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Must every question formulation be so formal?
Isn't there a bit of bringing your own personality into the question?
I mean is it really that important to have cold not individual question formulations?
Revision because of grammar is okay but removing a have a good day and calling it "deleting the extra stuff" seems a bit too harsh in my eyes.

Sorry, I probably should have mentioned this when I edited.. It's not some much "formal" as just reducing clutter. A paragraph saying "I hope you can help me, have a good day, thanks :)" doesn't add any new information to the post, as it's kindof a given that the OP hopes someone can help them (given that they are posting a question).. See http://meta.blender.stackexchange.com/q/466/599

I agree with the "I hope you can help me" it's pointless.  I think "Have a good day, thanks" is really just polite behavior and it's really not something people should drop for the sake of "rules"  If that's what's being pushed then the rules are very wrong or being used in a way that was never intended.  After all we are not robots and being curt when typing messages online tends to sound bossy and rude.

@MarcClintDion It can come out that way, but I think here on SE this is pretty much accepted as the norm without seeming bossy. At least in my mind, I think a lot of the tone is conveyed by the phrasing of the useful information, without the need for extraneous phrases that take up an extra few seconds to read without really providing any information. Also these aren't really hard rules per se, more like conventions that most SE users seem to follow. Usually I don't edit out this sort of stuff unless I'm already editing for another reason, but I made an exception in this case due to the amount

@MarcClintDion I seem to have pretty much the same philosophy as CoDEmanX.

I agree with that.  If there is a whole bunch of dialogue with a bit of standard courtesy it can just be easier to erase the whole paragraph than to pick through it all to clean up.  I was thinking that the standard behaviour that is expected of people at a public library seems appropriate.  Yammering on and on is discouraged but if you bump into someone it is polite to excuse yourself.  Thank someone if they help you except in this case the 'upvote' button is the thank you.

Exactly. I'm still frumious at Ray Mairlot for REPEATEDLY removing the engaging titles that I use as hooks to get views and hopefully answers. Examples in point: (Lightning Strikes! The Problem with Emitters) was turned into (Are particle emitters a good starting point for creating lightning?) and (Portal Majjicks in Blender's Render) became (How can I create a portal?) and (Cube Confusion: Creating a d8 in Blender from One Object) became (How do I create an 8 sided die from one object?) I'll admit to having changed the title on one of my own questions myself... twice...

There are lots of question on this topic, such as:
Editing questions to remove "thank you" etc
Should 'Hi', 'thanks', taglines, and salutations be removed from posts?
What should I keep out of my posts and titles?
Editing for Brevity?
Are taglines & signatures disallowed?
What is the policy on signatures and links in answers?
Here and else where on the Stack Exchange network, it commonly accepted to keep extraneous text out of questions and answers. It is not about formal vs informal writing, but rather concisely conveying the relevant information.
While salutations seem harmless, and they are; they also do not add value to the question, and as such are should not be there.
I read a reason something like this once.

If it add no value to the question, but takes time for everybody who reads the question, why not edit out this extraneous text.

let's discuss :)
The mere fact that someone uses the site to ask a question implies that they 'hope we can help'. The site is really about exchanging information, and though it may seem cold, distant and impersonal when we cut out the pleasantries, all we really want to do is stream-line the information, and make it consistent with how questions are presented across the Stack Exchange network.
If you feel the need to see a less formal side of the site join us in the chatroom RenderFarm, and you might get a better understanding of the separation between the familiar and the matter of fact


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Things to address with Stack Exchange upon graduation?
Our site is wonderful, and I love it, but I'm sure we all realize that it could be improved greatly! Now that SE is going to develop a custom design for us (Which will be soon, they have $40 million) they are probably going to be as willing as ever to make the changes that we need.
What are changes or other things you think need to be addressed by Stack Exchange during graduation?
Please separate them into multiple answers, it makes it easier to see what the community agrees with
PS This is not a feature wishlist... please put changes you've felt a strong need for.

