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Python tags and versions
It would seem a python is in order, should it be a separate tag or alias for scripting?
Also, should python or python-api have different versions, or that would be irrelevant?

With regards to versioning, the important differences between Python 2 and 3 would be rare enough that we shouldn't need distinct tags. Just specify which one in the question if necessary.

You can also script in C and C++

Python is the only scripting language used in Blender, any questions related to it can stay under python as they might extend past the api and into the language a bit, say something like 'stringifying' an object str(obj) for use in the gui, no need to start derivations. Let's try and keep everything as clean as possible.
As mentioned below scripting already exists, but keep in mind that Python based questions could be allowed to a degree as it relates to general Blender excluding scripting.
Examples..

Do I need to download and install Python before using Blender?
What version of Python does Blender use and how can I tell?

At the moment, [tag:scripting] exists and [tag:python] doesn't... Besides, the version question still holds

@JNF python usage questions can be asked that don't directly relate to scripting but do relate to Blender.

So you're saying two separate tags are in order?

@JNF quite possibly, I have edited it into the answer.

Thank you. That wasn't clear from the previous version of your answer.

I think it would make sense to have separate tags at least for python-2.x and python-3.x to keep compatibility straight. These two versions of Python are not perfectly compatible, and if either the OP or the answerer ever wants to include a code snippet, it could be useful to have these tags.


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Are questions about third party paid addons on topic?
I have been looking into using stackexchange for Q&A about our own addons, However the questions we get so far are mostly related to blender itself and actually we do not get so many questions anyways.
So would it be okay to ask/answer questions related to third party Blender addons in the blender.stackexchange community? And ask users to tag the questions with the addon name?

What exactly about them? Using them? Asking if there is such an addon? Writing them?

Related: http://meta.blender.stackexchange.com/q/267/599

I mean questions which raise from the usage of third party addons. In most cases these questions are closely related to blender's usage in general. So i thought maybe it makes sense to answer these questions in the context of blender.stackexchange.

I don't see why not..

well our Addon is "commercial" in the sense of we sell it. That might annoy users. However i believe stackexchange is an awesome way to share knowledge. I thought about setting up our own stackexchange community. But that will most probably fail because of too few users and too few questions.

@GaiaClary I can see what you mean because Blender is free but that doesn't mean we have to tie ourself to that regarding this community so its fine. Here on SE there are several sites that are based around a commercial application.

This site is about Blender and anything Blender related as long as it's allowed in our scope, commercial or free though we would more prefer the latter, I don't see why not. So that would include addons such as BlenderCookie's Contour, Unity interactions or even getting VRay configured etc .

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

sort: votes


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Usage of "baking" tag
The baking tag reads:

Baking is the act of pre-computing something in order to speed up some other process later down the line. Use this tag for Blender's bake feature under the Render panel.

Is it also okay to use this tag in reference to issues in baking physics systems? This seems to fall under the description of "pre-computing something … to speed up some other process later."

I wrote the original excerpt for this tag, so the limitation you are asking about is my fault. I neglected the fact that it could be explicitly open to all types of baking such as fluid sims, smoke etc so yes, it can be used. Feel free to edit it accordingly and if anything else comes to mind, it will be added as well.

All right, thanks.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


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Are there any banners or ads that I can use to promote this site on my site?
Please let me know how I can do my part. If there is any way I can promote this site with ads, banners, etc I would be happ to add them to my site.

SE doesn't make specifically branded banners or such until a site graduates and gets its own theme. Right now we'll have too make our own banners/ads.
You can find StackExchange's logo in a higher resolution here. Just be sure to follow their guidelines outlined here.
You can also find useful pieces of elevator pitch and such to describe the site on the About page.
You can see some ideas another beta site had with regards to a flyer to promote the site here.
As an after thought, we could have sort of a contest where users could design ads and post them on a meta post (sort of like Photography.SE's weekly photo contest). Other users would vote for the ads they like.

This has also been done over on Anime.SE, once we get some moderation in place, it will be taken care of http://meta.anime.stackexchange.com/questions/364/community-promotion-ads-on-the-se-network

You can get your user "flair" on your profile. It's an HTML anchor and image that updates regularly. You can use it to "show-off" your reputation and badge achievements.

Not sure this is what the OP is looking for

@Luke he could be. To advertise Blender.SE and his profile at the same time.

+1 I think flair is a very good alternative and i have it on my Blender blog :)


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What does exactly means "User was removed" with -5 reputation loss?
I discovered this change this morning, and was surprised. I'm just curious about the meaning of this reputation loss :
-5 User was removed
Thanks for your enlightenment.

Also see http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/125740/238438

It simply means that a user is no longer on the site (their account was removed by request or by violating site rules). When an account is removed, so are the votes the user has cast, be it upvotes or downvotes.
Read more on meta.so, What does "user was removed" mean and why did my reputation change because of it?.


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Is it possible to use tabs in posts?
Is it possible to use tabs in posts?
When I paste a tab (the browser catches the input of pressing Tab and changes the selected field, so I have to paste it in) into a post, it works in the editing box, but does not appear in the rendered markdown version.
Is this possible? If not, is there some way to get equivalent functionality?

You can't use an actual tab for the same reason you said above. StackExchange sites function like most other sites as opposed to a code editor so Tab behaves like it should. You have to use spaces but not the normal ones as SE will ignore whitespace for the most part and 4+ spaces triggers a block of code in markdown.
I actually have two spaces here. (click edit on this answer to check)
# and the four spaces before this have made it into code..

So, one way you can achieve this is by using html, as obviously, SE supports a subset.
Use   to get a space. Join more together for more space(s).

  is the entity used to represent a non-breaking space. It is essentially a standard space, the primary difference being that a browser should not break (or wrap) a line of text at the point that this occupies. (src)

Eg.
  Two space indentation
    Four space indentation
        Eight space indentation
Also, there is a user script on stackapps that might be of some interest if you really need this to work.

This user script changes the behavior of a few keys (most notably the Tab key) within the post editor to behave more like it does in IDEs or text editors:

What about the way tabs automatically adjust their length to match other tabs above and below? (for an example of this, click edit on this post)

@gandalf3 I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be seeing here. Those aren't tabs, those are 4 spaces and as I said, SE strips or doesn't render whitespace for more than one space in a line.

Did you look between the tags and the arrows when editing? (not in the rendered version, but the versions in the edit box)

@gandalf3 SE will preserve the spaces while editing but it won't render them. It's a good way to organize long posts and space content but it won't be rendered when saved.


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Suggested edit notification wrong
The suggested edit notification has been consistently wrong (in an inconsistent way) for a few weeks now. No amount of refreshing and cache-deletion seems to fix it.

It's always off, but the amount by which it's wrong varies.
Is it just me?

This stopped happening for a while, then started again..

This is by design. See this post at Meta.SE: http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/233535/224428.

Copy paste from meta.se for closure.

It won't, at least not always. The review indicator in the top-bar is not calculated on a per-user basis, but on a per-site basis. The counts in the review queue itself are calculated on a per-user basis. The top-bar indicator also won't always be accurate (and it's cached), which is why the tooltip has a ~ to indicate it's an approximate value.
There are several things that could cause an item to not show up for you in review, but still show up in the total per-site count. It could be that you've already reviewed the item and it's still waiting to be completed, you could have skipped it, or you could have previously taken action on the post in question that prevents you from being able to review it.


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Is it possible to format specific characters inside words?
Is it possible to format letters inside words?
For example, making the first letter in a word bold. When I try this with **b**old, I get
*b*old
As you can see, it's italicized, but not bold. ***b***old gives
*b*old
Is it possible to format letters inside words without extra asterisks?

This was an issue that was fixed some time around April 2014. See balpha's answer (he is an SE dev) for more information.
Now you can make only the first letter bold (**b**old), using just asterisks. (Fun fact if you just click the edit button on your question you will see the live markdown now displays correctly.)
However the triple asterisks (***b***old) wont work. you have to use **_b_**old which will render bold and italics. However if you want an entire word bold and italics you can use the three asterisks.
Another thing that has changed is underscores in a word are completely ignored. Here_is_an_example_
Yet the same thing with asterisks will display like this: Hereisanexample

I wonder why it only appears in my question when editing.. Did they preserve the old behavior for posts written before a certain date?

well kind of. The html is actually stored in the database, so if the post is not updated (edited) then the old markdown rendering will stay.

Remember SE supports a strict subset of html. If markdown fails or is  behaving awry, you can always fall back to this.
bold gives bold.


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How can I delete a tag?
I accidentally created a tag (ve), How do I delete it?

You can't directly delete a tag. The process to remove one (not having it appear as a suggestion) is that you untag it from any question(s) that it was attached to and the system will remove it after a while.
IIRC.. the tag script runs daily so any orphaned tags (those not attached to a question) will automatically be removed provided no one uses it in that space of time.
Also see How can we get rid of misspelled and unused (or "zombie") tags?


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How should the site look?
What kind of color scheme and style should the site have?
Should it be similar to blender's UI and default theme?
Should it look like other blender related sites?
E.g.

Blender.org
BlenderNation.com
BlenderArtists.org

What are some opinions on this?

Nice initiative. I think we should go for something flat and clean like http://photo.stackexchange.com/ where we could have render of the week in the header etc. More ideas to come!

