Would it still be that way once you direct the flood of users now active in the support forums to stack exchange?
It’s not like it uses computer algorithms to determine which posts are the most helpful and which questions are accurate, and another option to improve support here on BA would be to simply use software to only allow trusted members to reply to support threads (if you’re not the one who started the thread). So the ability to offer support will become a privilege that you must earn by showing you have enough Blender knowledge to give good answers.
I don’t see any reason why not. It has worked successfully for Q&A in a very wide variety of areas. What makes you think it won’t for Blender (especially given it’s working just fine now)?
laugh You think the quibbling & argument is a problem now, just wait until you introduce an arbiter on who can & cannot answer questions in the forums. The @#$%-fight that would come out of that would be epic (and not in a good way).
As if it will be any different on the stack exchange when people find their posts being deleted for being akin to ‘noise’ (it doesn’t matter how clear you lay out the rules, you can’t expect all to follow them all of the time).
They won’t be able to complain there, so they’ll just do it here.
How much impact such an arbiter would have depends on whether or not the bulk of the support noise is often initiated by the same handful of members, you can just block them from replying to threads that they did not start. Perhaps in that case then you do it in reverse, you start out being able to help in support and likewise it’s instead a privilege that you can lose.
The reason people get bad answers from time to time, is more because there aren’t enough people helping, and the people who do help are forced to answer questions that are not in their field of expertise, just so they don’t sink into obscurity with not even an attempt at an answer, imo. Also, people can get tired, and fail to read the question correctly, as has happened to me a few times. If there were a few more people helping, this would not be an issue. I agree that there are some efficiency issues, due to the limitations of the forum, but I don’t think it’s anything that cannot be addressed. One thing that comes to mind, is, you will find about a million posts telling people to recalculate normals outside. Seems like there could be a FAQ or something that addresses these common questions.
I concur " that’s crazy talk"
I just saw stack for the first time now. Clicked on animation and there are more unanswered questions then answered, pages of unanswered. It may have been a short study but I have never seen that many unanswered questions here at BA. It has always been like that at Blender.org. I like it here just fine.
Given I’ve been using StackExchange variants for a wide variety of Q&A tasks (I’ve been using StackOverflow for many years now for instance) and it has dealt with that just fine to date - I am still waiting for anything other than your gut feeling that BlenderArtists is a better forum/format for answering people’s questions about Blender than the Blender StackExchange. The flexibility allowed in posts here is because it is a community site and, as such, community issues & community discussion is meant to take place (including some complaining & “noise”). The Blender SE is for Q&A and, as such, doesn’t need to worry about people’s feelings being hurt - they simply need to ensure that questions are being answered. Focus is very important in that regard.
We’re talking about which is better for answering people’s questions, not whether one can stop people complaining about non-Q&A subjects in an open, non-ranked forum. This is the Internet, if someone wants to whinge - they’ll find a place to do it. If it goes against the forum rules here, the moderators can delete it. If it goes against the rules at the Blender SE, it’ll be deleted there.
Still got individuals picking winners & losers explicitly in your scenario rather than the best answers and best experts rising to the top by the combined opinion of all users of the Blender SE. There is a reason that most people go to StackOverflow rather than coding forums these days for answers - that’s because the StackExchange method works.
I think you are making things more difficult for no reason. This is a forum so it has problems and they are called “people”. So what? I find it always funny when people start to talk about the situation in the forum. It’s usually how bad it is, then they try to figure out how to solve those “problems”. It never works like that and anything you do may only make things worse.
for getting much more people to post in specific sections of the forum, it would tremendously help to first restructure the forum;
as an example this would be a possible restructured forum;
Artwork
Support
Coding
General Forums
contests
Jobs
Game Engine
Misc
put the Artwork section on top since the toprow is already suggesting that this is an art forum
and you would like to move fast to the artwork sections.
then the support since that one is important to solve artwork related questions, after that the Coding
for solving open topics in the support section and making new features and stuff.
after those you could put the general forums for the news and announcements and discussing of blender stuff
now put contests, job section and game engine
those topics there because they rely on the above ones and can only work,
if a person can produce artwork and has udnerstood blender in the areas he/she is using it.
last is the misc section as is.
One reason might be that SO/SE caters towards system admins and programmers but Blender is used mainly by artists so it might not be as welcoming or straight-forward.