Does this mean we are close to graduation?

@PGmath, We are in the queue, according to a comment from Abby Hairboat, a community manager for Stack Exchange. In the post a about the 40 million, they said some was going towards completing the queue, so I bet it will be within the year

.Blend upload and storage
Although many downsides could be seen, the number one most common comment on a question is a variant of "Could you upload your .blend, thanks!" Often it is the easiest way to trouble shoot issues, since images can only tell so much, and it takes a lot of time to reconstruct situations. Blend files are also valuable to answers as they can help demonstrate concepts.
Advantages:

Removes the need to comment about further detail in many cases
Makes it easier for users to comply to queries about more information
Many .blend hosting sites in use delete the files after use, this would make it Future Proof
Other sites pack viruses along with the .blend (Yikes!)

Requirements

.Blend upload should be permanent
There should be a notification asking users, if relevant, to pack the textures.

Disadvantages:
I think it is fit to note some possible issues to dispel any fears.

Poorly written questions, using a .blend as a crutch

Solution: Down votes. If the community has a problem with a question, they down vote it and the user learns.

I definitely do not agree with your " A poorly written question with a .blend can be better then a well written question without a .blend in some cases" statement. A well written and clear question is always better then a poor question. Would a blend file really make a question like this better?

One problem with this that you didn't mention is that blend files can get rather large. From a hosting perspective this can become pretty cumbersome. SE is unlikely to allow us this feature unless a third party can be used for the job. I would suggest Sketchfab... though it would still take some negotiation on that end.

@AWildRolandiXor Usually when a .blend is needed, just uploading a model won't do, the actually FILE is needed to understand some issues, as well as to demonstrate cycles materials etc.

@David Yes & No, Some questions are beyond hope :/ Some cases though, a user is more likely to include a highly useful .blend instead of being willing to write paragraphs of details that someone trying to help would have to read and replicate. Both sides win with a .blend. The some cases qualifier was there for a reason as well, your example would fall outside the some cases

@GiantCowFilms I haven't downloaded anything from SF, but wouldn't they offer to download the original file?

permanent (or short/limited time) storage could be an option. I'm not sure about this but i think some people don't want to share their files forever. This could limit hosting problems too.

@Bithur The problem is the fact that StackExchange is a knowledge base, not a support forum. The information should be permanent, that is the hole point. I under stand many here are not familiar with SE culture, but the reason why this is suggested, and I wrote a permanent storage system for the interim is that this information is valuable to future users....

@GiantCowFilms You're absolutely right, making things permanent is the best choice. I just wonder if it's needed all the time.

@Bithur Yes it is.... if people don't want to contribute long term they can go elsewhere, I tend to thing of .blend files in this instance as images...

< KBD > button
There was a discussion on this, which largely panned off into a user-scripts party :D! But in all seriousness, I think we need this. Without user scripts, which I dislike for various reasons. Typing out <kbd></kbd> is a really big pain, and makes me flinch every time I'm in Firefox or another chrome user without the script.
Obviously some of you are worried about possible abuse of the kbd tags, since they are kept away from new users through a veil of ignorance.
But other forms of formatting like ALL CAPS, ALL CAPS AND ALL BOLD and others  could easily be abused, but aren't, so why would the KBD be different? Even if it were, there are plenty of power users to fix the issue. There is also the option to remove it, I just think its worth a shot.

I think the relevant link should be http://meta.blender.stackexchange.com/questions/255/styling-for-gui-instructions

This has long been a feature request on the big meta, and they solved it the same way we did. I doubt they'll add it specifically for this site :/

I think it might be useful to implement a Featured Artwork header decided by a weekly or monthly competition. We could have an artwork gallery that the header is randomly chosen from every day. This would accelerate learning, promote participation, and make people more interested in general. There are some downsides to it, but I think in light of the benefits it might pay off.
I know we already tried contests here on Blender.SE, and it fell flat, with the last one only attracting one entry. I think this is largely due to the fact that there is no real incentive to participate, and although fun, people didn't want to pause their projects long enough to make an entry.