Is there any chance we could get the same header as Blender.org, similar to how AskUbuntu has the same header as Ubuntu.org? It would also be good if Blender.org's header could be updated to include a link to here.

@Keavon We already are linked in the support section

I know. I didn't mean this as a way of publicity, but more of a way to create continuity between the sites if the menu bar were used like on AskUbuntu.

What happened to this project? I am a web developer, and I would like to know if I can make a custom version that only runs when it loads for me. Is this possible?

This guy should be the site mascot!

@NoviceInDisguise like a userstyle?

@gandalf3 Exactly what I wanted, although your version seems to be pretty good too.

Update
Following Dan the Man's suggestion of doing something similar to blender.org, I've created a proof of concept stylish theme:

Install it from userstyles.org to use it live (it covers the entire site) :)
Tested on Firefox and Chromium. There is a strange issue in chromium where it doesn't render properly when refreshing the page, but clicking on links (even a link to the current page) makes it render correctly. Other than that it seems to work fine.
Icons
For the icons, some ideas which I liked most:
Badges
With a gradient:

Flat

Both are rendered in cycles ;)
Voting
Unselected var 1

Unselected var 2

Selected var 1

Multi-colored version, as suggested by A Wild RolandiXor:

Thanks to @catlover2 for early testing and feedback :)

I think the tabs/question links need more padding, and the logo needs to be smaller. It feels a little squished in the top fourth of the screen.

Also, is StackExchange needed in the logo? I've looked at other graduated sites and none of them have that. I like the icons a lot. The only thing I think worth changing about them, is the check itself. I like the first one, but the other two are too skinny.

@CharlesL I think we will get a logo and a new name once we graduate, I just put it like that because this site is known as "Blender StackExchange".

ah, ok. Anyway, nice job :D

I like the icons.

@CharlesL I agree, I made the skinny ones with the check boxes in blender's UI in mind, but it doesn't look very nice..

I like your up and down icons, but I really dislike the rest of the icons and design.

@Keavon Looking at them now I kind of agree with you :P

The voting buttons look similar to a google place mark for a map. https://developers.google.com/maps/articles/toomanymarkers/markerclustererfullnocluster.png  What is the circle there for anyway?

@David I took the blender logo, removed the arms and made it more like an arrow instead.

I love the Suzanne badges! +1

Me too! It looks awesome!

Me gusta mucho.

The up and downvote buttons could have different circle colours. One could be orange and the other blue. That would be a good visual distinction that other sites don't have (to my knowledge).

@AWildRolandiXor Interesting idea! But which should be blue and which should be orange..?

Since blue tends to be associated with positive things, maybe upvotes should be blue and down votes orange. When a vote has been applied, then the colour of the chosen button could change to the colour of the circle, and the colour of the circle could be white. That way, the user would see things they upvoted as having a blue upvote button with a white circle, and below it, a white button with an orange circle (basically what you had for selected var 1).

I really like how the new blender.org site looks. Flat and slick (yet slightly vibrant). We could do something similar. The main colors are pure white, F8F8F8, #444444, #109df0, #ddd, #f84, and #5f5f5f. It heavily uses the 'Open Sans' font.
+1 if you like the idea.

The Blender colors are welcome of course but think we should go for the old dark look if we were to emulate that site in any way. http://photo.stackexchange.com/ is a nice clean site, I think we should go for something similar to that, large header etc. The tall font on the new site kinda throws me off.

I like the idea of using those colors, but I agree with @iKlsR about the font. It's too tall, and doesn't match the rest of the fonts.

I think that the blender UI should be represented through the site, yet without compromising the user experience (the gray background is just too radically different from what people are used to). We can still use a few buttons/icons here and there.

Accept Answer

Upvote / Downvote

Various (by gandalf3, you can view these icons with the bundled icons addon)

Blue Polygon Background
This is a specific idea for the background (I also changed the font to Open Sans) that helps start the look of the site. I used the http://chemistry.stackexchange.com theme (modified) for the proof of concept. Naturally it would need some tweaking, but I think it has potential.
Polygons make up all 3D art in blender (with a very very few exceptions) They are an intrinsic aspect of 3D, and are also a powerful design element.

Some have suggested limiting the background to the header:

Also, I used this answer on the site to create the background :D. That is the beauty of SE!

Some sort of polygonal background would fit well with the theme of the site

I personally find the blue too distracting in the first example, the second is better imo. Maybe a little too detailed, what if you make the polygons bigger in the second example?

@gandalf3 I ment to, however it is quite a pain to adjust

Here's my variation on this idea, I like your colors better though.

I wanted to jump in here. I do not yet have a full blown site mock up, but some ideas.
First, I really like the way the top of the https://ux.stackexchange.com/ looks. Picture that blue stripe in blender orange.
Second, I thought gandalf3's idea to use the monkey as the badge was neat, but the silhouette was too unconventional. So here is my proposal for the badges.

Smaller (12px) and with more contrast.
For the voting buttons the first two are in the voted state, the grey is default unvoted.

I will add more to this in the coming days.

Nice! I like the badges, but I feel like there could be a tiny bit more contrast around the Suzanne (but maybe that's just me). Also, I'm not sure we can have badges that large (I believe the default badge icons are 12px). How do they look at a smaller size and with varying backgrounds?. The vote icons and the banner idea seem a little bit plain to me, but again that's just my personal opinion. +1

After looking at some other sites, it seems that we do have some freedom as far as size/dimensions after all. AskUbuntu has big badges in places where the name of the badge is displayed (with the exception of tag badges). Tag badges and badges in other places have smaller versions of the icons. GraphicDesign has smaller badges, which are not all circular. AndroidEnthusiasts is an example of a mascot used as a badge icon.

@gandalf3 12px huh? well I was hopping we could work with at least 16px. See updated post for the badges. About the others being too plain, well I kind of agree with you. I will post something better later.

How about something like this?

I'm still working on the spacing of everything as well as adding a little more texture, but you can still get the general idea.

Update 2:

This is too plain IMO. I would recommend looking at other graduated sites and seeing how they do things. Usually there are unique icons, custom accepted answer marks etc.

@iKlsR What about now?

Way too plain. Something more like the main Blender site would be better.

@DigitalArchitect On the other hand, the default blender theme is all gray.

Yeah, we should take ideas from other graduated sites. Christianity.SE, for example, it's anything but plain.

Hey, I love that site you made CharlesL . Personally I think that there should be the option to choose what style you want maybe there could be a settings page.

I like the white background for a clean look, my first impression was it looks like SO but I was wrong it were only the colors I associated with SO. I don't like the bulky gray banner.

@stacker very good point. You could fit more info if the banner was smaller.

No just no O_o...

I agree with Dan's answer that we would need colors (or symbols) to make our site recognizable at first sight. After quickly reading up on graphics design (not in English so I didn't learn any technical terms), I thought that a simple mesh could represent an abstraction of blender.
According to Usage in artwork and community websites the Blender logo should only be used to point to blender.org
Under the following conditions, third parties may use the Blender logo as well:

The logo can only be used to point to the product Blender. When used with a link on a
web page, it should point to the url blender.org.

You will visualize and promote your > own branding more prominent than you use the Blender logo. The Blender logo only can
be used as a secondary brand, which means it has to be clear for an average viewer
that this is not an official Blender or Blender Foundation website, publication or
product.

You can use the Blender logo on promotion products, such as T-shirts or caps
or trade show booths, provided it is a secondary brand as described in point

The logo is used unaltered, without fancy enhancements, in original colors,
original typography, and always complete (logo + text blender).

In case you use the
logo on products you sell commercially, you always have to contact us with a picture
of  how it will be used, and ask for explicit permission

This means we couldn't borrow the offical blender logo, and would need to have our own.
The design goals were that the banner shouldn't take too much room to leave more space for content, it should be recognizable. The mesh abstraction shouldn't be too dominant, it should have a fresh look. The font should be somewhat 'futuristic'

Some variations I think the mesh-thing could be easily over-used :

It would love to discuss any critics and suggestions.
This was created with inkscape if anybody would like start with improvements rather than from scratch I could upload the file.
Credits:

Fabric shader in the banner from: http://blenderthings.blogspot.de/2012/12/a-fabric-osl-shader-for-blender-cycles.html
Cycles wireframe in the banner from http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/41864
Blender logo: http://www.blender.org/about/logo/

I didn't vote, but in my honest opinion, this doesn't look very modern. It looks like something born in the 90s.

Just after posting the following, I saw there is a more recent question asking for site design input and thought it better to post there. Not sure which is more relevant, so leaving this double-post up for now.

I think aesthetics and a good sense of design and composition should take priority over looking "themey". Sure, having the Blender colors in a couple of places - used tastefully - could be good. But if the icons are all literal elements taken from Blender's UI it could start to look gimmicky and cheap. And while we love Suzanne, she's one of the more overused and definitely less sexy symbols associated with Blender. Could we maybe think outside the box a little more?
It should be sexy. It should be chic. It should be smart. It should demonstrate that this is a place for artists who understand design, not just people with a purely technical understanding of Blender. This may be a place to find out "how" but let's not forget the "why", which is the creative element. Blender is a powerful pro graphics application being used by many brilliant artists and we owe it to the community to deliver something that impresses and inspires.
What might such a design look like? I invite discussion along this train of thought.

