text:
2022 Moderator Election Q&A – Question Collection

The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it here.

Blender Stack Exchange is scheduled for an election next week, 2022-11-07. In connection with that, we will be holding a Q&A with the candidates. This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation.  Participation is completely voluntary.
Here’s how it’ll work:

Until the nomination phase, (so, until 2022-11-07 at 20:00:00Z UTC, or 4:00 pm EDT on the same day, give or take time to arrive for closure), this question will be open to collect potential questions from the users of the site. Post answers to this question containing any questions you would like to ask the candidates. Please only post one question per answer.

If your question contains a link, please use the syntax of [text](link), as that will make it easier for transcribing for the finished questionnaire.

This is a perfect opportunity to voice questions that are specific to your community and issues that you are running into currently.

We, the Community Team, will be providing a small selection of generic questions. The following two questions are guaranteed to be included:

How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?
How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc. a question that you feel shouldn’t have been?

The community team may also include the following three questions if the community doesn’t supply enough questions.

In your opinion, what do moderators do?
A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?
In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?

At the start of the nomination phase, the Community Team will select up to 8 of the top voted questions submitted by the community provided in this thread, to use in addition to the aforementioned 2 guaranteed questions. We reserve some editorial control in the selection of the questions and may opt not to select a question that is tangential or irrelevant to moderation or the election. We exclude any suggested questions that are negatively scored.

We will post the final questionnaire on the Election page. Candidates will have the option to fill out the questionnaire, and their answers will appear beneath their intro statements.
This is not the only option that users have for gathering information on candidates. As a community, you are still free to, for example, hold a live chat session with your candidates to ask further questions, or perhaps clarifications from what is provided in the Q&A.

If you have any questions or feedback about this process, feel free to post as a comment here.

A user is unhappy about a moderation decision. They post a complaint as a question in Blender's Stack Exchange accusing you personally of treating them unfairly. How do you react?

What experience do you have, that would help you be a good moderator?

How have you first come in contact with Blender and how long ago? Are you currently still actively using it professionally or for hobbies?

Copied from the last election: https://blender.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2750/19307

Chat is not a central part of this community, and engaging in conversations there is not required nor mandatory. It is however a good way to interact with more regular visitors and socialize a bit beyond the more cold and distant everyday Q&A, since Stack Exchange is often accused of being cold and impersonal.
Do you think reviving our chat rooms is a valid goal, or is it just a distraction from our main focus?
Do you think it will bring users closer together a encourage users to stick around more?
Do you have any ideas or suggestions to engage user in chat or encourage posting more often?

How do you think the stack exchange sites should handle off-topic and opinion-based questions?

The Stack Exchange sites in general, or the Blender SE?

@Joachim Well, i think that even if we narrow the question to just Blender SE, it could be something that could be apply to any SE sites.


text:
2024 Moderator Election Q&A – Question Collection

The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it here.

Blender Stack Exchange is scheduled for an election next week, 2024-05-21. In connection with that, we will be holding a Q&A with the candidates. This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation.  Participation is completely voluntary.
Here’s how it’ll work:

Until the nomination phase, (so, until 2024-05-21 at 20:00:00Z UTC, or 4:00 pm EDT on the same day, give or take time to arrive for closure), this question will be open to collect potential questions from the users of the site. Post answers to this question containing any questions you would like to ask the candidates. Please only post one question per answer.

If your question contains a link, please use the syntax of [text](link), as that will make it easier for transcribing for the finished questionnaire.

This is a perfect opportunity to voice questions that are specific to your community and issues that you are running into currently.

We, the Community Team, will be providing a small selection of generic questions. The following two questions are guaranteed to be included:

How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?
How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc. a question that you feel shouldn’t have been?

The community team may also include the following three questions if the community doesn’t supply enough questions.

In your opinion, what do moderators do?
A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?
In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching enough reputation to access moderator tools or become a trusted user?

At the start of the nomination phase, the Community Team will select up to 8 of the top voted questions submitted by the community provided in this thread, to use in addition to the aforementioned 2 guaranteed questions. We reserve some editorial control in the selection of the questions and may opt not to select a question that is tangential or irrelevant to moderation or the election. We exclude any suggested questions that are negatively scored.

We will post the final questionnaire on the Election page. Candidates will have the option to fill out the questionnaire, and their answers will appear beneath their intro statements.
This is not the only option that users have for gathering information on candidates. As a community, you are still free to, for example, hold a live chat session with your candidates to ask further questions, or perhaps clarifications from what is provided in the Q&A.

If you have any questions or feedback about this process, feel free to post as a comment here.

How have you first come in contact with Blender and how long ago? Are you currently still actively using it, professionally or for hobbies?

I'll just copy paste my question from previous election. It has a more lighthearted tone, but I think it i still relevant to assess proficiency

What general experience do you have in dealing with online communities and the usual procedures there?
In particular:

Dealing with spam or spam accounts
Inappropriate or conspicuous behaviour of users
Conflicts between two or more users

As a moderator, how would you deal with posts (questions, answers, comments) if they were obviously created partly or entirely with the help of AI?

How would you handle a situation where two high-reputation users are engaged in a heated argument, potentially disrupting the community? Can you provide an example of a similar situation you’ve dealt with in the past and how you resolved it?

Thanks for the answer, but I don't think it made it through on time. Election is up already at https://blender.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3079/2024-community-moderator-election. Your are also one of our high rep frequently active users around here. Would you consider running as a candidate? We love to see you participate

I know the election is in progress, but I'm just throwing in another simple question here, possibly for the next election. While it may not be directly related to moderation, it could maybe produce some interesting answers for the site's improvement:

If you could change one aspect of Blender Stack Exchange to improve
the community experience, what would it be and why?

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
Moderator election 2022 interest check
UPDATE: After discussion with the moderation team, the Community Management Team has went ahead and scheduled an election to start question collection on October 31, and nominations on November 7.

There seems to be a trend recently that whenever someone is elected moderator at Blender Stack exchange personal life takes its turns and takes away your planned availability for moderation.
No one is stepping down at the moment, but some of the current moderators plan to be less active for the foreseeable future, and as such we think additional help would be welcome.
After discussing with the current moderators and the community management team, we're looking at scheduling a moderator election to start some time during October of 2022. To avoid finding ourselves in a situation where an election would fail due to an insufficient number of candidates though, we’re posting this to try to assess the community members' willingness to step up and nominate themselves, when the actual election's nomination period starts.
We would be looking to open up two, maybe three additional moderator slots, but elections need to be competitive, to run a three slot election, we would need at least four candidates. This interest check will help us determine how many slots we should make available.
Being short staffed diminishes moderation quality and frequency. It also leaves little time to do other "site maintenance" tasks and fun activities to stimulate our community and increase engagement.
This may be an opportunity for "new blood" to join the ranks, bringing more action, fresh ideas, and generally avoiding "stagnation".
The winners of the election will join the current moderation team and help make our site grow bigger and better. Moderation is not "a chore:" you get to do what you already do as a regular user, plus you gain access some additional tools and perks to help you with the task.
Please leave an answer if you'd be willing to run for a moderator position.
Note that this is not an official election nomination thread yet, just a "pulse check" to get a notion of how many people here would be willing to step up, so you don't have to put up your whole election nomination.