...I think this might fall under design suggestions.

This would be cool if it was more than a showcase for artwork, and was notable artwork where the creator has explained how to reproduce some important technique he or she used in its creation. Alternatively, perhaps it could just highlight great answers/questions or maybe it could be art that was finished as a result of someone getting their question answered?

That is an interesting idea! I like it!

Apply design suggestions
There is a thread on our design here on meta It would be great if you could apply some of the popular suggestions, and take a look at what the community wants.

I feel strong need to promote accepting answers more, too many good answers are left without the accepted checkmark.
This could be due to new users not knowing to do this or how to do this (but many don't accept even when reminded in comments).
Or there are not enough rewards for accepting answer.
The actual solution I propose is for high enough* reputation users to be able to accept or change accepted answer (no reward here). This would help in situations when a new Blender release has better solution, there is an answer for it, it has more upvotes, but the OP is now inactive and the old answer is ticked and on top.
*) the amount is in question

I know the feeling +10 if I could. But @Jerryno, this would be a change in Network policy not just our site, so would be more appropriate on http://meta.stackexchange.com

I see @GiantCowFilms, didn't know about network policies. I wonder what is the reason for this to not be implemented long time ago, it looks like a clear thing to me. Other networks have to have same problem.

Sometimes, I find if difficult to choose an answer worth accepting and even insulting to other, equally valid answers that obviously took a lot of time to write... I've never seen a solution so much as proposed to this concern.

When you think of some sort of policy change, chances are someone on the network-wide meta already asked about it ;)

Maybe a solution to this might be a mechanism by which other members of the community besides the poster of the original question could accept the answer. This might be implemented in a means that is similar to flagging a question for closure, that is, people with enough reputation could vote to accept an answer..

It would be nice to have a special code, similar to kbd for buttons.
This would be useful because it would allow us to bring more visual distinction to a button in a set of instructions, without having to resort to a screen shot. (Images increase load time even when they are small).

See http://meta.blender.stackexchange.com/questions/255/styling-for-gui-instructions

I'd forgotten about that question. I undeleted my answer on it.

p3d.in embedding
This would make asking questions (and maybe answering) quite a bit easier. Users would be able to share their geometry and textures directly into the web browser without having to upload and download blend file, provide multiple angle screenshots or animated gifs.
I think it would make some questions way simpler. It is not, however, a replacement for blend uploads… that is still necessary.
another options is https://sketchfab.com/

p3d could be useful for modeling questions.... hopefully people don't think it is a replacement for other forms.

Sketchfab is better though.

@AWildRolandiXor define "better".

Well for starters, free users have unlimited storage.

This would be a heavy dependency, unlikely to happen unless the files weren't shown readily but upon request as this would no doubt slow page load times.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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Are questions regarding making modifiers allowed?
I was wondering if questions about making modifiers are allowed. I did a couple of searches here and there and many questions similar to what I was going to ask were closed. I did read a question about types of questions that should be off topic and closed (as quickly as possible) and it seems they are too.
But modifiers are specific to blender and only blender. They are not a programming language feature where you can just ask about them on a C++ forum. I understand python questions are allowed here since it's used in blender, so can't we allow a little bit of C++ code once in a while? It's really frustrating for me since I have tried for many months and asked practically everywhere about something as simple as a hello world modifier;  to this day I'm still as clueless as I was a year ago. I am really about to give up :(

that is easy to say, actually everytime i get that answer and i'm almost certain that person they never tried.. because it's very very difficult ,even changing one line of code of a modifier breaks blender and i have to undo changes.. i can swear the code is obfuscated for some reason.. any help is appreciated, if you could that is

many thanks for your time,i was able to get the same result as your example,had a little issue but managed to get it working after a few headaches,i now have enough to continue on my journey, thanks againt and sorry.u can delete,  i saved your post for future reference! cheers man , have a good night/day.