The new one is the official one and the newer one. So new discussions would be better placed there, to keep the old and new ideas organized

A gloomy variant (Edit: improved readability and increased dpi)

Downvoted due to bad readability?

That blue is hard to read


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Asking questions concerning people's opinion
Have been trawling the net trying to find decent tutorials for various parts of blender and was wondering if it is acceptable to ask on this site. I know this concerns people's opinions but was wondering if I put a specific area of blender down i.e node editing, video editing, constraints, if it would be allowed.

See this post here, this might help a bit pertaining to this site.. we also have a beginners reference post.

When an area of Blender isn't clear to you, instead of looking for tutorials, look for the words needed to focus on a question about specific things. The wiki pages for the various areas in Blender are reasonably informative, but had they been perfect then sites like BlenderSE wouldn't need to exist.
You can always drop into the main blender chatroom on StackExchange ( currently) The RenderFarm to ask people about tutorials for topics. If no one is active, ask anyway and check the logs later.
You will find you learn more if you ask for fellow chatters to help you find the vocabulary needed to do your own search engine searches for tutorials.


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Site(s) to use for uploading images and files
What are the easiest to use sites for uploading screen shots and blend files so that I can share them with the community members?

SE automatically uploads images to http://stack.imgur.com.

For example, I uploaded the above picture by clicking the Image button and the picture was uploaded to https://i.sstatic.net/vQQKL.png.
As far as .blend files, you can use any upload site. I personally prefer Google drive for convenience, but other people use dropbox and other sites.
Edit (by GiantCowFilms)
We now have Blend-Exchange which is free and dedicated for hosting .blend files for this site.

cheers for that

I have a post that I think can be useful pertaining to this, will link it here soon.

I had started writing one a couple weeks ago but didn't post it yet.

@iKIsR cheers that will be helpful

It's exactly as Luke says, it's best to use the dedicated imgur site to upload images. Here is a post that can help you optimize the images that you upload. How can I optimize images and screenshots that I embed in my post?
As for blend files, you can use any service you like, dropbox, box, mediafire etc. The best one to use in my opinion however is PasteAll.org. The site naturally supports blend-files and even offers some security should you need to use it otherwise. The only con is that files are kept for ~5 months or so.

Indeed, my linked script is gone. In my case I should have used pastebin https://blender.stackexchange.com/q/39616/5334 according to pasteall: When you paste, just assume that it will be here forever, but consider that it may be gone in a second! We might delete really old posts in the future or something out of our reach could happen resulting in loss of data. and more recently: files are kept for ~5 months

Here's my suggestion about where to post ~.blend files related to questions on Blender Stack Exchange: www.blendswap.dom, or another of the free repositories of ~.blend files in the community. Using of one (or more, if we want to avoid the appearance of partiality) of these sites would eliminate the issue of files being deleted, and would expose users, especially novice users) to valuable valuable Blender resource(s). It might be necessary to negotiate an arrangement with administrators and developers of sites used to permit deep linking to the blend file in a dedicated area on their site, to permit users who are not registered on the particular site on which a ~.blend file is listed to download the files in a question or an answer without the need for registration, and to allow the upload of files which might otherwise not meet site guidelines.
We might also want to add an icon to the editing icons directly above the edit box that would act on blend files the same way uploaded image files are added to the imgur site.

Thanks for chiming in :) Here's some related discussion on this topic if you haven't already seen it: http://meta.blender.stackexchange.com/q/373/599, http://meta.blender.stackexchange.com/q/297/599, http://meta.blender.stackexchange.com/q/344/599, http://meta.blender.stackexchange.com/q/166/599.

I saw those threads when I was looking for recommendations on where to post blend files. I had trouble deciding exactly which old question to answer, so I closed my eyes, pointed at the screen and answered the one I was point most closely to.

When the site gets out of beta, we will most likely get a dedicated service.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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Reasons for closing questions in beta
Going through the beta site, I noticed that some questions are answered and closed and others are answered and open. What are the rules for closing a question? I have questions that are answered sufficiently enough for my needs, do I have to close them myself?

In short, Lindsey, you probably shouldn't be closing your own questions. The main reason why questions get closed is that they, in some way, are not a good fit for our site. Good questions (even if they have acceptable answers) should remain open so that later users can potentially add even better answers later.

@Gwenn I make note of that in my answer, I think OP might have them a bit mixed up.

I am not sure exactly what you are asking pertaining to closed questions, you might be confusing them a bit with accepted answers so I will answer as generally as I can.
Some questions are answered and closed because sometimes it takes the community a while to accumulate the votes needed to close the question as off-topic etc. In that time, people might have posted what they thought to be ok answers etc. Here are some examples:

How to create a simple extruded box model?
What are the best graphics cards for cycles?
Why is Quadro slower than GTX rendering on GPU cycles?

Others are answered and closed/locked because while they are not good questions that we should allow on the site, we answer them because of how generic they are and because they are very likely to get asked again.
Lastly, some questions are possibly answered and closed because they have been asked already or because they are so similar in content with another that they can be merged. (Any any answers on the duplicate will be transferred to the first one.) Here are some examples:

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/1179/how-to-append-two-blender-files
How to Simulate the marble procedural texture in cycles
How can i use an image as a background in Blender Render?

Closed questions are basically those that don't fit well in the scope of the site and are too vague or broad to be reasonably answered. For example:

What are the best graphics cards for cycles?
https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/573/strange-blender-bug-on-laptop
How do you keep a single object from casting a shadow?

Questions that are answered and open are because the OP didn't accept an answer.
If you have questions that are answered and you are satisfied with them, don't 'close' them per se. You can accept an answer as the one that was useful to you by pressing the little arrow next to it.
To see all the reasons questions are closed and for more information related to this.. See the section on it in the help pages.

Do we have an off-topic list somewhere here on Meta?

@DantheMan http://meta.blender.stackexchange.com/q/1/12

You might want to check out https://blender.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions. It explains what "closed" (or "on hold")  are and why they are used. I will briefly explain here.

Some questions have already been asked or are answered by another question's answer. These are marked as duplicates, which is a type of closing.
There are some questions that aren't a good fit for this site. For example, a question about drawing unicorns would be off-topic here. It is not about Blender or the topics listed here.
Other questions are just unclear or ambiguous. A question asking "why isn't blender running quickly" with no further details or in very unclear grammar would fall into that category.
Some questions are very broad. For example, "How do I use blender?" is a broad question. People have written entire books about that.
Others solicit opinions rather than hard facts. "What is your favorite blender feature?" simply asks for everyone's opinion. There's no correct answer and cannot be answered factually.

When a question falls into one of these categories, users with over 500 reputation can vote to close them. When a question receives five close votes1, it is put on hold for five days. If the question is not fixed by the end of those five days, it is closed.
A closed (or on hold) question does not accept answers. A closed (or on hold) question can also be reopened by five reopen votes if it is improved.1
Closing is for questions that are not a good fit for the site or need work. When you receive an answer to your question that fixes your problem, mark it as the accepted answer by clicking the check mark beside it. No need to close it.
1 A moderator can close or reopen a question single-handedly if they see fit.


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Efficiently adding images to posts
When uploading a screenshot is there anyway to blow it up or somewhere to put it so viewers can see the full size of the image, as some of the detail may be obscured when shrunk down to fit the question box. thank you.

Normally, we can just open it in a new tab etc. You don't need to worry about this, as long as your original image has a decent resolution.

If you use an HTML <img>, you can enclose it within an anchor tag <a> to point it to the image. Make sure you upload it the normal way, first.

The only way to do this is with javascript or css, and it's not possible to include either in the answers. Unless this feature was added by website administrators, it's not possible.

Right clicking and opening in a new tab is the usual way to do this. You can also make a copy of the autogenerated image link, and then encapsulate the image markup in link markup, using the image link as your destination URL.

Expanding on Roland's answer, you can accomplish that with the following Markdown:
[![Click for Larger Version](http://example.com/img.jpg)](http://example.com/img.jpg)

Example:


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Where can I search for my favorite questions?
There was a star button for each question which says "This is a favorite question", I wonder where I can find all the qustions I've ever tagged as favorite? Thanks!

There is a Favorites tab on your main profile next to Badges. Here is yours.

Ah, there it is, never noticed it, thanks!


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Are questions about modifying the source code allowed here?
I downloaded and built the source code to add a few tweaks that I couldn't add with scripting.
Are questions about the source code allowed here?

Update
Now 3 years later, see Source code questions in 2016

Unfortunately no..
It was decided by the community (see #4) to make these off-topic for several reasons.

C/C++ related questions are way out of the scope of what this site is and should be about.
Most if not all questions that could possibly fall under this would be extremely localized…
The site is intended more for artists than developers as it says in the description.

... Q&A site for people who use Blender to create 3D graphics, animations, or games.

So keep it to scripting only — Python, GLSL and OSL only related questions are allowed to an extent if kept minimal and in relation to Blender but for anything else programming related, you are better off asking on StackOverflow, the bf-committers mailing list or visiting the IRC channel #blendercoders on the freenode network.