What exactly are other "site maintenance" tasks and fun activities that stimulate community and increase engagement? What actually means more action and fresh ideas and general avoidance of "stagnation"? How exactly can you help make the site bigger and better? I would be interested to know if these goals, rules and tasks are clearly defined somewhere or if there is a set of rules for this.

These tasks are not formally defined anywhere, just some general direction of what type of fresh ideas and input we'd welcome from new moderators, to promote growth and "shake things up". Some examples of site maintenance you already know are closing old or unanswered questions that need more details, others may be managing tags (write wikis, remove unwanted ones, set up synonyms etc).

Fun activities may be try to resuscitate our dying chat rooms maybe by posting cool projects you are doing, challenges or interesting questions, engage with new and old users to make them feel more at home, encourage them to stay around and answer, rather than ask one off questions and leave. Just some vague ideas I had in mind, we welcome some input on this from our candidates

@DuarteFarrajotaRamos I can see why the chat is not very active, there is no link inside the users profile, just at the bottom of the page, new users don't even take the tour. web managers should consider a "CHAT ROOM" button visible in the users profile.

@Emir Also the fact that the chat interface looks quite dated and primitive. Notifications work pretty poorly at the moment, a lot of times you miss most replies. Unless you specifically mention someone by name they are not guaranteed to receive notifications.

Yeah, that too. The chat needs a complete revamp

If you guys want it too, I'm interested.
I would be only partially available and quite limited on geometry-nodes, but maybe I can help to enrich this wonderful platform a little bit.
Is there a questionnaire to fill out somewhere or do I have to take a test of courage?

Thanks for volunteering. "Is there a questionnaire to fill out somewhere or do I have to take a test of courage?" There will be when/if the elections actually star. For now this is just an informal post to see if we have enough candidates to even move forward with an official election.

See https://blender.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=election for an idea of how the process goes, and look at the posts with "Questionnaire" in the title for the community questions we generally post.

"do I have to take a test of courage?" Oh, of course. Along with fighting a dragon.

I think the community functions do a pretty good job of keeping everything tidy, but I am often lurking on the active questions queue and have seen a few things go by that should have been nuked from orbit.

Welcome aboard, that is the spirit we are looking for, thanks for volunteering. "Community functions do a pretty good job" they do to an extent but they hide some of the cruft from users, behind the scenes some unseen work accumulates in review queues

Despite my pathetic reputation here, I'm willing to nominate myself if it can help the elections be (more) successful.
Currently I'm a moderator at the very small Arts & Crafts.
I've been using Blender over the span of at least 9 years now, mostly focusing on materials.

Yes! ...that sounds good! Please sign up here: https://blender.stackexchange.com/election

Thanks for nominating, shows understanding of how our elections work.

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


text:
Community Projects?
I know this seems a little absurd, but I've been thinking:
A while ago, I solved the final puzzle in a new form of puzzle: the semi-interactive puzzle on puzziling.stackexchange.com.
Have we on blender done something similar, like as a community project (game, animation) or is that even possible on this site?

Blender itself is a collaborative community project, and for the open movie Sintel there was a call to sprint model assets. In the end I think a bunch of planks or crates did get used as filler objects in the market place scenes.
BSE at its heart is a QA site, and the focus of this community is to provide people with working answers. I think something like the Blender Cloud is more attractive as a potential platform to explore Massively Multiperson Online Artistic Productions. (Like MMORPG, MOOC).
It isn't clear to me that discussions about these kinds of things and how they might manifest has a home on BSE-Meta either. You could test the waters in the Renderfarm chatroom, and if that gets serious a dedicated chat could be made.
My closing remark is that I too have thought on occasion that if every strong contributor to BSE had sufficient free time, and interest, and could agree on a collective goal/project we could do some wild stuff -- but that's a lot of ifs.

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


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Candidate score
When an election rolls around the nominees are assigned a candidate score. A  maximum possible score of 40, constructed fifty fifty from reputation and selected badge achievements.
Reputation
1 point for each 1000 of rep, capped at 20,
Badges
A point per having any of
Moderation Badges.
'Civic Duty',
'Cleanup',
'Deputy',
'Electorate',
'Marshal',
'Sportsmanship',
'Reviewer',
'Steward'
Participation
'Constituent',
'Convention',
'Enthusiast',
'Investor',
'Quorum',
'Yearling'
Editing
'Organizer',
'Copy Editor',
'Explainer',
'Refiner',
'Tag Editor',
'Strunk & White'
Some example scores. Note: I've chosen by league table, & activity. If you are on here and don't want to be edit yourself out, or conversely not on here, and want to be edit yourself in.  Please include your score in any answers
UserIds 15543, 19307, 74827, 31447, 19156, 34531, 3710, 35559, 41069, 60759, 15924, 78972, 86891, 241, 30849, 29586, 599, 92768, 2217, 7777
User Link                Total CappedRep BadgeCount ModBadges EditingBadges ParticipationBadges

------------------------ ----- --------- ---------- --------- ------------- -------------------

David                    40    20        20         8         6             6
Ray Mairlot              38    20        18         7         6             5
Duarte Farrajota Ramos   38    20        18         8         6             4
batFINGER                38    20        18         7         6             5
gandalf3                 38    20        18         6         6             6
Leander                  34    20        14         5         4             5
Robin Betts              32    20        12         4         3             5
lemon                    31    20        11         3         3             5
Jaroslav Jerryno Novotny 31    20        11         3         3             5
p2or                     28    12        16         7         5             4
Rich Sedman              28    20        8          2         2             4
Jachym Michal            27    17        10         3         3             4
Robert Gützkow           27    18        9          3         3             3
moonboots                25    20        5          1         2             2
Martynas Žiemys          23    12        11         4         3             4
Timaroberts              19    7         12         5         4             3
brockmann                17    6         11         5         3             3
susu                     15    6         9          3         3             3
Gorgious                 13    8         5          2         2             1
Grimm                    13    1         12         5         3             4

Too Reputation-centric
IMO this is way too reputation centric. In sport the best player doesn't necessarily make the best captain, and often affects their playing if capped. The addict that hovers over the questions, often duplicates, answering first to get their "fix" is not going to fit the bill either.
How about base 10  log(rep) - 2 capped at 0 to 6, (A hundred is 0, a thousand 1 and a million 6)?.
Badges
Drop rep and simply Order the table above by badges either total or in a badge category order , or weighted more to some than others..?
A review queue badge is obtained by doing so many reviews. All of which may have been rejected, or gone the other way. In the heady days of trying to beat @David at the review sweep, many times I didn't pass when undecided. Made the decision to cease review for a category once I hit 1000, get the medal, tour of duty over.  Others have gone way and beyond.  This should count for something.
What skill badges to the incumbents have? Do we add some weight to mixing up the skill set of the moderation team. Something using our score for the  most popular tags?
Voting.
One of my soapbox issues on BSE is the lack of voting. Do blender users have particularly high standards?  Could a penalty be incurred for not voting at all?, for each time vertice or vertexes is used in a post or comment?. ... starting a question with "So, I need..."  Posting "It doesn't work in 2.9" comments on posts pre 2014.... oops got onto penalties and digressed..
Voting is important. And is well covered via  "Civic Duty", "Electorate", "Enthusiast", "Sportsmanship" badges.  Still way outweighed by rep.
Interesting queries on Data Explorer
The question
What criteria would you use to determine a candidate score.
Be both OTT and sensible, ruthless and fair. Most importantly please add those one percenters (up or down), that count to you.
For "consistency sake"  cap score + bonuses - penalties to 0, 40.
.

