Please Help Out in the Support Sections

Hey guys, I noticed there is a bit of back-up in the support sections. We could use some more blender gurus in there. I have not been able to help much the past few days because I am really busy. Blenders support forums are the best, so let’s keep them that way. Please help out even a little bit. Every bit helps. Thanks guys.

It helps when the poster closes the thread (I assume that they set it to solved) or replies to the comments.

true, not everyone does that. but it’s easy to scroll through and see which questions have no replies.

I rather drop the support forum here… or at least only use it where http://blender.stackexchange.com isn’t appropriate.

That’s crazy talk.

Wouldn’t that make Blender one of the only pieces of software in existence with a fragmented community (ie. having to register on 2 or more sites if you want the full community experience)?

I think it’s quite important to keep BA as a complete solution for user’s community and help needs, the support forums are still quite active so you risk a massive pushback if you try to pull it off without any sort of feedback (especially since my quick look at the site suggests there’s far less activity than on BA).

I don’t even know where that idea even came from (only in FOSS land).

You already have blender.org and stack. And to be honest, the advice over on stack is WAYYYY better, and the points system lets you know when you’re getting an answer from somebody who knows what they’re talking about, and when you’re getting an answer that’s a guess from someone who doesn’t. Right now the support here kind of ranks only slightly higher than the help you get on the Facebook groups in terms of quality…

Ofc, interesting read and discussions in these well-worn style threads. But usually there are just several members active. Can’t be that reading takes so much time?
Not that i’m a guru or something but i tend to be in Help more or less. Keeps educated, mutually.
Cheers ;).

I agree, eppo. Helping in the support forums is a good way to expand ones knowledge base. And you help a lot.

I’m not exactly sure if being condescending towards the many people trying to help others around here is a terribly fitting attitude for a moderator.

May I just ask: Is that your personal opinion? Or the widespread belief among the powers operating this community? If it is the latter, why would anyone seriously continue being helpful in these forums, if a) it’s apparently not wanted in the first place and it’s b) considered to be largely inadequate anyway?

Different sites for different purposes, having stackoverflow for Q&A, github for development seems to work pretty well for a lot of people.

SE is better then a forum for Q&A for most of cases, that Im not interested to invest time to answer a question on a forum, that gets quickly buried with other posts on a site without great search functionality… and probably get asked again.

SE is very narrow in its scope, it doesn’t work so well when people aren’t sure what they want, or need advice doing a larger project which doesn’t have a single answer. For this a support forum seems good to have.

Its nothing against blender-artists userbase, IMHO forums are just horrible for Q&A format.
(SE founder makes the point pretty well, recommend the interview if you can spare the time http://thechangelog.com/86/)

I’m really surprised to read the reactions of both moderators posting in this thread, and find it very odd considering in my own experience of learning and using Blender , the support board of Blenderartist has been unvaluable for so many years, i learned so much from reading people asking questions and people answers, i still learn so much from it with all the people coming with different methods to solve a problem.

The idea of getting rid of it in profit to some other website/stackexchange/whatever is silly.

It’s my personal opinion. And it’s not condescension, volunteering to help is great. But giving the wrong answer is just as harmful for someone trying to learn as not answering at all, if not even more damaging. There are hundreds of threads in the support forums where the correct answer is buried in a mess of incorrect answers with no indication as to which was the helpful solution. Most users also never return to their threads to report back, or even worse give a simple “thanks that worked” after four or five suggestions, or leave a “I figured it out myself” without any explanation for others who may have the same issue in the future.

These aren’t all criticisms that lay the blame on the community either, the vBulletin forum system just wasn’t really meant for this type of usage. There isn’t a method of easily leaving feedback or promoting correct responses. I’m just saying that if you’re serious about getting your support questions answered, there are better places to do it for the Blender community, which I think was Campbell’s message as well.

Being a moderator doesn’t mean you can’t point out the shortcomings in your own community. Just like working on Blender doesn’t preclude me from pointing out the areas where it desperately needs attention. If you want a yes-man to say that everything is great around here all of the time, there are plenty who will fit that bill. But I think we’ve seen over the last year with the necessary changes that have been made to BA that this is an evolving community, and the support forums aren’t immune to that fact.

The forum needs a like button cos m9105826’s needs a thumbs up! :smiley:

By no means. But it does mean that you have to be extra careful to make clear if you speak as a private person or an official representative.

To be quite frank, the mods here have been quite explicit about when they are speaking in their role as a moderator. Unless they say otherwise, I assume they are speaking as themselves. They are, after all, primarily members of the Blender community first and moderators further down the list.

Doesn’t Vbulletin have a lot of bells and whistles available for it that could help someone know if they’re getting a answer that is likely to be correct, something like…

  • A ‘trusted support person’ icon that could appear in a member’s post if they are knowledgeable in many area of Blender
  • An answer notification system that sends a PM message to a user getting help that his question has been addressed
  • A ‘helpful’ tag that indicates whether a post was helpful, this could also be a user statistic to help people spot those whose answers can be trusted.
  • A button that can mark posts as having incorrect answers or containing unhelpful jibberish.

An alternative, perhaps it’s possible to plug a stack exchange style support system into BA itself, helpful posts bubble to the top and noise sinks to the bottom.

InkariShinji, your reply is really a good example of why this type of forum is no good for support. As soon as someone says something mildly confrontational, people who take offense will start a debate about it. It all gets mixed into one thread that nobody will want to read. Even years in, people will land on these threads via Google and have to wallow through pages of junk posts that aren’t relevant to anything anymore. I’m not blaming the users for that, it’s just a structural problem of this terrible forum software.

With a system like SE, the useful answers tend to rise to the top. The comments don’t take up much space. It’s all in one page, so you get a quick overview. Duplicate questions are quickly merged. You can even gather achievements, if you’re into that kind of stuff! Clearly, Blender Stackexchange is superior in practically every way, so those people who really want to give support should migrate their efforts to it. Programmers pretty much all switched to Stackoverflow, and it’s worked wonders for us.

To my knowledge, this type of thing happens in nearly every forum and community site you find on the internet, and I rarely see this in the actual support section of BA.

Perhaps to avoid confrontations and hurt feelings, we have the Internet as a whole revert back to the 1.0 days (read, before social networks, before comments sections, back when the only community stuff was text-only chatrooms). The entire knowledge base is written for you by those with the keys to the website containing the info and if you want more, you can just go to your local bookstore.

In a sense, you remove the whole community aspect from the internet and there’s no more hurt feelings :wink:

Whilst I don’t doubt one could find or develop code for vBulletin to accomplish what you are discussing, I think the better question is to ask if it’s worth it given the establishment & success of the Blender StackExchange. What advantage is there in creating an inferior copy of StackExchange (and hacking vBulletin would be inferior)?

As BeerBaron points out, developers have been using StackOverflow for a while now and it is simply head and shoulders above the utility of forums and the like I used to use. Hell, I quite often simply add “stackoverflow” to the end of a Google query just to get straight to their stuff. It is just a better method of getting answers to direct questions.