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Is the edit-mode tag needed?
Recently several questions were tagged edit-mode. It has no description and has very few answers associated with it (probably because the tag itself appeared not so long ago).
With this logic, there would be needed tags 'object-mode', 'weight-mode' etc. but wouldn't that be overtagging ? I don't see what becomes clearer with this tag; it could be better to tag some of the adjacent questions as 'editing' and add several others fitting the situation.
Or probably it should be used only for troubleshooting questions with scripting solutions where mentioning interaction mode is important.
So is this tag really needed ? Does it make a post in any way better understandable / searchable ?

I don't think so, generally these should fall under the broader editing or mesh sometimes which is more meta. I've made it a synonym to editing. As we also have tags such as weight-painting and texture-painting we really don't need tags for the specific interaction modes.

Feel free to start a discussion on this here.

Thanks for the answer! And another question..I wanted to make sure there aren't cases when mentioning interaction mode could be important. E.g. this question, where this is what is discussed; this fits under python and editing though.

That shifts more to python and is tagged properly IMO. Maybe a tag for interaction-mode specifically could come in handy. We do tag cleanups every now and then so will keep and eye on it, but we have the big useful general ones now that work.

I feel as if it would be good for questions about the way Edit mode works or perhaps a bug inside it. Although I can't see new people or even some others using it at the right times. (My opinion, not a solution)


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Bug? Indented code block not interpreted after list
See here:

Item one
Item Two
this is supposed to be a code comment
import bpy
print(bpy.context.scene.name)

this should not be indented I guess

Item one
Item Two

(add something here to fix code block interpretation)
import bpy
print(bpy.context.scene.name)

Am I overlooking something obvious in post formatting?

This is an ambiguity in the Markdown specification. See Code block is not properly formatted when placed immediately after a list item.
A quick and simple fix is to do as you've done and put a string of text there. A comment <!-- --> should do the job if you need to keep the post clean.

Item one
Item Two

# this is supposed to be a code comment
import bpy
print(bpy.context.scene.name)

this should not be indented I guess

Thanks for clarification! It's not allowed to edit non-wiki posts on meta sites, so can't check the markdown of your post, but not really needed. Will use a comment if needed!


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The moderators of Blender Stack Exchange are on strike
In direct response to the disorderly firing of Monica Cellio and the increasing distrust in SE policies and tone shift towards the community as a whole, all the mods of BSE have recorded themselves as "Inactive."
What does that mean? We will be non-active except for critical cases.
Our protest is completely independent of the LGBTIQAP+ debate this issue now has spiraled into. The community's present heightened state of disapproval and mistrust of SE stems from two massively unpopular actions SE took within a short time frame:

The spontaneous de-modding of Monica Cellio, and by large the community as a whole after the fact.
The pronoun change in the Code of Conduct, the FAQ for pronoun usage, and SE's handling of the community's response.

To be 100% clear, we (the mods of BSE) are inactive in protest of the way Monica Cellio was de-modded.

If you are just hearing of all this for the first time let me try to quickly fill you in, more details can be found here and here.
On Sept 18th mods got a hint that there would be a upcoming CoC pronoun change (this was in a mod only chat room). Monica held the opinion that the singular they is grammatically incorrect and would not refer to someone as "they".
Monica had a further correspondence with SE via email.
On Sept 27th Monica's moderator privileges were removed - without any warning.
To make matters worse SE maligned Monica on meta, in responses on child metas, on twiter, and in the media.
On Oct 6th SE issued an apology saying they treated Monica wrongly.
Then on Oct 11th a working draft of the new "Moderator Warning, Removal & Reinstatement Processes." was released for moderators. This rubbed salt into the still fresh wound. Under the new processes there is no circumstance where Monica would have been removed in the way she was.
Whether or not you agree with SE that Monica violated the CoC, the issue still stands that she was removed without due process. This could have happened to any of us at any time for the same or a similar reasons. It's pretty frustrating to think that the sacrifices and years that went into growing one's community, curating it, welcoming new users, handling hundreds if not thousands of flags can be gone in an instant in such a manner and as such we have decided to join the dozens of moderators in making a stand.
There is an unprecedented level of anger, mistrust, frustration and fear across the network. Never before have we seen users create open letters to Stack Exchange or see meta posts with -1000 and lower scores. Never before has a mod been removed like this. We are in uncharted waters here and I truly hope SE can sort all this out before we reach a point of no return.
While we are late in mustering a response, we hope that the collective voices of us the moderators across the network do have an impact which will be heard by SE. The reason for our protest is two fold:

To visibly add our voice to the outcry against SE's actions.
To show support for Monica Cellio. I can not imagine how rough these past few weeks must have been.

Thank you for your support!  I don't want to bring the argument onto your site, but I think it's important to note that in that TL discussion I was seeking clarification about the new policy so I would know what would and would not be a violation.  I was trying to stay on the right side of the policy while exploring approaches that would also meet my needs.

@MonicaCellio Thanks for the clarification. I just want to say: Though the parts of SE we inhabit don't tend to intersect much, I still recognized your name from browsing the occasional hot network question over the years. Just from that, you stood out as an exceptionally level headed and empathetic person. My respect for you has only grown since then. I'm sure I'm only echoing what you've heard no end of in recent times, but your patience and perseverance are truly admirable.

Thanks @gandalf3 -- much appreciated!

Unfortunately, new pronouns are JARGONS. They are increasing hundredfolds, very confusing and complexing.
I am ok with simple easy-to-remember pronouns like he, she, it, we, and they, but I get wholly confused by NUMEROUS arcane pronouns like xe, zir, sie, etc.
Video below demonstrates ESL students' confusions over new pronouns that are unheard of in all the past decades. That describes precisely my predicament.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzNGkwGYE4E
In the future, you and I might get replaced by new obscure pronouns. What happens if we misuse you on another person who gets triggered by it? Does SE penalise us for our simple mistakes? Or will SE notify us of our mistakes and give us guidance on pronouns?

I believe this Question was not meant to start a discussion on the CoC pronoun issue, but merely to inform about the Mods position on the de-modding situation..

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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Blender Stack Exchange Dark Theme
The site is too bright when working in a dark room or at evening when switching from all the 3D software that all has dark UI. Is there a Dark Theme?
If you have your own feel free to post it next to mine to form a database

I decided to share mine. You get it through userstyles.org here. Give it some time to get used to.

If there are bugs pls comment below, I am sure there are places of the site I never visited so there might be weirdness. Also I hope it works in most browsers the same.
The style also hides the New contributor messages, if you want them comment this section of the theme:
/* New contributor, code of condunt */
   .new-contributor-indicator
   {
       display: none;
   }

If you want to do anything with the theme feel free, it's CC0.
[Edit] There is update for the new design with left-bar navigation, but for some reason does not auto-update (at least for me), uninstall-install of the theme solves that.

For anyone not already aware, the stylish addon promoted on userstyles.org now comes with telemetry/tracking components. You may want to use stylus, a fork with those parts removed, instead.

Nice catch @gandalf3, I didn't even know the Stylish addon existed. For Chrome the right stuff is here: stylus for chrome.

Thanks Jerryno! I like this a lot. It may not be obvious, so I'll mention: after installing Stylus the install button works on the userstyles.org page. Disregard that the logo in the upper left is for Stylish - it is compatible with both.

The blender stackexchange seem to have change these days: https://i.sstatic.net/ITwIo.png

@L0Lock Looking at it now also, I was away during weekend but will update it soon. Also I noticed the theme does not auto update very well when I make changes.

@L0Lock It's updated:)

awesome !
It could add one more suggestion, the "nex privilege" progression bar also needs some work: https://i.imgur.com/3HiW5BG.png And also this part: https://i.imgur.com/NVlVbgp.png

@L0Lock Good catch, thx. Fixed.

one last thing I guess, link in answers (and maybe comments) are a bit hard to see: https://i.imgur.com/z7mb3Tv.png

@L0Lock Try the update from yesterday, I am tweaking small things here and there as I bump into them. When I do an edit to the theme, the site tells it takes about 5 mins to update, but sometimes it does not update automatically. Sometimes it even does not update when hitting the update icon in theme manager and says it's up to date, when it isn't. And only after I uninstall and install again I can see the change. Weird.

I installed your dark theme again today, and it seems the SVG images that were hosted on svgshare.com have all gone down. I've patched the CSS for myself to get rid of the big red error images that appear in their place, but you might consider adding any relevant SVG images inline in the CSS instead. Cheers.


text:
Cannot post questions (confirmed across 3 computers)
I am posting this on behalf of Alec Teal, who has tried to report his inability to post on both blender and the meta as a bug report. It does not appear to be relegated to a specific computer, as he has tried on 3 different ones.
EDIT: (from Alec) Firefox 35.0.0, 37.0 and 33.0 with Adblock+ and Instafox as addons (ABP disabled doesn't change things) on 3 different computers (Linux Mint MATE - if that matters) cannot post.
The error is "An error occurred while submitting the question"

Alec Teal or you should contact Stack Exchange directly.
team@stackexchange.com or by using this form https://blender.stackexchange.com/contact
Let them know your problem, even link to this post.
I would guess that you may have a post block or some other odd problem keeping you from posting to the site. In either event only SE can help you.