You got me with vertexes :). I'd agree that reputation points aren't a reliable measure of moderating qualities (look at mine :). Rep doesn't matter to me, as long as the mod knows what he's doing.

Vertexes isn't necessarily wrong, depending on how strict you are. I'd rather have penalties for using "Plz Help" or writing the words "Question" or "Doubt" in the title. XD

Anyway nice post, I gather this all came from Stack Data site. Your scoring system seems more reasonable.@batfinger your score is right up there at the top. What are you doing here playing with numbers, instead of running as candidate? :D

David added the query as a link to election page for me at your election.  I cannot resist any chance to post that vertices meta link. Someone took it just a  weeeeeee bit too seriously.   And like the election prior  there are already some very good candidates who have put their hand up. There is one potential candidate who is also a high rep  member of "Seasoned Advice" SE that would make a great mod whom has expressed interest in the future... My advice:  "The future is now!"

I knew I couldn't be the only one who noticed @batFINGER :). Having high rep on "Seasoned Advice" tells you so much about a person... "The future is now!"

What about helpful flags as a metric too?

@marcellothearcane sure. The question then is how much  for how many.. eg 1 pt bonus for >= one per month of users lifespan?


text:
Policy on posting code / error message etc as images
For many of the reasons well outlined here
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/285551/why-not-upload-images-of-code-errors-when-asking-a-question/285557#285557
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/303812/5317130
it is stackoverflow policy to post code and error messages as text.
StackOverflow Help Center: How to Ask a Good Question

DO NOT post images of code, data, error messages, etc. - copy or type the text into the question. Please reserve the use of images for
diagrams or demonstrating rendering bugs, things that are impossible
to describe accurately via text. For more information please see the
Meta FAQ entry Why not upload images of code/errors when asking a
question?

Is the same policy relevant here?
http://idownvotedbecau.se/imageofcode

Yes, I believe this is very much relevant. People with visual impairments will have a hard time when encountering such posts and even those of us that are able to view the images fine it would require a much greater effort. For instance questions about Python scripts would require to recreate the code. I've also seen screenshots of error messages where relevant parts are cut-off because the terminal doesn't show everything at once etc.

@batFINGER maybe it would help if you write something on this topic on the canned comments

Totally agree, worth a canned response too.

I think the correct thing to do is to let the user know what the problem is.
A down-vote with a comment explaining what is wrong might get the attention of the user. But the comment should also explain how to fix it.

.... wouldn't bother downvoting, the dv link in q came up in a search thought I'd post it.  When I've requested a user to "please post code as text" some responses sure get the mouse hovering over the DV button tho...  Re canned comment will look to how  SO  has phrased it in how to ask question page. Link escapes me atm.

I agree with this.* However* error messages in blender often are popup boxes under the mouse that disappear. I expect a lot of users do not know how to get the text of such an error message. Now about images of text, you could broaden this to say something along the lines of "no text in images." Sure a screen shot of blender will have text (and thats fine) but when someone opens up paint and adds what should be the answer to the image, now thats a problem. Same as screenshot of code it is near useless.


text:
How do I send a message to a specific User
How do I send a message to a particular user for clarification of a specific post?

The short answer is You can't.  But:
If you whant to add attention on the specific post, write comment with @username text inside, and  user will get a notification about your comment.
If user place links to Twitter, Github, and their personal website, you can check out these links, and often can see email addresses. Also, many users place their emails and Linked In profile links in their publicly available "About Me" section, especially if they are interested in networking
This question opened many times in meta stackexchange.com:
Any way to send a personal message to another user?
How do I contact other users?

Hello @zeffii, forgive me if I steal some attention from you.
I'm a chess enthusiast, I modeled a chessboard and (not knowing Python) I embarked on writing a program that reads a game from a PGN file and, controlled by a Tkinter interface via the Forward, Back buttons etc., should make moves on the chessboard. The program is only sketched out, and I found out only now that the moves are executed, but the 3D view updates only when the script ends.
I have looked for solutions on the web and none seem to work.

Hello @zeffii, I tried to implement the brilliant solution you proposed in the script of the page "https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/28673/update-viewport-while-running-script" but given my poor python knowledge I could not get any results!
If I sent you the Blender file and the script, would you have the chance to give it a look?
Thank you and excuse me for the length of the message.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator

@Ave you have to do it on the question or answer that you want to reach the author.

@Ave I suggest you ask a new question about the problem you ran into (there are plenty of python people around who may be able to help, even if you don't reach zeffii). Plus, by asking that question, you may get enough upvotes to have the required reputation to post comments on the main site (and therefore be able to comment on zeffii's answer directly).

@Ave you might want to read How do comment @ replies work?. The only person that got pinged from your two comments there, was Crantisz.

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


text:
Pre-canned comments to help users?
I often find myself writing the same comments over an over again, each time getting more brisk and less helpful. I thought it would be good to have a selection of pre-canned comments to pull from...
Feel free to add anything that find yourself using agian and again
This post is also an opportunity to tweak comments

There is a user script that make this even easier. I will link to the AU meta question about it.