i also don't mind if this question get closed, sorry for being selfish this place was my last hope and i wasn't disappointed :D

If you're asking about a modifier, it seems to me that this is part of the source code, which would make this substantially a duplicate of this question. I don't know what your level of sophistication is with C++, or how much you know about the internals of the source code, but perhaps this page is a good place to start. Developing an add-on would be something  a  bit different, but  that, too, would seem to be out of scope

ohh my comments look like i'm talking to myself ,heh. brasshat yes i did know my question is similar i was wondering why they can't be allowed here , they aren't that vague and only deal with a small portion of blender's code. btw someone else helped me here the other day,and i did get some links to an actual example. who do i contact to mark this question as solved? or should i just delete it ?

While the Blenderartists forum uses the "[solved]" designator, BSE has typically not, though I suppose it could edited in in front of the question. I would suggest, though, that you not delete the question..

@brasshat there is never a good reason to add "solved" to a question. That is something from and for forums, not a Q&A site like SE where we have other tools (like accepted answers).

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


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Should there be a modification to this off-topic criterion?
One of the reasons that can be given for flagging a question as off topic includes the following.

This question appears to be off-topic because it requires step-by-step instructions for a process that is specific to a particular project, and/or demonstrates too little effort on the part of the asker. ...

There are times when I have been preparing an answer that I've aborted the process of answering because I've come to perceive that the best answers to their question will fall afoul of the above criterion. Now, for most of the blenderheads participating in BlenderSE, this doesn't bother me, but there is a class of user who is obviously a novice (or less) at blender, for which I find the reputation of the users in that class on the site to be an effective, if slightly inaccurate indicator and I feel that not answering, is unfriendly, and perhaps reflects poorly on the Blender community. So I'd like to propose two actions. First, a grant of reputation (perhaps 250 points), or maybe a badge to a user who can demonstrate completion of either Chronister's or Hirsig's on-line courses in Blender, or a similar equivalent.
The second action would be to not declare a question from a user who has a reputation below a certain value (again, 250 points is a suggestion) off topic for this reason. Especially since, on the one hand, I don't see that many questions which would seem to be off topic on this criterion, and on the other hand, some questons which should be flagged as of topic on this basis are answered anyway.

First is is not possible to grant users rep (out side of bounties). Also it is not a good idea to grant new users rep based on blender experience, because the SE rep system is in part measuring how well a user knows the site.
If you want to answer a question that you think may be on the edge of being off topic for "too specific", I would suggest you go ahead and answer it.
However if it is clearly off topic please do not answer it (as it will encourage more of the same.)
I agree with you that this is not the best CV reason (and we are working to reword the CV reason) . It is quite subjective, some questions get answered (with lots of UV) and others are just closed and left to sit.


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How to get a link to an old question that was probably deleted for no answer/no votes?
I'd solved a scripting problem and included it as part of a question here a few years ago. I don't see the question and I'm guessing it was deleted for no answers/no activity or similar. I've searched for the script or blend everywhere on my computer and can't find any trace of it.

old = circa 2016,
possibly contains some of: interpolate, interpolation, bend, extrude, tube, snake, pipe

The question was about how to script the creation of extra polygons to regions of a bent tube mesh only where the bending radius was tight, so as not to have too many total polygons. My example script was a bent tube and there may have been a GIF animation included in the question.
Is there any way that I can find questions that were deleted by the Community bot?

You have six deleted questions. Five you deleted, and one (probably the one you are looking for) was deleted by the community bot.
Here you go: How to make these “orbit tubes” with fewer shapes via script?
In case you wanted to see your other deleted answers:

How to draw or illustrate object's paths in space along with cycles rendering?
Is Blender simply the wrong tool to make this kind of 3D representation?
best source of info on how to navigate within blender
3D viewport rendered from this script still unstable
Higher math functions on generated coordinates to control cycles material nodes - Options?

You can always see your posts, OPs don't need 10k rep and the "View deleted posts" privilege to see your own posts. You do however need a link, it will not show up in your list of questions.