Firefox 35.0.0, 37.0 and 33.0 with Adblock+ and Instafox as addons (ABP disabled doesn't change things) on 3 different computers (Linux Mint MATE - if that matters) cannot post.
The error is "An error occurred while submitting the question"

Got the edit but still cannot post questions

You should contact SE to get your problem resolved, see my answer for more info.

I've confirmed your account is not suspended so you should definitely contact SE.


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Are questions about the 2.8 branch on topic?
So far we only have a few questions that are directly about Blender 2.8, from a quick search on the site, there are these that come up:
What's the purpose of eevee engine?
Game development for 2.8
blender 2.8 eevee & cycles viewport display modes gone
The first two were fairly well recieved, yet the third was put on hold as off topic.
As development continues, and with builds being updated daily on the Buildbot I think it is safe to say that it is inevitable that the site will see more and more questions regarding the branch.
 Is it useful in any way for the community to have these questions answered here now, even if the answer may include "this is subject to change.." ?
Personally, as long as an official build is available, is being actively developed, and shows potential benefit to the community as a whole, then  I don't see a problem with questions about the branch.
Until 2.8 is released, or is at least much closer to being released, how should we handle these questions?

Late here but from a quick glance the first two are more or so general questions as to what will be coming or what the 2.8 workflow will be like. The third is a question about using the experimental branch itself. These questions are likely to not be useful later on as the branch is under heavy development, a button can be here today and gone tomorrow. As the page itself says with 3 different warnings These builds are not as stable as releases, use at your own risk. These questions should not count as valid until the branch has seen an official stable release.

I don't think Blender 2.8 related question should be automatically considered offtopic. It will eventually become the official latest release, so it should be encouraging to have early answers and clarifications about it.
That is as long as they are not about trouble shooting technical problems with the builds themselves, along the lines of "Why isn't this working?" or "Why is behavior X unexpected?", or "Where is < favorite missing feature >?" and the typical "When will it be ready?".
As iklsr politely mentioned, the currently available builds are highly experimental, still broken in fundamental ways, and not at all ready for prime time. They are not Beta builds, nor Alpha, not even ready for public testing. Expecting them to work at this point is unrealistic at best.
Generally speaking those may even be considered bug reports of sorts, which are a widely known type of off-topic here.
Once released I'd expect all kinks to be ironed out, making such questions validity and relevance questionable for the long run too.
One other concern I'd personally have is that encouraging end users (especially beginners) to use these as production software, which may lead to an increase in unwanted bug reports in the bug tracker, which already is managing hell for the scarce developer manpower.
At this point I fear end user bug reports are more of a hassle then helpful. Quoting Sergey Sharybin from the bf-committers Blender 2.8 meeting of August 15 2017 mailing list

Note for everyone: Blender 2.8 tracker is currently for developers to
  coordinate core development. We can not spend time on fixing users
  reports yet: lots of them are requiring core parts to be finished
  redesigning first.

Besides the obvious dangers of potential data loss while using untested pre-alpha software.
Questions along the lines of general usability, or theoretical questions about officially known features and roadmap, should be OK, I guess.
EDIT: And here it is, the official statement of what I have been trying to convey, The message at the official 2.8 snapshots download page has been changed to request bug reports exclusively from developers. My point being we should prevent random users from reporting bugs at all costs, even at the expense of testing 2.8 nightly builds by not encouraging end users to test them at all.

I'm going to disagree with Duarte here, and argue they should be off topic.
At its core Blender.SE is a database of blender knowledge, in Q&A format. As a result posts long-term value should be considered as the top priority. At the same time, Blender 2.8 is rapidly evolving software, and questions about how to use its features could quickly become outdated as the Devs change the requirements and feature are modified. Any answer based on it could quickly become irrelevant, within a few weeks/months. Irrelevant answers will clutter search results, hindering the usefulness of this site.
I think in most cases it would be best to wait until 2.8 is much nearer to release, and its requirements have been locked.

Yes, absolutely.
Yes, 2.8 is rapidly changing. Yes, questions asked about it today might not apply tomorrow. The thing is, the developers are hoping to get people using and testing the branch as much as possible, because that's how volatile, experimental features (especially when it comes to UI/UX) turn into solid, well designed features which last years without major changes.
Why would we want to discourage that?
Answers which are valid in the long-term sound nice, but really. Is there anyone looking at 2.4x documentation now and saying "this is perfect, no need to update this?" I don't think so. Blender is changing all the time. We want answers which are valid now. If tomorrow answers aren't valid — but the questions are — they'll get answered again.

To differentiate between questions about the current release and 2.8, I propose we have a 2.8-branch tag. This tag would only apply to questions about the 2.8 branch, meaning once it has been released (merged into master), the tag would not apply to new questions about 2.8.

Having 2.8-branch or any variation of that still seems like a band-aid fix to my larger concern which is fragmentation. I dislike the notion of having versioned tags of Blender (that will cease to be specifically relevant) in a few months when we could just wait and apply everything to the current stable thing that everyone has. However, I do agree that this should be the place to come when in doubt about new features etc. I'm not sure the best way to quite go about this and I could be wrong but hoping for some more input.

@iKlsR Yes, the tag will cease to be relevant for new questions. It'll remain relevant on existing questions where it serves as an identifier of what branch the question was asking about.

My main concern is that I am not so sure devs do want "people using and testing the branch as much as possible" yet. I've read them complain more than once that they don't have the manpower nor should they be spending the time to triage reports they already know full well are broken ATM. It also opens the floodages for the too many curious beginners posting the usual "this doesn't work correctly!" reports in the bugtracker

Same applies here, though it is not so much trouble for us triaging the occasional  2.8 random post, I imagine most questions (as we've already seen) will be along the lines of "this doesn't work as expected!" or "where is missing feature X!". Not only are those of low future (and immediate) value, most of the time we won't be able to answer them anyway or provide a proper solution. Trouble shooting the problem is a waste because most of them would probably classify as bugs and be fixed eventually anyway.

@DuarteFarrajotaRamos All the more reason to let them post here instead ;) As for troubleshooting questions, I think it'll depend on how obscure the particular problem is. If it's an easy fix/something a lot of people run into, then I don't see why it shouldn't be answered. If it's not, I wouldn't say that makes it off-topic per se. Perhaps just unlikely to receive an answer (but you never know), or, if anything, closed as too localized.

Yes 2.79 I agree, but not 2.8, not yet at least. Correct me if I'm wrong, but if I interpreted developer's comments well, I fear at this point it would be pretty much feel like a painter having the public constantly commenting over his shoulder on the unfinished artwork "It's not finished", "You missed that spot" "That is not done". It's annoying and not helpful

@DuarteFarrajotaRamos Which I think is all the more reason to promote asking those questions here. That way we act as a buffer between the devs and the curious onlookers. Continuing your painting analogy: we certainly don't want to discourage the public commenting and discussing the painting amongst themselves ("don't you think that house would look better with a door?" "Yes, I heard they are adding doors soon." "If the doors have doorknobs they'll be easier to use!"). All this discussion can be browsed by developers, and maybe useful insights will be integrated (or give devs more ideas).

I concur, fair enough. "That way we act as a buffer between the devs and the curious onlookers" That I can get behind :)

Added a few more examples of unwanted user bug reports I collected in recent times to my answer above. Sergey Sharibyn Mentioned himself that 2.8 tracker is to be used for developer project coordination, which I feel confirms we should act as buffer and not encourage 2.8 user reports just yet

@gandalf3 although it seems the consensus has ultimately been that 2.8 is off topic, will a tag be created at some point?  As development continues,  particularly with greasepencil-object branch and the new open movie on blender cloud, interest will only increase I'd expect.

@Timaroberts I don't know that there has really been a consensus in that direction. I haven't actually seen very many 2.8 questions yet, so I think we're still handling them on a case-by-case basis.

No
Instead there better be a meta tag for "Blender Beta version" since there is constant development on Blender, things might endup in Blender, or might not endup in blender. Not every GSOC project went into Blender, so if people like to discus beta stuf or bleeding edge builds better give them a proper tag.


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Downvote Flagging
I am a user of BSE and very interested in Blender (#1 this week; yay). However, I have never asked a question on META, so bear with me.
A Quick Intro to my Situation
I just recently passed 1000 rep, and I have gotten to that mark very quickly after letting my account sit around for the first three months after my first question. Now that I'm here, I'm noticing a new phenomenon: People who downvote perfectly fine answers.
Now it isn't that big a deal; it is only -2 rep, but what gets to me is the negativity behind it. I woke up the other morning and found one of my answers downvoted for no apparent reason and with no comment explaining why.
My Question
Does anyone know if Stack Exchange people are planning to add a function where downvotes can be flagged and considered worthwhile or not? Does anyone think such an idea might be useful?
Any thoughts appreciated!

Related: http://meta.blender.stackexchange.com/q/488/599

I think it has something to do with wanting to earn the "critic" badge...you have to cast a downvote.  In my opinion, it is difficult to find a question/answer on this forum that really deserves a downvote, so people might just randomly pick something to downvote so they can move forward in badge-earning.

@WishyQ Haha. Ouch, but probably true.

"...the negativity behind it?" How do you know what's behind it? I know it feels bad to get a downvote on an answer you took time to craft so that it would be worthy of SE, but there's no way to know WHO downvoted, let alone their intention. If there's a problem with a good question or answer getting lots of downvotes, there is already a mechanism in place for handling it... it's called "meta.blender.stackexchange.com"

I totally agree that a DV without a comment is unhelpful, but assigning motive to it is less helpful. It's just a critique... not an insult.