Please edit the question
Note that most new users are not aware of the edit link to modify a post. So telling them add information is not enough, and they will use comments to clarify.
Writing the word edit between brackets [ ], like this: [ edit ] (without the spaces), will create a link users can use to edit their posts.
It is unclear what you are asking. Please use the [edit] link at the bottom of your question (https://i.sstatic.net/vHwEx.png) and add more information on how you set up your project. [Add images](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/75491) that might help us understand your scene and settings. See [How to upload an image to a post?](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/75491). Consider sharing your .blend file so that others can inspect it. You can upload it at https://blend-exchange.com/ and then paste the resulting link as part of your question.
Lack of details
General
Hello and welcome. As it stands this question is not answerable at the moment for lack of essential details to understand the issue. Remember only you have access to your scene, only you know your exact setup, settings and what steps you took to arrive where your are now. Please describe in detail what your issue is, possibly supported by some [accompanying screenshots](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/75491) with the [edit] button under the question. Editing will automatically put it up for review so it can be reopened.
New Users
Hello and welcome. This question was closed due to a lack of detail. It's not permanently gone, and this isn't a mark against your account. If you [edit] your question to include more detail, it will be automatically queued for review to be reopened.
Edit instead of using comments.
Instead of comments, please use the [edit] link at the bottom of your question (https://i.sstatic.net/vHwEx.png) to add information to your post.
or
Instead of adding comments, please use the [edit] link at the bottom of your question (https://i.sstatic.net/vHwEx.png) and add more information on how you set up your project. [Add images](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/75491) that might help us understand your scene and settings. See [How to add an image to a post](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/75491)
Please post more information
This comes in a few variations: add a .blend, screenshots or more information
Post a .blend:
Consider sharing your .blend file (with the images used as textures [packed into the file](https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/82965/1853)) so that others can inspect it. You can upload it at https://blend-exchange.com/ and then **paste the resulting link** as part of your original question.
Not enough information variant
Could you please post a .blend file using a service like [blend-exchange](https://blend-exchange.com/), as it stands there is not enough information in your question for anyone to find out what the problem is or find a solution. Thanks!
Difficult setup variant
Could you please post a .blend file using a service like [blend-exchange](https://blend-exchange.com/)? The current situation described in your question is difficult and/or time consuming to setup. By posting a .blend you can make it much easier for us to find a solution to your issue.
Add Images
Please use the [edit] link at the bottom of your post (https://i.sstatic.net/vHwEx.png) and upload images that show your current setup and illustrate the problem.See [How to upload an image to a post?](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/75491)
Pictures only, but not enough information in the text
While files, images, and external links may be helpful additions to questions they should not remain the only way to obtain information about your issue. Don't make understanding your question rely on downloading a file or visiting an external site. Use the builtin tools to [upload images](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/75491) or [gifs](https://blender.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/963), besides thoroughly explaining the problem in written form so it can be searched for and indexed thus helping future users find it.
Make images visible as part of the question and not as links.
Please use the [built in tools](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/75491) to add images to your question. Use an image editor, or online optimizer, if you must resize an image. You can help those who would answer your question if all the information is displayed as part of the question and not as links.
or
Please use the [edit] link at the bottom of your post (https://i.sstatic.net/vHwEx.png) and use the tools from this site to upload images so that they are displayed as part of your question. See: [How to upload an image to a post?](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/75491)
or
You have better chances of getting a answers if all of the information is visible in this page, instead of asking users to visit links just to understand your question. Please use the [edit] link at the bottom of your question (https://i.sstatic.net/vHwEx.png) and use the tools on the site to upload images directly. See: [How to upload an image to a post?](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/75491).
One question per post
Please ask only one question per post. Use the [edit] link at the bottom of your text (https://i.sstatic.net/vHwEx.png) and delete one of the questions. Then ask the second one (and any other questions) as a separate post. One question per post is how this site works. Thanks.
Too Broad.
As it stands this question is too broad. Try to focus the question into a single specific issue. Break up different questions into different posts. You can ask many questions, but it is easier to organize things if you deal with one issue at the time. To understand how to make better use of this site please take the [tour] and read [How do I ask a good question](https://blender.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask) and [What types of questions should I avoid asking?](https://blender.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask).
How do I do this?
Please make an effort to describe what you want as part of the title. Read: [What is the problem with posting an image (or link) and asking ""How do I do this?"](https://blender.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2449)
Solved
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Filedropper does expire, and quicker then pastall. Pastall is 5 months, file dropper is 30 days with no downloads.

@David Quick, alternative?

http://meta.blender.stackexchange.com/a/611/2217

It would be great if the more general of these were added to [ask] so that users are aware before the fact instead of folks having to post such comments.  There's a growing trend for people not putting effort into their questions on [blender.se]

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We can get some of ours from here: http://meta.askubuntu.com/q/1323/1992
There is a github repo for these comments too. If someone is willing, we could have our own (just need to fork the original).
If no one is able to maintain it, then I'll pitch in there.

Interesting idea... I'll take a look when I have a moment... I'd be willing to look after it, if I like the idea.

Do let me know what you've decided :)!

I did try it out, but the userscript kept on rejecting the jsonp file I made

Your file likely had a sytnax error.

See here: https://github.com/GiantCowFilms/BlenderSE-ProFormaComments

I tried to make a compilation here, but as mentioned in the readme, the remote import seems broken for now... I will provide a full markdown version later when my brain cools down a bit x)


text:
What is the process for creating gifs for questions and answers?
We now have over 1600 posts with gifs in them, gifs are very popular and useful; however it seems that they can be hard to create.
I have read placing .gifs in text and How to post gifs on this site?, yet I still have not found a complete write up for how to create and add gifs.

Yet another idea. This ScreenToGif tool is now here.

I would recommend ShareX. It can take screenshots and capture gifs, but it also immediately uploads them to https://imgur.com/ and provides you a link. With this, you don't have to worry about the SE upload limit because you can just point to the imgur link directly instead of going through the upload dialog.

@JoshSilveous while that is super convenient. I would urge you to not simply use imgur. All images need to be hosted on SE. Now if you can not make the gif under 2mb, that is a different issue, but then and only then should an external host be used.

@David But StackExchange's host is just a subdomain of imgur (stack.imgur.com). Unless StackExchange gets some kind of priority on imgur, why does it matter? The host is the same, the only difference is that it doesn't use "stack" in the domain.

@JoshSilveous Yes, SE uses imgur, but it is very different. Imgur guarantees that images hosted on i.stack.imgur will never be deleted. I do not trust them on their regular site.

We now have 17,000 posts with GIFs in them!

The recording software
The top two are by far the most used (on this site):

LICEcap Windows and OSX installer

GifCam Windows only, but no install (yay)

ScreenToGif Newer app, looks very good, Windows only, no install (yay)

peek Linux only

Do note that these all can be run on linux using Wine.
There are many other ways, such as recording your screen, and then later converting to .gif (and in some cases that is better) but 98% of the time it is way easier to just use one of the options above.
Making the gif
This is the easiest and the hardest part, I'll explain.
All you have to do is hit "Record"

But then you messed up one of the steps in blender you were trying to show off. (start again)
You forgot to turn on Screencast Keys, or KeyCastOW (both how I display the key presses). (start again)
You realize half way through that you are only recording half of the 3D view. (start again)
You took way too long, and now have a 20mb gif. :( (start again)
Blender crashes. (start again)
Things that never go wrong (when you JUST made that exact same thing) go wrong now that you are recording a gif. (start again)

So it is easy to record a gif, it is hard to get it right.
You will quickly gain a new appreciation for all those that make hour long tutorials. I digress, back to the gifs.
Reducing the Size
You want to aim for the smallest file size possible. The three parts of that are how big you make the gif, how long, and what FPS.
I (almost) always use 15 fps.
I (almost) always make my gifs 650px by 400px.
As short as I can make the gif without making it unclear what is happening.
This is NOT how you want blender to look when you are making a gif.

It is very hard to keep all actions in the gif capture window.
Instead change blender to look something like this:

Now everything you do in the 3D view will be recorded.
Publish on BSE
The biggest reason to aim for a small file size (under 2mb) is so you can use stack exchange's built in image upload and hosting.
If you do have a gif under 2mb then you can add it to your question or answer like any other image. By using the add image button, or simply pressing CtrlG.