This is excellent, thank you for your time tracking all these down! Yes that's the one, and this/these will save me time remembering what I'd done and getting back up to speed again.

As a regular user, no.
Users with access to moderator tools can only see deleted questions within at most 30 days, or search their own deleted posts with deleted:1 search operator. It's still possible for them... to traverse each question posted in 2016 (from ID 44022 to 70222) manually.
For users without that privilege, they can only see their own questions/answers deleted within 60 days.
Moderators might be able to help you since they can search for any deleted posts.

@uhoh oops, bad copy-paste. But, yes, if it's your own deleted posts, then you can use deleted:1 after getting that privilege.

oh! From comments below here you can see that this has been mentioned to me earlier, but I thought something like an SQL script was necessary. Now I understand that one can simply type deleted:1 in the search bar in any site where one has sufficient privileges. Thanks for taking the time to explain it to me!

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


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Is there any rule against fake bounties?
Are there any official rules against putting fake bounties at the end of your posts?
The links work in both of them, but you can not select the text.
This one looks quite convincing on the main site.

This one looks very convincing everywhere.

Would things such as this simply be considered spam?

Tags go above the bounty, so this is easy to detect. Another tell-tale hint is that it would not be featured as a question with a bounty.

No. This should not be allowed
The big issue is this "joke" is extra noise in your post (like a greeting/signature). SE doesn't permit such things. As @NoviceInDisguise observed,  it will be edited out quickly, and you will only succeed in annoying a user who has to go to all the trouble.
Furthermore, you may have to deal with and upset user expecting a bounty. Probably best just to avoid it.

The ease with which you can simulate a bounty moderately well is amazing, however it is easy to detect if it is real or not. (Tags go above the bounty, so this is easy to detect. Another tell-tale hint is that it would not be featured as a question with a bounty, etc)
Personally I think they will get edited out very quickly as our community is great at reviewing questions.
However repeatedly posting posts like this could result in serious actions on the part of our moderators, and could result in your suspension from the site.

This answer has an open bounty worth  reputation from GiantCowFilms ending in 5 days.
This answer should be accepted.

your link to giant cow's profile also goes to the bounty page, and the +2,700 is not at the same line height as the other text.

I know, I literally typed this using only one image in about 20 seconds.

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


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Winter bash 2015 Countdown
Last year there was the 2014 Winter Bash.
Is there going to be a 2015 Winter Bash, and if so, when?
We already knew by November 21st that we had the option to opt into the winter hats, but it is now November 29th (nearly December) and no one knows whether or not, or even when the 2015 hats will be.

Probably better asked on the main meta.

We will usually put up a post when it's time to see if people want to participate.

@iKlsR A better question would be, when will that post be?

@X-27 When we know.

lol, ok :-) I guess we just wait......

Got an email from SE "This year's event will start on 14 December 2015 and run up to and including 03 January 2016."

Cool! Can't wait for the craziness to begin :D

whistles
Winter Bash 2015

Thanks! Is that countdown in minutes?

Yes, it's minutes.


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How to record steps in Blender
Sometimes here people post amazing gifs that show their workflow.
These are really compact sequences, often with keyboard shortcuts displayed.
How does one do that? And what additional software is needed?

This should have been posted on Meta.

Related: placing .gifs in text, How can I insert videos into my Q&A?, and How to post gifs on this site?

Regarding to capturing keys pressed - what program was used e.g. in this answer. I have found related page, but it seems there isn't that program included. Others still work but are a little bit less intuitive (and some of them less new)

@MrZak it looks to me like that was made with licecap (I use that too)

@David, that's strange. I use it too and the only options I've found are those appearing once Record button is pressed. I didn't see anything related in that window

@David, found. Those are captured by Screencast Key Status Tool as in the answer mentioned. It's maybe deprecated but imo the best I've seen.


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What is a rollback operation?
What is a rollback operation, what is it used for?