What I used to do in my early days was whenever I got a dvote was to read my post again and see if anything could be improved. Sometimes you are not in the wrong but you can use it as a positive "growing" experience. Flush out your answer more, throw in a blend, link to relevant articles etc.

I've been down voted few days ago, and looks like the person who down voted my answer (I think) didn't read the answer well enough! He even decided to Bounty the question (even though it's not his question) and that brought me more votes. Yet in other cases, it appeared to be my mistake, when I read the question again, I gave the wrong answer, irrelevant to the question, and I deserve that down vote.

Short answer: nope.
You will probably never see a "flag the DV" type of thing for a number of reasons.

All votes up or down, are completely anonymous. So it is not as if a mod could do anything to a user who casts a "bad" DVs.
Votes are very subjective; and most of the time* there is no way to say definitively that a vote was "bad".  What may be helpful and a good answer or question to you, may just look like a low effort link only answer to the next guy. Further more some "noob" questions tend to get DVed just because they are so simple, but everybody's knowledge of blender (and the SE system) is very different; so what may be "duh" for gandalf is a huge stumbling block for this new guy.
DV's can help a new user learn the SE system, and what and how fits in this site.

While commenting after you DV a post is nice (and very encouraged) it is not required. However when you DV with no comment (like what prompted the OP to ask this here) it leaves the OP in the dark, and most of the time he will not learn anything from it.
I too have had many of my posts DVed for no apparent reason; don't worry about it. There is always a chance that you beat somebody to answer the question and now they're mad, or some other dumb and petty reason.
If you wrote a good answer and you know what you are talking about (not one of those "maybe you should try X" sort of answers) then don't take a stray DV to heart.
If you point me to your answer that was DVed, I may be ably to guess as to why it was DVed.

* There is a thing called serial voting, and several variants, such as bullying, and serial down voting, for things such as those the system and us mods can and do do something.

Thank you very much!

For the record, I don't normally go around downvoting beginner questions.. (I even upvoted this one!)

@David Hey, I was just wondering, do people not earn reputation on meta?

@ShadyPuck nope, all site metas do not have rep, it is directly linked to your main site account. However you do get separate badges on metas.

@David  Would it be possible to add a function to the site: when a downvote is cast, a box will pop up in which the voter can explain briefly the critique, and the downvote will not be registered unless a reason is given ?  This would be very helpful.  I noticed that when I added a question, "Why are you downvoting this?", to my downvoted question, the downvotes ended.

@WishyQ Nope, this and many, many, many variants have been proposed for several years on meta.stackexchange, not likely this will ever happen. Safest way to avoid downvotes is to ask "good" questions and write clear answers.


text:
Could somebody add low-poly and gameart related tags?
I noticed there's no low-poly / high-poly / gameart tags but I don't have enough rep to add them. Could somebody please do that?

Can you point to at least 2 existing questions you think could benefit from this classification?

low-poly makes sense, the other two don't, the first is irrelevant and the second is better sub-classified.

424 results for "low poly", 102 for "minecraft". example 1, example 2. I'm not an adept, but why not creating a "low-poly" tag ?


text:
Question put long or short preferred?
Would people rather read a question put in the simplest terms and ask for any more essential information in the comments, or am I more likely to get an answer if I add as many relevant details as possible? Thanks.

Even the most mundane detail or seemingly non-related action can help you get a concrete reply (installed program X yesterday etc) as opposed to commented suggestions and followup questions so I'd recommend to provide as much detail as possible when asking. Not saying you should always try to avoid the latter but being preemptive can save everyone time.
Some people can be put off by a wall of text so why not both? Ask a quick summation up front or after (a slight expansion on the title) while still going into detail in the body of your question. See my post here for some tips, How do I ask a question that is hard to describe?. If in doubt, go the detail route.
From my personal experience over the years on StackExchange, I find that writing a "well worded" question from what I suggested above can in some instances give you the answer* before even submitting it because it makes you think about your issue in full, a type of Rubber duck debugging if you may. Not always applicable to 3d and Blender especially if new but you get the point I hope.
*One of the reasons I have no questions on my profile ;)

Alright, cool! So in the future, I will write a short snippet/summary of the problem and then expand in the following paragraphs. Thanks. :)


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Uploading screen shots into stack exchange questions/answers
How can I upload screen shots into the a question to help someone answer a question for me?  I can't find any instructions on how to do it. I have tried pasting and dragging a jpeg into the question box but have had no joy. Could somebody please either tell me or direct me to the relevant page?

Hi and welcome to the meta site. You asked this on the right place. Here's an answer

Also, for anyone coming to ask this again.. you need at least 10rep to do so.

@DantheMan Questions can't be dupes of questions on other sites. You can link to the MSO question, but people shouldn't have to check MSO before posting at Blender's meta.

As a preventive measure against spam, users with less than 10 reputation have some restrictions. Namely, new users cannot:

post images
post more than two hyperlinks at a time, either in a post or their user profile
contribute answers to protected questions
ask or answer questions too rapidly

Once you've achieved ten reputation (as I see you now have), these restrictions are removed. Additionally, You can gain more privileges as you gain rep. For example, at 15 rep, you can vote up. At 50 rep, you can comment everywhere.

Once you have the ten reputation, you can insert an image by clicking the Image button (Ctrl + G).

From there, it's pretty straight-forward. Choose "From my computer" and select the image or choose "From the web" and insert a link.
The full page on markdown is here. You can find it by clicking the question mark in yellow and clicking "advanced help" (which Windows users never do).


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Is the discussion tag redundant? if most posts in meta are tagged with it
look through the posts, doesn't it make more sense to make a non-discussion or notification  instead? It's almost like tagging questions with question

Hover over the tag and read its description.

Discussion questions are the heart of your community. For example:
  Should a certain question be allowed on the site? For what reason did
  a moderator lock a certain question? Are said actions setting a
  precedent? Be sure to present your entire case and background
  information/data so the subject can be discussed fully.

Plus there are questions tagged with question and also with answer. Remember this is meta, we can post lists, resources or have general discussions about, for or against something for the main site etc. Every post here needs at least one tag, discussion can house nearly all of this as more than likely there will be a general giving of opinions on what was raised.

It is a bit unusual for Stack Exchange to enforce (force) a tag selection like this, but meta fulfills a special — and essential — purpose among the sites. We use meta as The canonical repository for all feature-request, support, and bug reports on the system.
To keep it a trusted system, you must assure that one of these these tags are applied to all the posts that need them.
So you can't really say "you must tag everything with one of these tags… or leave it blank." You essentially have to include a none-of-the-above tag discussion to make sure a selection is made in each case — assuring the collection is complete.

Please note that for some reason, the current system requires every question on Meta to be tagged with at least one of the following four mandatory tags: bug, feature-request, support, and discussion.  I do not see the point of this requirement, but I am not sure if this is likely to change.
Because the discussion tag does not seem to mean much, I prefer to use any of the other three mandatory tags whenever appropriate and never use the discussion tag with any of the other mandatory tags.  That is, I treat the discussion tag as “everything other than bug reports, feature requests, and support requests.”  But that is just my personal preference.

i made this post partially tongue in cheek, but thanks for the insight!


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Do questions about materials count as tutorial questions?
We've already had a few questions come up where people have asked 'How do I make xyz material/texture?'
Do these questions count as tutorial-requests, and thus should be considered off-topic?
These questions, by their nature, seem to invite too much discussion (especially when either the word 'realistic' or 'best' is in the question). But I could reasonably see questions of this type being limited enough in scope that there is no concern.
I imagine that, if we allow this kind of question, it will be a very popular, especially among new users.

I would consider making material X to comprise of quite a number of steps, especially if there is to be explanation for options.

It all depends, if the user is asking how a specific setting works or how to get a better result from a node or feature then fine.
What could be considered lengthy is however, asking for details on how to construct complex shaders or materials from scratch. It is also a good idea to specify specifics about the material type you want. You should also not use words such as 'realistic' in your questions, this makes it subjective and too open to interpretation as everyone has their own opinion of what looks real or not.
In essence, all questions related to anything Blender are fine, just keep them concise, on-topic and explicit.

This seems suspicious: http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/247/how-to-make-sharp-geometric-models-look-more-realistic

@JNF its ok imho, the answer above was geared towards materials mostly. Mats and models are two different things, hard surface models take less tweaking to get good results and he explicitly asks about sharp hard surface models, its fairly easy enough. There wasn't much left for the mind to decipher and he also asks how to get them to be more realistic, not fully realistic, so some mild differences there. Adding some realism to something is different from asking for it to be realistic. TL/DR: It was explicit enough.


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Add images to stack exchange questions
I still can't add images to questions here on this forum, I hit image upload (ctrl-g) it uploads and shows the image in a separate window and then the only thing I can click is "cancel and add another image". Or I can click outside the upload window, but then it does not upload. I can't click "use this image" or anything that would confirm the upload. I'm on a Mac using Safari (Version 8.0.7 (10600.7.12))

Just FYI, this post might get migrated to "meta.Blender.StackExchange.com" Don't let that worry you, it's just a better place for meta-discussion ;-)

...and welcome to Blender.SE!