However if it is over 2mb, then you will have to change the gif to get it under the 2mb limit. Crop it, if there is extra space in the gif that really does not need to be there - crop it out. Try different compression settings (I've found screenToGif has pretty good compression) that is the next easiest. If the gif looks too poor at the lower quality, then change the number of colors and re-record. If you reduce the variety of colors, the file will get smaller.
Please do not use an external image host. Even if you answer looks a tad better now with the uncompressed gif, eventually your answer will be broken. And dead links are worse than deleted default cubes.

Great post. I mention in Solution 2 here that both licecap and gifcam can run under wine on linux.

Also, you want to make sure that you enable capture cursor if you want to make your mouse show in the gif   (as in here) https://i.sstatic.net/9LUMe.gif

+1 for the "making the GIF" process!  I just spent 5 hours failing at making a simple screen recording to send to a friend and I think every one of those happened!  I'm also interested to see those other recorder options too as LICEcap doesn't work properly on my tablet.

So I've tried all three, LiceCAP works fine on my workstation but not on my Surface tablet, GifCam and ScreenToGif both work fine.  ScreenToGif has a lot more features (including saving to a video file), but makes the computer lag a little while recording (doesn't affect the recording though).

My favorite GIF capture application is Gyazo. You can do screenshots and GIF capture, and it instantly uploads it to the web when you take it. Then just copy/paste the URL into SE.

You can make gif's using blender and GIMP.
Three ways you can get original frames from blender -

Render an animation. Depending on what you want to show you can setup an animation in blender and render the animation to images. You can also use the viewports opengl render option.
Accumulate a series of screenshots. Blender can take a screenshot of it's window. Take a screenshot at each stage that you want to display in the gif.
Make a screencast. Blender can also automatically take a series of screenshots as you perform your task. There are settings in preferences under system to adjust the framerate of a screencast. The screenshots will be saved based on your render settings for location and filetype.

Making the gif -
Once you have a series of frames to use for your gif, you can open them in gimp. By using File->Open As Layers... you can select multiple images and have each one added as a new layer. Note that this will add the selected images to the current image so you may want to close all open images before doing this.

Select and crop the image to the area you want in the gif. To reduce the filesize of the gif use Filter->Animation->Optimise (for GIF). This removes duplicated areas from each layer, leaving them mostly transparent and the result is opened in a new image.

Then export the image and give it a .gif suffix and you will get the options dialog for saving the gif, be sure to enable "as animation".

The gif's you save can then be added to your answer the same as any other image.

Could you show how you can change the delay between frames by editing the layer name. I always optimise (difference) must do a test one day.

You can rename the layer to customise the delay of each frame - it will have (100ms) in the name. If you want the same delay for each frame you can change the export settings for delay and tick Use delay entered above for all frames which will override the delay in the layer names.

According to the gimp docs optimize (gif) also reduces the size of the layer.

There's definitely not a single best process. I hope this thread fills up with people weighing in on their method.
Linux here.. (Ubuntu) -- not crossplatform
My solution involves a few prerequisits

(optional) Kazam, you could use Blender's Screencast to create *.png
Blender's VSE, (hah! you totally have this already!)
FFmpeg's for the convert command,
gifsicle "command line automated gifs",
A Blender add-on called BCPrompt (disclaimer I wrote this add-on).

The instructions don't quite capture how simple this is to do :)

use Kazam (screencapture software with UI) to record a selected screen area to a .mp4. (hit start, do your thing, hit stop, save to .mp4)

When you make mistakes you can undo, or restart the demoing without restarting the kazam recording.

Import the .mp4 to Blender's VSE, and edit it till it shows only the  most essential frames.
Now I'm ready to render the clip as a set of .pngs, but first I need to set the correct render dimensions and the start and end frame. With the strip/meta strip active I got to console and execute a few commands included with the BCPrompt add-on.
>>> dandc     (ctrl+Enter is mapped to execute a command from console)

the dandc commands does these two things for you:

sets render-output's width and height from active strip's dimensions.
sets start and end-frame from active strip's extents.

Render the VSE to *.png to some /Path/to/folder/ either via UI or
>>> anim /Path/to/folder/

Once the render is complete I execute
>>> ogif /Path/to/folder/ 256 24

this outputs two animated gifs of the *.png in that folder

1 non optimized called animated.gif
1 optimized to 256 colors and 24 fps called opt_256_animated_24fps.gif

To get the generated gif into the browser I can execute system commands from the python console using an exclamation to prefix the line. (this turns the pyconsole into a lightweight terminal)
>>> !nautilus /Path/to/folder/

will open nautilus at the given folder and I can drag the     optimized.gif to the BlenderStackExchange window.

ffmpeg is also capable of producing gif files using the palettegen and paletteuse filters.

@Skrylar yep https://gist.github.com/zeffii/59d1e1b3ebbab0d75438 -- I may still use that , thanks for the reminder.

The convert command is imagemagick, not FFMpeg

I use regular screen capture tools (anything to make a video), then upload the video to ezgif.com.
I currently switch between Quicktime and Monosnap (but I'm on a Mac). They both work well, but for different situations. Then I upload the result to ezgif for editing and "gif-making." This site lets me optimize with compression, cutting, frame rate, etc., and does it all rather quickly.
Let me know if you want more details, or a gif of the process :-)

Still working in 2.92:
To convert an existing image-sequence or movie-file, the Bligify add-on wraps ImageMagick and Gifsicle, and can be called from inside the VSE. You must give it the paths to those executables in its set-up panel.
At least, on Ubuntu, the .blend, with the paths set, must be saved as a startup for the paths to persist between sessions, unless you want to go in and tweak the script.

I use byzanz which is in the ubuntu repos, along with byzanz-record-window
A quick search also yields this, which I haven't tried.
If you prefer a graphic method there's also silentcast but I find its UI a bit confusing.
Another solution is using the internal blender screencast command, saving the output to ogv and using the script in this answer to convert to gif
Or render to png's and use
convert -delay 10 -loop 0 *.png -layers OptimizeFrame animation.gif

to convert to gif, and
gifsicle -O3 animation.gif --colors 256 -o out.gif

will optimize a bit further


text:
Anyone in favour of adding an asset-browser tag?
Granted the asset browser is not the shiniest addition to 3.0 but it's definitely shaping up to be really nice in 3.1, and I predict a bunch of questions arising in the few coming months.
There is a tag for pretty much every single editor so I don't see why we couldn't add this one. I know I can go ahead and create it myself but I wanted to test the waters before doing so.
There is an asset tag but I feel it's not generic enough for the asset browser, since it also involves managing catalogs, libraries, etc.

Definitely worth it. I've tagged a bunch of existing questions with [tag:asset-browser] so it should already be available and show up in suggestions. Feel free to tag any relevant posts with it. A wiki and description is also welcome.

Great ! Thanks for the feedback :)

tag wiki updated

Thanks of @MartyFouts the tag keeper

Needs a 'status-completed' tag?  Unsurprisingly, only moderates can add that tag.


text:
Including a .blend file
How do I put a .blend file in  my questions? Thats really all I have to ask, even though I have to fit a certain amount of characters.

