions) answering the Programming Language question. It's a waste of people's time which could be used, you know, answering real questions.

The whole recruiting team members, stealing game ideas, blah blah blah questions should be banned. If people can't use the search function, we shouldn't all have to deal with them.

The main problem is these people listing ideas, and then saying "Yeah, I can't program at all. How do I make this?" It's just so annoying to see this post over, and over, and over, and over again.

Those who post thread rants about who "should be banned" should be banned. See what I did there? You start banning for weak reasons like those and it opens banning users on a whim just because you didn't like them. Banning should be reserved for users who break rules and constantly continue to break them after repeated warnings. I have to agree with SymLinked though, if you are sick of those kind of threads then simply don't bother reading them.

If you turn it around, what's your proposal to fix it? (and still give the yougsters room)
Maybe another grouping of forums?

The main problem is these people listing ideas, and then saying "Yeah, I can't program at all. How do I make this?"

That's the entire purpose of the For Beginners forum: to help people who have no idea what they are doing get a leg up.

If you don't want to see that sort of thing, move on over to the technical forums - you are well past the point of 'beginner' in my mind.

People trying to "recruit" team members. "I'll pay you once it's done. It's totally going to be a hit."

If you see those threads, hit that handy-dandy report button.

We created the classified system in order to relocate that sort of thing outside of the main forums, and we tend to be pretty aggressive about closing recruiting posts these days.

Hehe, someone just made a post about posts like these.

I am guessing the main thing you are getting at is that if a person wanted to come here as a beginner, it would be hard to find useful information in the "for beginners" due to the fact just about all of the topics there are the same "MMORPG with no programming skill" posts. As well as the "what is the best language" topics.

My answer to the "which language is best is that it depends on what you are doing.

"Just as you don't write essays with Excel, you don't write websites with Python. And some languages are more efficient at some things. It depends."

Now I can save that answer to my notepad, and copy and paste. Hehe. But, I don't really respond to those types of questions much anymore. It has been answered enough here.

All of the good "for beginners" posts are indeed buried underneath repetitive posts.

There's always been a mass of this sort of thing, in every gamedev community in existence. It's been that way since I joined GDNet like 8 years ago.

The best response to it is to redirect it to the proper place. People should only be banned if they do things like advertise for a team repeatedly in the wrong place.

My interpretation of the OP's intentions was that he didnt want to ban the users but rather the topics mentioned, so that those threads could lets say be locked after a mod pastes in some generic "use the search bar, here you go a link to the FAQ" response.

My interpretation of the OP's intentions was that he didnt want to ban the users but rather the topics mentioned, so that those threads could lets say be locked after a mod pastes in some generic "use the search bar, here you go a link to the FAQ" response.

I thought that too, until he said this:

The whole recruiting team members, stealing game ideas, blah blah blah questions should be banned. If people can't use the search function, we shouldn't all have to deal with them.

To me that changes the context from the threads to the users.