I think forums are generally perceived as being for general discussion, even if you designate a specific section; the format and layout of forums encourage it. There are extensions and whatnot but that’s part of the motivation behind SO/SE (Q&A).
As for SO/SE, I like how you can select a best answer and answers are ranked - very convenient. With forums, you have to dig around through pages, but then again, forums were meant for discussion and to be read linearly. On the other hand, SE responses are ordered by most helpful rather than chronologically. So the purpose of SO/SE is to find questions to answers quickly without all the unecessary information in the way (you could say that’s why comments are in a smaller font and less conspicuous on SO/SE).
To summarize, let each thing focus on doing its own thing well - SO/SE for support and specific questions, and forums for general discussion or less specific questions.
Right now, looking at this page, I don’t see a link to the Blender SE - there could be better integration between the two communities.
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.
+1000
The support forum is one of the most interesting in BA
On the other hand, general forums became a boring full of trolling topic.
Lot of regular visitors here, with a few or no art posting, they don’t help others, no replies on the support topics… this is the general picture. IMO.
And… endless discussions about the blender UI.
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.
clearly, you aren’t a regular support forum visitor.
Wrong answers followed by right answers is what you get.
However, in most cases, these aren’t right or wrong answers. There are different approaches. In many cases, a thread becomes a nice challenging exercise.
I am with michalis on this I have used the support forums a bit and the are great. The rarely go off-topic I guess because all the champion debaters are stuck in the general forum arguing about the UI for the 100th time.
W.I.P, support, finished projects and traditional are probably my favourite parts of this site.
I think we are all off topic. You want to help here or not or start a new thread.
Here I go off topic again. This is a great place to start. I knew nothing about blender when it was installed on my computer. You can come here and ask when you are not even sure what to ask. I like the personal feel of it here. It is like someone stopping by your desk to help you personally. I feel like I have friends all over the world here. I like the environment here.
Whats the topic of this thread? Will you help here?
+1 Sanctuary like you i have learned a lot and there is a lot resources in the support forum that have been there for year and i don’t think stackexchange or some other website can replace it yet.
I think that Blender artists forum structure doesn’t help the support forum, when they put support forum down there you have to scroll to find it and Blender and CG discussion is on top. The logic is simple when you open BA page you find yourself reading some trash talk and wasting your time in stead of helping some one in need.
With all due respect, though, the general discussion & news forums belong at the top. It’s where most other 3D discussion forums put it, it’s where most of the community spends it’s time discussing a multitude of subjects, and the support sub-forums for most every software community I’ve seen are at the bottom of their respective pages too.
Blender Artists isn’t first & foremost a support site. It is first & foremost a Blender community forum.
From my experience of actually having to to wade through thousands of posts over a number of years, my general impression is that the majority of user activity lies in the Support forums, WIP/Finished works, a big chunk in the game engine and python support. (you are free to actually count the number posts over the last few months in each forum if you wish to supply real data). There is a significant amount in General Discussion but coming from a small number of very active users who have there own club that involves producing large amounts of noise and hot air as they try and pick apart each others unimportant opinions. This just leads to everyone else just getting really bored (I know I do and I’m sure I’m not the only one), leaving them to get on with it until one of them stands supreme as the last man standing. A winner we can all be proud of !!
IMHO the support forums is a vital part of this forum. I agree sometimes you get some incorrect answers ( although in my case that really has not happened that much.) I’ve been using Blender for about 3 years and I still find myself going there for help and support.
One thing that probably could be done, to at least encourage people to mark posts solved, is make it a heck of a lot easier and more visable for them to actually do it.
tl;dr if you have time, help answer questions in the forum you prefer, either here or stackexchange… the important thing is to help, not to debate which is the best spot to answer the same question.
I’d wager that the vast majority of my however-many-thousand posts here have been in the Support forums. In fact, I’m pretty sure it was my help in the support forum that got me added to the Cycles dev module, and as a mod here in the first place. Doesn’t mean I have to like the format, or even agree that it’s necessary to have. Forum discussion is just a terrible way to get support. Again, IMO. It’s slow, overcrowded, inaccurate, and the abysmal search engine that comes with vBulletin doesn’t help either. This doesn’t mean I won’t continue to help out as much as I can there. I just feel that IRC and SE are superior support avenues.