You can use Blend-Exchange, which is an externally offered service run by me. It was designed specifically for this purpose:
See here
The reason to use Blend-Exchange over pasteall (now retired) is that the files are kept permanently.
With the user script, you can have a upload button right in the make a post box, just like an image upload.

Blend exchange is definitively the way to go. The embed code that it automatically generates for you even has an awesome, eye-catching, decorative, pretty little picture for the link to your blend file.


text:
What to do about fluid-simulation and smoke-simulation, fire tags?
Since 2.82 some of the physics systems have undergone some major changes, specifically Fluid (when mantaflow was added). As such, for the site it seems to creates a bit of a mess with some tags because they overlap.

fluid-simulationexcerpt as of this writing:

Questions about the Fluid simulation systems in blender. Blender has
two systems for simulating liquids, a SPH (Smoothed Particle Dynamics)
system integrated with the particle system, and a Lattice Boltzmann
method which can be used create a variety of simulations.

smoke-simulation is actually an old wiki link as of writing this question, which is how this question came up in the first place.
fire   no tag wiki
For a user that reads the tag wiki, this would be misleading, so the information should probably be updated.
Per current documentation, fluid simulation includes smoke/ fire and liquid, so wouldn't be surprised if users unknowingly begin to misuse fluid-simulation for both causing future disorganization of questions as time goes on.
Examples of questions that was asked are Both my fire emitter and my domain became 'wireframe', can't see them in render view
The OP is asking about fire, but tagged the question fluid-simulation as well as fire
also,
Cold smoke simulation
The OP is asking about smoke but has tagged the question fluid-simulation and smoke-simulation
Finally, these two tag search results here and here show that it is already becoming quite disorganized.

The questionHow should these tags be organized? The given information needs to be updated. So while at it, is it a good idea to create a new tag, liquid-simulation  and use that for questions specifically about liquid, and use smoke-simulation for specific smoke questions, and then use fluid-simulation or create mantaflow for both of these?

Perhaps we could include a notice that the old tags are now deprecated and reference which new tag should be used instead. I'm not sure how often questions about mantaflow are asked, it may make sense to have specific tags for simulation types for mantaflow (e.g. mantaflow-fluid, mantaflow-fire, mantaflow-smoke)

@RobertGützkow perhaps, at a glance it seems that [tag:smoke-simulation] has had 15 questions this month, [tag:fluid-simulation] 31, and [tag:fire] has had 7. At the same time, I know there are users that still use old versions because of their hardware, so still may run into questions for now...

I think [tag:fluid-simulation] and [tag:smoke-simulation] should be kept system agnostic as tags respectively pertaining to fluid and smoke, regardless of the underlying system.
The fact that it now uses Mantaflow library or that both use the same system under the hood seems irrelevant and should probably not be reflected in our tags.
Having additional liquid-simulation or mantaflow tags will probably only add to the confusion. Incorrectly tagged questions should be fixed of course.


text:
Should duplicate and paid add-on tags be kept or removed?
While reading through questions, I realized that there are a great number of tags that seem to be either duplicated or otherwise very sparsely used or just misused frequently.
Would it be useful to either consolidate or remove some of these? It might make edits and asking a bit simpler, but I would be interested to hear feedback.The list of tags is below.

auto-rig-pro
select
bytes
archipack-add-on
addon not add-on
alpha not alpha-channel
blender-internal andinternal-renderandblender-internal-render and blender-render and render-engine-blender-internal NOT blender-internal-render-engine (or something, this one is maybe a little confusing, although with 2.8 soon a non-issue I guess)
eevee and render-engine-eevee NOT eevee-render-engine
fcurve NOT fcurves
luxrender and render-engine-luxrender NOT luxrender-render-engine
math andmaths NOT mathematics
modelling NOT modeling
renderman andrender-engine-renderman NOT renderman-render-engine
sss NOT subsurface-scattering

A lot of those are synonyms and not duplicates. They redirect to the 'primary' tag. Bytes was created by a new user, removed by me, and will automatically be deleted soon. There are also discussions here and here about tags.

Hi Timaroberts, thanks for the investigation. Like Ray said most of those are already synonyms if you follow the links they'll take you to the correct targets. The ones that aren't were possibly overlooked and will be merged

I guess I had assumed that they were just duplicated, especially with all of the BI tags :) thanks for the clarification!

BSE tag synonyms

@David thanks! I didn't know that page existed :)


text:
Should a question be allowed to contain contact details?
A question has been posted (Mesh distortion on my models clothes when creating a pose) that suggests that answers and information exchange could be done via instant messaging outside stack exchange, because of an exceptional urgency. The users also provides contact details (discord username) in order to be reached.

A troubleshooting confrontation, if made public and permanent through comments and edits, is beneficial to other users (including who asked the question). Because of this, should the information about instant messaging and contact details be removed?
Should the user be suggested to edit the question themselves to remove this information?
Would the contact information (or a request for instant messaging, contact details being moved to the profile page) be acceptable in the comment section?

The post is on a First Post review queue and somewhat puzzles me.

meta-meta-question: can meta questions contain links to currently active main-site questions?

to answer your meta meta question, yes definitely. Any time you can link to real examples of the issue it is helpful.

You start out with the correct assumption which is: contact info should not be in posts.
As such whenever you see this type of thing (usually an email address where you can contact them for more details) edit it out.
Nothing good comes from it. If you privately give the OP some answer off site, then nobody else can benefit from that answer. Likewise if the OP sends you more detailed information (that should be edited into the question) then nobody else has that to write an answer off of.
Users can have almost anything they want on their profile page, so sure their contact info can be there. However if you then find a question with something like this:

If you need more screen shots you can find my contact info on my profile page.

Then just edit it out.
SE does not like extra "noise" in posts things like "thanks" "hi" etc are encouraged to be edited out, how much more so someone's contact info.
You will find that every time this has been brought up on the main meta the same answer comes forward, contact info should not be in posts.
Should I flag a question in which the OP includes their phone number?
Should (real) e-mail-addresses be forbidden in questions/answers?
Allow users to put their e-mail in posts?

It might be worth mentioning that pointing people to offsite contact (as in your "screen shot" example) is that then other answerers don't have the advantage of working from the same information when forming their answers, peer review stops happening, and the aid rendered doesn't go on to help other users. If a question needs more information it should be edited into the question.


text:
Blender SE's updated site theme is ready for testing!
As part of implementing the new unified themes across the network, we're gradually rolling out updated site themes for each site. As of today, we have enabled your updated site theme for testing.
If you can't see it right now, that's by design! This is a very early test implementation of your design and we need your help finding issues with it before we make it live for everyone permanently. So, keep in mind, there will be things that need fixing! We'll address those things as we can.
If you'd like to review it, here's how:
How do I enable it?
Click here and check the "Beta test new themes" option. This will turn on the new theme for all sites that have one in testing, including this one. Here's more info on how to opt in. You can uncheck the box to revert to the older theme until the site is live for everyone. Note, while turning it on is immediate, it will take a few minutes to revert to the old view - but it will go through!
What type of feedback do we need?
On this post: Bugs related to this site's design elements
Please help us look for issues/bugs related to the theme design and how we have mapped the old theme to the new. This needs to be done within the limits of the new unified theme.
This could include colors of sections of the design or text, problems with JavaScript add-ons (if applicable), the logo or top banner appearance or other artwork.
You can also feel free to ask questions about the new layout if you're unsure how to navigate it.
On Meta Stack Exchange: General concerns about left nav or theming
There are some things that are definitely changing everywhere and can't really be adjusted on a per-site basis. A few of them include:

Top banner is shorter in height, so some artwork has to be adjusted along with some logos.
Left Navigation is active everywhere (but can be collapsed into a menu by visiting your site preferences - instructions here).
Responsive layout is active, which lets the site adjust as browser widths change - no side scrolling (some pages haven't been updated, yet, though). For now, if you prefer the scrolling, you can disable this by clicking the "disable responsiveness" link in the footer.
Many site elements including tags and voting arrows are standardized across the network.
Link underlining is active. In an effort to make links more visible, they are now being underlined.

