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Our Facebook, Google plus and YouTube accounts have been contacted with two emails, they are as follows.

Hello!

First of all, I would like to thank you for the work you're doing to promote the Gaming Stack Exchange community. Your Google Plus page has some excellent content and is a valuable communication and promotion tool. We at Stack Exchange HQ love that you've taken site promotion into your own hands, support this initiative, and encourage you to continue promoting the site through social media channels, but we also have to send you a friendly reminder to review our guidelines for the use of Stack Exchange trademarked and copyrighted items.

Basically, the name of the page cannot be the name of the site; something along the lines of "Stack Gaming Community" or something else that takes just some elements from our official names would be fine, but "Gaming Stack Exchange" and its logo trademarked. We also need you to make it clear in your description that the page is a community-curated page, not an official Stack Exchange social media property.

We love the work your doing to help spread the word about Gaming Stack Exchange, but we need to keep our official presence and our user-driven initiatives separate and clearly defined. If you start doing awesome things on Google Plus that get media attention, for example, we would have to say "Sorry, don't know what you're talking about" if a media rep got in contact with us to discuss it. It makes things confusing for everyone.

Please review the guidelines linked above, and don't hesitate to get in touch with me if you have any questions about how to make sure you're in compliance with them. Thanks again for all your hard work; keep it up!

and

Apologies for the back-to-back emails; I just realized that the Gaming.StackExchange [Facebook page] lists this same email address. The description on the Facebook page is great (announcing up front that it is an [un]official page), but it still has the same problems as the Google Plus page regarding the name and logo.

I appreciate your cooperation on this, and again, I'm happy to discuss any questions you may have.

Basically our overlords and masters are unhappy with the use of the term Gaming.StackExchange and the use of the heart logo on our social networking sites. I have already changed the names of two of the sites to Stack Gaming Community (I cannot change the Google plus page for about 15 days) but we have not yet acted on the logo situations.

We would like to stress that all of the pages say that they are unofficial in the description, but we can see how they may be mistook for official sites.

Unless we can come to some sort of agreement, we will need a new logo for the sites. So we may try to contact Jin or Sean Gallagher (SE's art guys) for a logo if they are not too busy.

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    I have to say that I really don't see the difference between the automatic twitter bots that tweet any crappy question that isn't closed fast enough and a curated social network presence with hand-selected posts in terms of "officialness". They're both user-generated content, and I'd trust your selection far more than whatever algorithm our twitter bot is using.
    – Mad Scientist
    Feb 10, 2012 at 22:45
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    I'd also like to note that @David Fullerton mentioned back in November that there were plans for the social networking sites, which also contributed to our impression that we pretty much had a greenlight for these as they stood. An explanation as to what, if anything, has changed since then would be greatly appreciated.
    – FAE
    Feb 10, 2012 at 22:48
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    So... Jeff left and everything is falling apart! (don't blame the messenger oh mighty overlords)
    – juan
    Feb 11, 2012 at 3:14

2 Answers 2

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This is a quick message to let the Gaming.SE community know that you all are not in any sort of legal trouble, and I don't want you to feel rushed to come up with a totally new identity for promoting this site. The emails were meant as a friendly reminder that Stack Exchange does have trademark and copyright guidelines that we expect everyone to comply with, even if we haven't been enforcing them as much as we should have. The email hyperlinked to that set of guidelines; you can find it on the legal page if anyone else wants to take a look.

I sincerely apologize if anyone was overly alarmed or confused by this message; that was not my intent. I will be available to be part this conversation if you want me to be, and I will continue to be in contact with the moderators. I expect that this site, as well as the other sites who have community-run social media properties, will cooperate with us on this matter, but I am happy to talk to you as we work through this.

Please know that this was not an initiative that singled out Gaming; I'm working my way through all of the community-run sites that I'm aware of, but Gaming happened to be one of the first that I emailed.

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    Thanks for the update on the situation. We knew about the existence of the guidelines - I just think we got a lot of our confusion from when, 2 weeks ago, we already walked through the guidelines and talked about what pages we already had. I (and others) had thought we were already cleared.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Feb 11, 2012 at 19:14
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Well, well, well. If the higher ups require us to come up with an official unofficial (?!) identity then here's what I have designed in a total of 5 minutes with MS Paint and a little thinking.

Obviously I think of this as nothing more than an ad-interim solution while anybody else comes up with something... anything better.

The Name

Stack Gaming's Bridge

  • We need "Stack" and "Gaming" for searchability obviously
  • Bridge is the name of our chatroom, obviously. We have it, might as well use it.
    • A lot of people have grown to associate "The Bridge" with this site.
    • It's as much branding as we've got as far as names go.
    • It is in no way part of the official branding of the website.

The Logo

enter image description here

I drew up our heart, changed the red to blue, then flipped the image around and tweaked the colors a bit. What we're left with is a pixelated blue bird sorta thing. It's ugly, but:

  • It ever so slightly recalls to the website through the background and the glow effect upon the logo has upon said background.
  • It is pixelated, just like the website's heart.
  • It looks nowhere near a heart and has no bearing with any of the official branding colors.
  • It might be too close to the Twitter bird, or to some other logo I've never seen before.

If a even higher resolution picture is desired, make sure you scale up using nearest neighbor to avoid adding blur.

The colors

The bird's colour is RGB(63, 72, 204). It stands upon a striped background of alternating RGB(0,0,0) and RGB(40,40,40). The eye is RGB(255,255,255). No color palette has been defined as of now. (It's not like we've used the official color palette for anything after all.)

Feel free to take this and make it 9,001% more awesome. Because just 20% more awesome won't cut it.

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    +1 This is why you're awesome.
    – Wipqozn Mod
    Feb 10, 2012 at 23:12
  • -100 this is not the reaction I expected. I excepted much booing and telling me how stupid I was
    – badp
    Feb 11, 2012 at 13:54
  • @badp I think the fact its that we like the concept. The execution? Not so much.
    – Ronan
    Feb 11, 2012 at 16:10
  • @RonanForman well then, go ahead and execute! Jin for one can't help us as he's just moved in his new house, so I guess he's super busy with that. I also wouldn't count on Sean.
    – badp
    Feb 11, 2012 at 16:39
  • Looks like a hen laying an egg standing up. I approve.
    – kotekzot
    Feb 15, 2012 at 10:36

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