See What is a 'rollback'? and the bottom paragraph of the editing section in the help center.
Simply put, a rollback reverts an edit (or edits) on a post, returning it to a former state.
To roll a post back:

Click the timestamp below the post to view the edit history

Click the "rollback" button next to the revision you wish to revert to.

UVed for the meta meta, an example image from this post, nice one!

@gnadalf3 Is there a required reputation to use it? I can't find "last modified" timestamp.

@Georges Updated answer

Thanks, I clicked the timestamp, all I get is (source) and (link), no (rollback) or (edit) @gandalf3

@Georges I can't find it explicitly mentioned anywhere, but perhaps you need edit privileges

Thanks @gandalf3

@Georges As gandalf already said, you need the edit privilege (2000) to perform a roll back on a post that is not your own and is not a community wiki. For CWs the required rep is 100, and you can always edit your own posts.


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Overuse of code snippet formatting
I often notice people using the code snippet formatting for many more things than showing code, often just to emphasize things.  And it can be quite annoying reading a post in which every other word is put in a gray, monospace font (see what I mean?).
Is there a way to encourage people to only use this formatting for what it is intended for?  As there are many other, more appropriate ways of emphasizing text.
I have also seen it used for values, such as “I would use a density of 0.5”, or “hit GZ5.  Are either of these appropriate?  At least for the latter example I would think that indicating a key press, regardless of whether it is a number, should always use the  tags.
Maybe I am being too nitpicky, but I do feel that this formatting has a specific purpose and is being quite overused.

I 100% agree. I try to edit these out and link to this meta post whenever I seem them mis-used.

I agree as well. Note that in comments it is used to show a quote quite often. I personally think that is acceptable, but in questions/answers where the actual quote method is available, it is not acceptable.

For values i think its reasonable,
eg: set the volume to 0.25, blender's default texture path is //textures
but it shouldn't be used for emphasizing words alone.

ideasman42's answer is spot on.
I use the backtick formatting for any input value, short text or numeric, and short code snippets.
Example:
"type 180/pi in to the Z axis rotation"  or
"a color vector is in the form of [Red, Green, Blue, Alpha]"
I think using backtick formatting to clearly format the input for a model operator is proper.
Example:
"Press GZ 5 to move the cube up 5 units on the Z axis."
The only place I use backtick formatting, when not directly formatting input is when the font does not clearly differentiate between I and l (which is I and l ). I sometimes use the backticks like this I (`I`) so the I is more clearly distinguishable.
I do agree that some times the backticks are over used, but I do not think that this is the worst problem facing BSE. A simple edit can fix any of these formatting errors. :)
However, all this only goes for questions and answers. Comments and chat posts, out of necessity need to use the backticks, because of the limited formatting options.

I think this can definitively be over used, but, sometimes, there's no better way; How would you describe a onscreen button or list choice - you could use , or italics, but that looks weird to me. So for instance, I would say "Check Transparent under the Film subsection.".

I believe that the general consensus is that italics should be used for menu items and on-screen buttons/categories.

Exactly ^^ Also for cascading buttons you can do i.e. File > Save As


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What to do with really short answers?
Along with the uptick in new users, we seem to be getting more and more answers in the form:

So just do X and add Y with a Z thing and it will work.

Giving no details as to how to actually do X, Y, and Z.
I find this especially common when users find the answer to their own problem and just write some little snippet like this.
How should these answers be dealt with?  Should they flagged, edited, deleted, down voted, etc.?  If they should be flagged, what flag should be used (none of them seem to fit perfectly)?
I usually try to leave a comment asking them to expand on their answer, but they often don't do so.
To be clear:  I am talking about situations where the answer does technically answer the question, but just makes absolutely no effort to explain itself.