If you have concerns or issues regarding the left nav or the overall approach we are taking to theming, then this Meta Stack Exchange post is the right place for feedback.
As I mentioned earlier, there are some unique design elements like voting arrows and tags that are being standardized in this process. Keeping these custom elements makes our ability to maintain the sites too complex and, while we're very sad to see them go, we're in a difficult position of needing to make the site designs work together so that we can continue to address feature requests and bugs that will make your Q&A experience better. This is addressed in a Meta Stack Exchange post if you want more detail.
What new themes?
If you're like, "What the heck are you talking about?", then you should read the Meta Stack Exchange post entitled Rollout of new network site themes (and maybe the posts it links to for the full background). To follow along with the rollout of these new themes, go here.
Thanks so much for your constructive feedback!
Oh, Who am I?
If you don't know me, I'm one of the Community Managers here at Stack Exchange. I'm here to listen to your input and convey it to our Design team for responses and fixes to bugs. I'll do my best to respond to your concerns and explain whether changes we've made are bugs that can be changed or if they're by design and why.

I haven't tried the beta theme yet so I have no opinion about it (apart from not having had any issues on other SE sites that use it). I wonder if it's because of people's opinion on the theme or because they feel like this announcement post is of poor quality that they are downvoting. If it's for the former, that's bad! If it's for the latter, please -- people -- explain!

ok @NicolaSap because you asked. I was one of the heartless unspoken DVer's. My DV has nothing to do with Catija, her post, the quality, or how it was written. This is about the left nav, period. I'm not going to get into the whole theme thing here. I just left my DV and moved on. Will report any bugs when I come across them. (which is what this whole post was supposed to be about).

Thanks David for the clarification. I acknowledge that the new theme is not much appreciated around here (I repeat: I haven't gotten into this topic or argument before), and I realise that there's something bigger than an internal BSE thing at stake here. Voting is anonymous and isn't to be judged on SE (apart from serial voting), I just felt that a reason such as yours is not among the "good ones" for a DV, but thanks for coming out and claiming it

I agree, with you there. DVing because you do not like the under laying issue is not a great reason. (It would be plain wrong on the main site.)  However meta is a little different, her we do vote to agree or disagree. So here it is borderline, ok probably not right. This is not about the theme (too late for that), but just letting you know to test it.

Oh, so the leftnav approaching closer here as well. Sad to hear. Also I'd love to hear more about customized 404 / not a bot etc pages much more than about leftnav and link-underlining (although questions about 404 etc were already asked without any answer).

@David: I'm not sure if you know that you can hide the left nav. I personally can't decide which way is better, but some people prefer their nav in the top bar.

The new logo looks like it has been saved to SVG in Adobe Illustrator without enough decimal places. The default number of decimal places is 1, but a minimum of 3 is probably needed to represent the logo in its full glory.
Because of this it lacks in details and the logo looks off compared to the old one. For example the "B" looks off, the 'l' is to thin etc. See the attached images for comparison:

The old and new logo as rendered by Google Chrome in macOS:

This is probably status by design, but I'll bring it up for thought.
The "Ask Question" button is now missing on the users page, user pages, tags page, tag pages, all of the review pages (including all the tools), the tour page (At least here it forces users to read down to the "Ask a Question" button.), and the help center.
That is a lot of places where I can not ask a question. Why are we removing the "Ask Question" button, the one thing SE is meant to do, and making it harder to get to the ask page?
In short I have to be on the Home page, the questions page, or a question page, to be able to ask a new question.
Can we please put the "Ask Question" button back everywhere? I mean we have that whole new (empty) left nav, and is begging for buttons.

So, when we pulled the Ask button out of the top bar, this did become a problem and I agree that it should be addressed. In the question I mention that many pages haven't been redesigned for the responsive layout - pages like the review queues and profile pages - hopefully this will be a consideration when they are reworked. I can't actually remember if anyone's asked to move the Ask Question button into the left sidebar but my guess is that it'd be problematic since we allow users to collapse it, which means it'd be missing on every page.

Is it intended that you have to go through the help center to find the badges page?
I wanted to check on one of the badges, and could not remember how to get there (shows how often that page is used). It did not occur to me to check the help center. I loaded the old theme, and clicked the badges button, simple. (then from the url figured it would be in the help center)
Seeing how it is a very secondary page I understand removing it. However the left nav is still quite empty. Could we not add it back there?
What was the reasoning to drop the "badges" and "ask question" links when the nav moved to the left?

Badges (and privileges) can be reached by clicking on the achievements dropdown. It's in the top line of the pane. It's actually been there for a while. :) I forget about it all the time, though. That said, Badges are a pretty important part of the site mechanics. You're not the only one who'd like to see them in the left nav. https://i.sstatic.net/eI8dp.png

Ooh, that's useful (and I feel dumb).

On my user page when there is a blue number box showing the count since last click, the underline for that tab disappears.

(no that number is not edited.)
My browser and OS:
Same setup as always, still running FireFox 52.0.2 esr on vista.

I looked through the css and the issue arises from the border-bottom:2px solid transparent; and border-bottom:1px solid transparent; deceleration in the #tabs a,.tabs a style on lines 7045 and 17749 respectively (well at least in how FF unminifys it.)

:( Hmmm... I don't have any events here to reproduce this but I don't see it on sites that I do have events on that are also in testing. It may be browser/system specific. Could you add some details in that regard?

PS you should have an event on BSE now. (and it likely works in your browser)


text:
Hovering on the date of a comment changes its color to the default link color
When you hover on the post date of a comment on the meta site, the color of the date changes from light gray to bright orange. This is different from the main site and other metas (at least Stack Overflow Meta). The links on the other metas don't change when you hover.
Edit:
When the link is visited, the bug doesn’t re-occur.
Edit 2:
To fix this, change this CSS rule:
a:hover

to this:
:not(.comment-date)>a:hover

For convenience, here's a comment to test it on ;)


text:
Remember to check for "duplicates"!
Many times, it happens to me: I comment to propose a solution but I always forget to check for duplicates questions.
Is it possible to add a clearly visible message (maybe above the text box) which remember that when a comment is about to be posted (eventually for answers too)?