We do not support old versions of browsers - the current version of Safari is 9.1.

Stack Exchange sites are Not forums. They use a very specific, Q&A format.

You can only upload images in a supported format: jpg, PNG, tiff, bmp or gif.
If you try to upload an unsupported file type, should show you a warning :

Also, see if you can scroll around the new window that's created. You should see something like this:

It's possible that the button is just hidden at the bottom of the window. Lastly, try a different browser to find out if it's a browser compatibility issue.
Images are limited to 2Mb in size. For larger images or unsupported formats consider uploading to a different host and adding the link to it on your post.

Pngs work fine for me?

I use pngs for all my screen shots, works fine for me.

Same, op should probably try another browser.

My mistake. I thought I remembered trying to upload a png and getting rejected. Thanks

With Safari don't works (I have a Mac), so try installing Google Chrome


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Strange tag stack on Google, re: blender.stackexchange website (suspicious bug report for admin)
I noticed something strange about stackexchange while doing a Google search. In one hit to stackexchange with a really odd tag stack (see screencap). Thought you'd want to know there's a bunch of completely unrelated tags there, like "travel" and "christianity". Also, I noticed that most stackexchange hits didn't seem to have that tag stack? Seemed odd, so here you are:
the search URL: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=math+language+blender+driver+expression&*
the specific link with the weird tags: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjfnOL70KbSAhWD1CYKHWrfDPoQFggmMAI&url=http%3A%2F%2Fblender.stackexchange.com%2Fquestions%2F8135%2Fusing-a-scripted-expression-driver-to-combine-two-angles&usg=AFQjCNH8ZOT_dyP5s05x56KPz-00OoCyfA&sig2=sSzDT-QE_O8xm40mjOecsA

I don't see anything strange or suspicious there (besides I didn't get that result with your query); travel and christianity (along with English Language Learners and Japanese) were parts of domain names travel.stackexchange and christianity.stackexchange respectively which were lucky enough to be caught into the results by search engine.

Where's the bug? Can you clarify what you believe is wrong here?

This is not a bug, but google turning up exactly what you searched for.
You searched for "math language blender driver expression" and "language" happens to be in the footer of every page.

So right there you hit blender and language (on every page). Then that page you linked to takes care of the "driver" and "expression" thus google in all of its wisdom is left to show the footer and how it matches your query.


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Is there any way we can get new users to read a short guide to asking questions?
And by short I mean, no longer than a paragraph. Let me explain.
We are closing questions because the question is too broad/vague, or too localized. I remember i used to use a program called Stomp, it made bassdrums. It came with a manual, and the manual had 5 questions that you had to answer before you could use the program. This forced the user to know a little about the program, it was playful (ie not condescending) and really helped me learn the program.
I don't expect each time a user posts a question, to be faced with a few questions to make sure they understand the stackexchange party line, but it would be superb if first time questioners had 4 or 5 multiple choice questions to establish that they understand what kind of quality we like to have here. If we don't we will end up doing more boring administrative work unfit for humans, and make people feel inadequate for not asking good questions.
With a bit of creative wording we can convince people to take the time to understand that blender.stackexchange is the best thing since sliced bread, and everyone can participate and be a valuable member of the community if they want. So from the very start we ask that they accept a few generally accepted ways to communicate with the rest of us.

No long meandering questions, boil down the question to the core if you can.
It is OK to ask many questions, but break them up into different posts so they can be answered separately.
Don't be too worried about spelling or grammar, at least don't let it stop you from asking questions. Avoid using 'text-speak' as a courtesy to us.
If you ask a question, please stay around for a while to see if it has answers or comments looking for clarification.

BAM.
thoughts? I didn't have time to make this shorter, sorry.

+1. To "Don't be too worried about spelling or grammar" can we add something like "but please don't use text-speak"? Things like "wat have u tried" on StackOverflow drive me crazy...

fixed it up a little, thanks for pointing that out.

I don't really think we can do much. They're already supposed to read the about/faq or at least the quick summary before their first question(which I'm sure many of them ignore).

maybe we can re-adjust some attitudes towards the user agreement, it can be better.

Well, the FAQ is out there, but...

Not any more...

make it a part of a "new user tutorial" page / link.
I don't consider myself unschooled in computers or systems (programming since 1974, business consultant since 1995) and just discovered site yesterday. I run the 2-minute drill on initial contact, but suspect initial Q&A submitted didn't demonstrate skill level experience should expect. extended view of other postings helped.
I suggest offering (or making a currently available page much more visible... I didn't find it) users an intro to the site. use examples of good and bad, reasons for each, and add links to followup pages in useful areas (the  command for instance). keep the 2-minute page option, perhaps a link at the bottom.
good hunting. have found the site useful, though some parts have been 'not so intutive' as I expected. (in fairness, part of my issues may be hardware related... I am using a very old 1st gen iPad on iOS 5.1.1.)


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Filling the tag wiki and getting reviews
If we need 4000 points to edit the tag wiki then who is editing and approving them at the moment? I added transforms and dimensioning to experiment with how that works. My edits have not been reviewed, who do I contact or do those edits appear in a community officer dashboard?
I get the impression from the tag wiki documentation that it can be a great place to have in-depth coverage of topics. In addition to the excerpts, we are encouraged to go into detail -- i guess we will arrive at some consensus on how much detail.

Anyone with 1500+ rep can approve tag wiki suggestions. It usually takes 2 approvals from normal users for one to pass through and 1 from a SE mod.
Users with 4000+ rep can edit tag wikis without any approval. Also, you don't normally contact anyone, these are added to the Suggested Edits queue and will be addressed once seen.


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The anatomy of Questions without accepted Answers
I'd like to compile a list of reasons why questions go unanswered on bse or don't have accepted answers. With the intent to categorize them, and do rudimentary analyses on the 500 questions that have evaded us.

Question does have answers, but user hasn't accepted:

User hasn't returned
User has not logged in using same account to accept
User doesn't consider answer sufficient
User has answered own question somewhere in the 'thread', and not posted detailed answer to accept.
User has stated that it is solved, but omits the resolution method from comments or edits to own question.

Question has gone unanswered:

has comments requesting clarification, still unclear
comments have clarified the question but still unanswered
Question answered (and confirmed) in comments but not added as an answer
Question clear, how to answer isn't.

too big?
expertise needed?
theoretical?
no off-the-shelf solution exists
no convenient custom solution exists

This may be a foolish task, but classification can spread some light on the make-up of our dreaded 'unanswered list'.
I'm sure I've missed a few subtle scenarios, please feel free to suggest

There's also the occasional "question answered in comments but not with an answer" scenario. Often the answering comment is a half request for clarification/wild guess, or is a link to an answer on a rather different question.

indeed added, any more?

This correlates with http://meta.blender.stackexchange.com/q/691/12

yep, an extra metric to help judge the 'missed impact' of an unanswered question. nice.

I believe that, even if the OP hasn't marked an answer as accepted, the question will still be considered answered if it has an answer with an upvote.

PGmath, yes! maybe I should make the distinction, i'm really talking about questions without accepted answers.

@PGmath you are right, i forgot : http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/271395/answered-questions-showing-up-in-unanswered-tab-why  this changes my own post a little

One possible solution for many of these stray threads which have not been accepted is for the Stack Exchange network to start automatically marking answers as correct(and also possibly requiring moderator consensus) when they have reached a certain amount of up-votes.  10+ positive votes often indicates a solid answer and now people who never come back are not leaving loose ends behind.

Excellent post. You should post it on Meta SE

I know for one that a lot of questions I've seen don't have an answer. lets link a few.
http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/26962/clay-like-physics-in-bge
http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/29113/directional-gravity-for-irregular-shapes
and pretty much any question asked by @gandalf3. frustrating, but worth noting.

This post would be very useful on Meta SE

It would be nice if we could convert some comments into answers if they answered the question. I don't think there's a lot of incentive to answer a question the OP is no longer struggling with. Here's a good example - a question by a new user that was solved within 15 minutes because a comment got them to think differently about the problem and as a result they understood what to do differently. Should I now answer the question that was already addressed sufficiently?

@Mentalist yeah, answer and it will likely get up-votes. Sometimes the OP doesn't return to accept the answer, goods question deserve decent answers.

Recently I have seen an uptick in the number of users that post a question and don't respond to calls for clarification or to comments trying to help before they've already posted another question. The ones that are in Texture Painting tag seem to be fly by posts with no commitment to interact in the way the site is meant to be used. I wonder if mods could clean up some of these that stand long enough as they often don't have a really unique angle to the question to begin with.

I think you missed "User actually figured out question on his/her own, but gave shoddy answers or asked questions in answers and therefore cannot answer own question." Lack of motivation may also be another cause, as well as spelling issues (which StackExchange seems to be very good at avoiding.) God I hate spelling issues and grammar problems, they really do make questions a pain to understand.
Oh, and in case you were wondering... This question was unanswered. The question about unanswered questions went unanswered.

my post is marked as discussion :) we can freely ponder these things. If you can reword your proposed missed reason, i will add it.

