Welcome to the forum for the Global Space Balloon Challenge! This forum is the crux of the GSBC community - introduce your team, share your ideas, ask questions, and help others successfully fly their balloons. Anything and everything about HABs is welcome. Be nice and follow the rules for your forum behavior, but please make this forum your own.

What is This Forum About?

The Global Space Balloon Challenge (GSBC) is the coming together of people around the world to simultaneously fly high altitude balloons from every corner of the globe, celebrating an age where anyone can reach the edge of space for a few hundred dollars and a few weekends of work. Learn more and join the fun on our website or check out the hundreds of teams from dozens of countries already signed up!

On this forum, get the help you need for your HAB from the “tutorials” and “technical Q&A” categories. Let us know when you are flying throughout the year and what happens through the “launch announcements and results” category so everyone can see your progress! Educators head to the “education” category and if you need anything else or want to share something awesome, check out “general questions and sharing” [link]. For all GSBC information, we’ll be posting to “challenges and previous results” for prize info and results from last year and to “GSBC announcements” for nearly everything else challenge related.

Requirements for Participation in the GSBC

Anyone participating in the Global Space Balloon Challenge must follow these requirements:

You must be part of a team with at least one other member. This is to ensure everyone’s safety as they assemble and fly their balloons.
Your payload must contain a camera. We know this adds weight to your balloon, but we believe sharing photos is the best way to inspire and connect with other teams, a critical component of the GSBC.
Your payload must carry a GPS. This will allow you to track and recover your payload safely.
You must follow all your local regulations. Please see the regulations page for more information.
Challenge submissions must be submitted by no more than 1 week after the challenge window has closed.
Everyone on a team must have signed up on the website and accepted the Terms and Conditions.

Before Creating New Help Topics, Please...

Make sure that you take a look around before just starting a new topic - there's a good chance that somebody else has already asked the same question.

Please search before opening a new topic, as someone might have
already created the topic you want to open. Note that we do search on
your behalf as you compose a new topic, too.
When creating a topic, be sure to select the correct category so it
is easier to find. It is OK to leave category blank if none feel
applicable.
Make sure to be very descriptive in your topic, and give it an
accurate title. If you just post "my balloon doesn't work", we can't and
won't help.

Things to Avoid Doing

Do not post affiliate links in posts. Nobody else will appreciate
them, and you will be flagged by other users.
Please do not spam us with your web site link. Nobody appreciates
people who sign up and then spam their software immediately without
contributing. There are some exceptions, but you should first email
us to ask if you can.
Please do not act like a troll. People posting nonsense, demonstrably
false statements, propaganda, or inflaming other people repeatedly
for no reason will be warned and then banned. This is meant to be a
civil discussion area.
Please do not post other people's work or information as your own. Cite properly. You may not post descriptions of, links to, or methods for stealing someone’s intellectual property (software, video, audio, images), or for breaking any other law.

Be Agreeable, Even When You Disagree

You may wish to respond to something by disagreeing with it. That’s fine. But, remember to criticize ideas, not people. Please avoid:

Name-calling.
Ad hominem attacks.
Responding to a post’s tone instead of its actual content.
Knee-jerk contradiction.

Instead, provide reasoned counter-arguments that improve the conversation. Be clear and concise.

Your Participation Counts

The conversations we have here set the tone for everyone. Help us influence the future of this community by choosing to engage in discussions that make this forum an interesting place to be — and avoiding those that do not.

Discourse provides tools that enable the community to collectively identify the best (and worst) contributions: favorites, bookmarks, likes, flags, replies, edits, and so forth. Use these tools to improve your own experience, and everyone else’s, too.

If You See a Problem, Flag It

Moderators have special authority; they are responsible for this forum. But so are you. With your help, moderators can be community facilitators, not just janitors or police.

When you see bad behavior, don’t reply. It encourages the bad behavior by acknowledging it, consumes your energy, and wastes everyone’s time. Just flag it. If enough flags accrue, action will be taken, either automatically or by moderator intervention.

In order to maintain our community, moderators reserve the right to remove any content and any user account for any reason at any time. Moderators do not preview new posts in any way; the moderators and site operators take no responsibility for any content posted by the community.

Keep It Tidy

Make the effort to put things in the right place, so that we can spend more time discussing and less cleaning up. So:

Don’t start a topic in the wrong category.
Don’t cross-post the same thing in multiple topics.
Don’t post no-content replies.
Don’t divert a topic by changing it midstream.

Rather than posting “+1” or “Agreed”, use the Like button. Rather than taking an existing topic in a radically different direction, use Reply as a New Topic.

Terms of Service

Yes, legalese is boring, but we must protect ourselves – and by extension, you and your data – against unfriendly folks. We have a Terms of Service describing your (and our) behavior and rights related to content, privacy, and laws. To use this service, you must agree to abide by our TOS.