I'm not sure I follow. Check for duplicate whats? (comments?)

@gandalf3 ... questions... effectively, I will add that editing the question. Thanks

For answers it may be could be done (although looks like probably not).. Not for comments I think (at least because where to position that box so it's not annoying? And maybe one is commenting for clarifying?). This is kind of habit which e.g. I tried to create for myself.


text:
How to set spell checker in English?
I am french an my Windows system and web browser are set in french language. So when I am typing here (here = typing a question or an answer in BSE) nearly all the words are underlined and that does not help... How to set it in english ?

AFAIK the spell checker is part of your browser and not something that can be controlled by SE. I suggest searching around for docs relevant to your browser (in FF it's RMB on text field > languages), or even asking a question on an SE site ;)

@gandalf3 Thanks ! RMB and languages works perfectly !

OK, off topic... but @gandalf3 gave me the answer. In my opinion "off topic" is very subjective here as I understood the meta was to help in practical aspects in BSE... but ok... the subject is solved for me. Maybe you should simply give an answer gandalf3 and the "debate" is closed.

Related: How do we enhance the SE spell check dictionary?

As gandlaf said in the comments, SE does not have any spell checker built in to the question or answer fields. All spell checking is handled by your browser. (Or if you are using a browser such as, say IE before version 10, you will get no spell checking.)
Here are the instruction to add spellchecking for other languages in Firefox and Chrome (yes the best instructions I could find for chrome was from their forum...)

Thanks David, it works... hope I will type a better English now !


text:
Look at my file (via pasteall, or others) and answer me, the good way, now?
Is that acceptable? Things have changed (I think). Since some months, this has became usual here.
Is this due to some change in BSE rules?
Or should we (repetively, again) ask, in comments, for more accurate information in the question itself? Or give up about that.
Also, is the usage of pasteall or any equivalent has became the good habit here (no more blend exchange)? Even if the question makes sense only with the linked file, in long term?
What is your opinion about that?

As far as I'm aware this rule still applies What is the problem with posting an image (or link) and asking “How do I do this?”. "Just fix my file" questions should be closed if they can't be understood without downloading a file.
I have pulled back a little on immediately closing though, because as a moderator any votes are binding, so as soon as I vote to close it takes effect immediately, not giving users time to respond, which may seem a little discouraging for first time users, so I tend to await a little.
As for using PasteAll rather than Blend.Exchange, I have relaxed my enforcing of that rule a bit recently.
As mentioned by BatFinger, Blend-Exchange as a "permanent" hosting provider would be unnecessary for many situations and overkill as one-size-fits-all solution. Hoarding certain files for "all eternity" somewhere seems really unnecessary and will gradually accumulate as internet pollution.
Besides that many files, especially ones in question, are really only relevant to answer said question, and have limited value afterwards. As Gandalf mentions they are probably downloaded once or twice to identify the issue by any potential the answerers, and then beyond that point I think the interest decreases abruptly, and I suspect the number of downloads falls to zero quickly after getting an answer.
I'm pretty sure no one is downloading hundreds of donut files, or old incomplete "stripped down" blends, small enough to fit size constraints any more.
Files on answers though are a whole other matter of course. People will likely be far more interested in files that provide understanding about solutions.
I wonder if Blend-Exchange can provide any type of file access statistics over time. Not sure if there's any system in place that can provide some access traffic history of files over time so we can confirm or deny my theory.

Unfortunately, it seems like user provided files are mostly just for us to confidently sort the question into exactly what kind of duplicate it is.  I don't know how to get around the problem that asking a question in the right way almost requires the same knowledge as fixing it to begin with.

"asking a question in the right way almost requires the same knowledge as fixing it to begin with" Sadly almost true. On the other hand, asking the question the "right way" forces you to diagnose the issue in a way that you narrow it down enough to almost fix it yourself


text:
Is it acceptable to recommend other software in answers?
Blender is a very versatile tool that excels in many diverse areas, and does remarkably well even for uses beyond it's main scope, but as much as we all love it, we have to admit that it is not some sort of glorified universal jack-of-all-trades.
There are just some tasks that it is not very good at, or can't outright do, and there may be more adequate tools for certain jobs.
Some times users are struggling with tasks that would be a lot easier to accomplish with some other software package, alternatively or in parallel with Blender. So in the process of answering some workflow related questions is it OK to recommend said software to the user within the scope of the question or should all answers refrain from mentioning other applications and focus exclusively in Blender based solutions only?

Is it acceptable to recommend software to totally replace Blender
Is it acceptable to recommend software to work in parallel with Blender? (As part of a more complex workflow with import/export interactions, or as is often the case with texturing with image editing software, or illustration/logo design/bezier-curve-related type of work and Inkscape)
Is it still OK to recommend commercial software, even if it is or not free/open source?

I ask this because I have often done it before, but I have recently been called out on it, and it actually got me thinking if it was the right course of action.

A very good question.
Seeing as how this is blender.stackexchange.com answers should primarily be about blender. We have closed question asking how to do X in maya or 3Ds max, like wise answers using maya or 3Ds max would be very odd (and probably down voted heavily).
That is not to stay that you can never suggest other software to do a particular task. There are lot of examples where blender is simply not the best, and we do have recommendations there for other software.
To your first point, I would say no. We certainly don't want people coming to BSE and just getting an answer "use X, blender sucks." However if "totally replace blender" is referring to just a specific part of a workflow that is probably ok.
Point two: absolutely! 3D, video, graphic design, etc are big jobs, using diverse workflows including many different software packages. There is no reason people here should think they are limited to just blender (in instances like this), especially if the question is using different software.
Point three: sure. I for one much prefer free (as in freeware) and even more so free and open source software (FLOSS), but there is no reason we should not let it be known about some good proprietary software, just because we have to pay for it. (There are paid blender addons that get mentioned in answers.) There is such a HUGE offering of software related to and used with blender that it is very likely that someone may not know about piece X.
Saying all that, I want to caution you when writing answer recommending other software.

First off, you have to still have a good answer. Just writing "blender can't do that, use [link to other software]" will not be considered a good answer, and will be converted to a comment. (It is fine to leave a link as a comment.)
If it can be done in blender explain so, if not then just say that blender can't do X add the link(s) to the other software and say a bit about it. I understand that you don't need to say much about each software, but BSE answers should not just be a collection of links.
Use restraint when jumping to recommending other software. If someone is having trouble with the sculpting tools, we should not send him to Zbrush. Any modeling question should be answered in blender not maya, 3ds max, ryhno, sketch up, cinema 4d, lightwave, and others. While mocha pro may be is better then blender's tracker our questions asking about tracking should use blender.

In short, answers should focus on blender, but in context external software recommendations are ok.

Yes, that's mostly what I figured, just wanted to be sure. I generally strive to answer exclusively using Blender; when it is considerably advantageous, I recommend other software always as a side note. If Blender is totally incapable of said task I try explaining why with links to references and point to other software, commenting commercial ones. Thanks for the thorough answer

@DuarteFarrajotaRamos sounds like you are doing great! keep it up.