Ah, okay. The first one used to be my bane: I was like "Okay, now how do I shoot the bullet without something getting sent flying?" and I had asked a followup question about how do I get the bullet object to move after it was created, and it turned out that it was just disconnected, but I'd been giving out ghastly, incoplete, "your'e on to something" answers that I couldn't actually answer my own question, which I kinda see as a problem.

if added a generic version of the scenario you painted, last item in the first set. the "can't explain how i fixed it" kind of questions could be removed if the question has very few views after a set amount of time.

No, I really did solve it on my own. But because I'd been giving the "onto something" answers, I couldn't even answer it. That's a problem.

Upvoted for: "The question about unanswered questions went unanswered." :-p


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Chrome bookmarklet to convert old api page links to api_current
I'm not sure if this is the appropriate place to put such a thing, but many of us paste links to docs and older Questions should perhaps be updated whenever it makes sense. This makes that slightly more convenient..

I use this a lot, maybe others will find some use for it
javascript:(function()%7Bvar current %3D window.location %2B ""%3Bvar newUrl %3D current.replace(%2Fpython_api_(.%2B)%5C%2F%2Fgi%2C 'python_api_current%2F')%3Bwindow.location%3DnewUrl%7D)()

the non mangled version:
javascript:(
    function(){
        var current = window.location + "";
        var newUrl = current.replace(/python_api_(.+)\//gi, 'python_api_current/');
        window.location = newUrl
    })()

Installation
To install, go to Other Bookmarks > Add Page > URL and paste the single line javascript at the top, then pick a useful name for the bookmark.

Maybe add a quick "install" line for some users. Useful, thanks.

i might be overlooking something but it appears that bookmarklet link creation is prohibited on SE , which totally makes sense.


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Can we blacklist the "blender" tag immediately?
Following the lead of Caleb on Christianity.SE, who requested that the tags "christianity" and "christian" be blacklisted six days into the private beta, I recommend that the tag blender be blacklisted. As we are on a site about Blender, having such a tag adds no value to any question because any on-topic question will be about Blender.

+1 see my answer here. http://meta.blender.stackexchange.com/a/10/12

possible duplicate of How should be the version tags?

How about the [tag:3d] and the [tag:open-source] tag?

There should already be a ^blender$ intrinsic tag blacklist. All sites (betas, at any rate) have this.

On the bicycles.SE site, you can use 'bicycles' as a tag (though your post will immediately get edited/deleted).

I agree that the blender tag should be blacklisted. Could we also look into blacklisting other tags that are inherent with the use of Blender, such as graphics?

+1 I think it makes a lot of sense to blacklist it, if all questions can fit under the blender tag then why have the tag at all?

You're not always asking about graphics...

to expand on @JNF's point: the [tag:scripting] and [tag:python] tags have little if anything to do with graphics.

How about the 3d and the open-source tag?


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"Meet the Pros" -- Scheduled chat #1 with Jonathan Williamson
Yesterday, I emailed Jonathan Williamson, one of the founders of Blender Cookie, and we're planning on hosting a scheduled chat right here on Blender.SE. The chat will be some sort of interview with professional Blender users/developers, where we can ask him questions about his history with Blender, other CG tools, personal life, etc.
We're thinking about doing it this next Thursday, June 6, 2013. I'm just not sure what time will work best for everyone, since we're in multiple time zones. Comment below stating which time you think would work best for the community (in CST, please).

Friday, June 7th at 2:00 UTC
(or Thursday, June 6th at 7:00pm PST)
It should last an hour or more.

Sign up here. The room is currently set to gallery, but will be open when the event starts.

This event has ended. You can find the transcript here.

Thanks for the invitation @Dan-the-man!
I'm on the West Coast but have a pretty flexible schedule. I can make most any time of day work.

I've noticed that the times people have been most active on the site (at least during the private beta) are about 8:00AM, 3:00PM, 8:00PM, and 1:00AM West Coast time. 8:00PM probably sees slightly more traffic than those other times, but it's variable.

@JonathanWilliamson No problem! I think this will be interesting.

Ping me once you have a time decided on - I'll add the event to the Community Bulletin sidebar.

@Shog9 Alright! Cool.

Times in UTC would even be more useful. I have no clue what CST means :O Well, now I do, but it is a timezone format I never ever use. UTC sounds more open towards the entire world :)

@Shog9 We have a little problem. Since we are doing this mainly to attract new users, and there is a 20 minimum rep required for chatting, new users won't be able to communicate. Is it possible to take off the minimum rep requirement for this room only?

Not exactly, but there is a work-around - you just need a moderator sitting in on your chat.

@Shog9 Ok. We have decided a time.

Big fan of Jonathan Williamson, have followed his tuts for years. Unfortunately time doesn't work out for me, is it possible to get chat transcript for the session?

@PlastyGrove Yes. Here you will find a bookmarked transcript once the chat is over.

This is confusing people on main, since they don't know that the event has already passed. I propose posting all nominations here etc and creating another one for links to the transcripts and dates of those that have passed. (renamed it)

Ok @iKlsR. Good idea.


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Allow permanent blend file hosting
Now that we are officially (yay) a part of SE, we can revisit one of the main issues that has "plagued" our community and been largely inconsistent with our derived meta of how our site should work.
We want a familiar place to permanently store blend files as opposed to random services such as mega and temporary hosts such as pasteall.
This is not a want, it's a need now

Can we have a service for uploading blendfiles?
Where to upload .blend files - non-expiring links
Should all "Ask A Question" pages encourage the poster to upload their blend?
Can we re-upload .blends to more permanent hosts?
Including a .blend file

Huge thanks to GiantCowFilms for stepping up with a solution that worked well but we are in need of something more convenient now. For one, we would like this to be intuitive and normal as in we don't have to remind or tell users to attach files (see 3rd point above).
I won't go into any more detail since this has been discussed many many times, see my answer here for a quick overview.

Maybe it's worth asking the blendercloud guys if they could sponsor / host it. ducks -- good for the name propagation.

While I think many questions would benefit from having a blend file uploaded, I think there are many that would not, so I'd be more inclined to use the verb "facilitate in place of "encourage" in bullet item 3.

@zeffii BE still has quite a bit of space left, and moving to another 3D party sponsor will only delay the inevitable. I think the only good forward moving solution will be to have SE host it.

well, what makes it attractive for a site like imgur to host stackexchange images? what kind of deal exists for that?

I imagine some tags could use a small .blend in their description too as reinforcement of complex topics.

Commenting to let you know that I've seen this and I'll circle back soonish.

This type of request has been made before and we have never offered up storage for files like this because there are so many 3rd party storage options.  I asked internally to see if it's feasible for us to host this for you, but currently, we don't have any structure in place to do so, and we have no plans to do so in the foreseeable future.  I'm going to have to status-declined this request.

Yes, big thanks to @GiantCowFilms for stepping up. Without seeing the stats for blend-exchange and analytics for BSE it's tricky to establish how much having a convenient and permament .blend hosting feature available has contributed to the firm growth of BSE. I would be surprised if the effect was negligable.
Allowing large .blend shares does strike me as potentially counter productive. As a teaching tool we should be encouraging people to do one of the following two options. (Some people do this automatically because they have time and have learned how to learn)

(Subtractive)
make a duplicate of your .blend and do the following to it:

remove all the stuff that doesn't need to be in the blend

materials
objects
textfiles
packaged images (etc)

if only a part of an Object is problematic border select around it, invert and delete the rest.
only when you can't remove any more details without making the .blend useless as a communication tool, then upload.

(Additive)
start a .blend from scratch, with the simplest representation of the problem you face.

How often would the OP solve most of their own problem by being automatically confronted with a suggested diagnostic approach.

I can only think of three cases where a large .blend could possibly be justified: (1) large textures are required (2) Detailed high-poly geometry is required (3) Troubleshooting is being done on a scene that is large, and it cannot be reduced further (most can be reduced without interfering with troubleshooting, and reducing usually makes troubleshooting easier).

cegaton, yes! .blends can reinforce learned helplessness. We like to think we're helping, but in the long run quite often it results in 1) A question that's only useful for one person. 2) possibly doing that one person a dis-service if they didn't create the shared .blend purely for the sake of demonstrating a single issue. (us solving it without them taking the time to single out the issue)

zeffii, BTW, if you want blend-exchange stats, contact me in chat, I could potentially get them for you (I'm not great with MySQL).

unfortunately i'm not free to sink time into this within the foreseeable future.


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How should we handle questions about addons?
I've seen a few questions showing up recently that are relating specifically to addons. Should they be considered off-topic? I think questions about addons that are in trunk are fine, but 3rd party plugin questions could get messy.

In this case I see nothing wrong with handling these questions, dealing with each on its own merit.
If the addon is unmaintained and/or has no documentation, then we should really not handle questions related to it. Only addons which are actively maintained, and especially those that are documented, should be supported by us (as part of the community).
Keep in mind, this is just my opinion, others, and even Stack Exchange, may disagree.

I agree with this.

For Contrib and Trunk addons, isn't there a requirement that their documentation be sufficient before inclusion? If someone needs support for those, perhaps the docs aren't sufficient -- usually they have support threads on BA linked in the addon info.
We can easily refer to those threads, and they will generally have good content, it seems gauche to duplicate their efforts here for the sake of keeping everything on B.SE.
I say; close as off-topic but link to external support threads in the comments as a courtesy when possible.