I would say the best thing to do is a DV. By all means leave a comment asking them to expand on their answer; but low quality content should be DVed (that is how the sorting process works to always have the best answers on the top).
There is a rather thick gray line between what is low quality and not an answer, or just a low effort post.
When you are trying to decide whether or not to flag something, ask yourself what you would do?
Is there really any justifiable reason to delete this post? (in the case of an answer that does technically answer the question, but is rather bad the answer is no.)
However if it is better suited as a comment, then by all means please flag it (probably as not an answer).

Short answer: DV low effort posts, flag "answers" that really aren't.

please consider my updated post ;-)

I like Samoth's idea of posting a better answer, with or without a downvote of a correct, but not very detailed one. However, to me two other bits of information should be taken to account: who'd asked the question, and who answered. If an experienced user posted the question, an answer similar to that described in the original question might be quite adequate; on the other hand, if the question is from a brand new user, then I'd suggest that a more elaborate answer would be called for.
Yes, I do know that the idea is to build a knowledge base for future users, in addition to asking the immediate question, but given the same question asked by two different users, they may not both require the same level of detail in the answer.
Then there's the answer of time. Sometimes I have provided a shorter answer than usual because I'm short on time, and I want to get the answer to the questioner as soon as possible. When I feel the answer lacks detail, I generally have the intent to go back and improve the answer, but I know I've not always done this.

I would really encourage not to DV short answers. Commenting about elaboration is good. But if it technically answers the question (what you included), then it is a good answer. There are so many "maybe" answers which should be DVed.
But if you want more details that you'd see yourself that could be added - why not make it a community answer? Or post your own answer with more details and see if it get's UVed?
I know, brilliant and detailled answers are wanted. But UV a good answer to encourage answering at all. If all answers get DVed just because they could be improved, that's cutting your own branch you're sitting on. This site is not about questions only but about answers. And if technically answered it's a help for people who search for answers*.
Not to forget: DV means (as its tooltip explains) "This answer is not useful". So if the answer is technically right but only could be elaborated, you should better not vote than vote and express that it is not useful at all. You should instead probably just UV because you can clearly see that the technical answer is given. And might drop a comment encouraging to elaborate.
And feedback here should be more encouraging, right? Not discouraging with DVs (even more without a comment about why).
* consider that as a programmer I myself often stumble over questions that I have as well and just searched for it in Google and with a bit of a more specific topic I get more hits nowadays on SO than on Forums which is a great thing. And People often look for answers and if they find a technically correct one it will really help them out. When there are open points/details left out, the comment section is the place where one can ask for them. This might remind the author to elaborate. And it might new users to register to ask for more details - and if they get them (probably in another more detailled answer that you just posted later) they might consider sharing their knowledge as well.
I think, it's about answers first and foremost. Elaboration is a process in time. So don't hinder this process from evolving with a DV. ;-)


text:
What are secret hats?
My question is simply that, what are secret hats?  I have seen many users with hats not listed in the winter bash page, the hats' description say “this is a secret hat”.  In fact most of the what's I have seen so far are secret hats, what does this mean?
I even just earned the fascinating secret hat and still have no idea what it means!?!

The secret hats are just hats, like any of the other hats on the winter page, except Stack Exchange did not give the instructions on how to get them.
There is a growing list of spoilers for the secret hats on http://meta.stackexchange.com.
To answer your question about how you got the fascinating you can hover your mouse over here.

for upvoting an accepted answer with 5 votes


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Customized help center entries
As pointed out in Custom off-topic close reasons: 2014 in review, we appear to have very little site documentation about things like what you can ask about and how best to ask about it.
As a matter of fact, the only b.se specific thing I've seen in the help center is this:

Blender Stack Exchange site is for people who use Blender to create 3D graphics, animations, or games.

This is nice, but it feels a bit short (compared to GD.SE) and susceptible to different interpretations.
For example, one could argue that this is on-topic following the above criterion.
However the best I managed to come up with right now is this:

Blender Stack Exchange site is for people who use Blender to create 3D graphics, animations, or games.
Questions about Blender using Blender are welcome.

So please edit/say something if you have a better idea ;)

Also, perhaps we could add something like this to the end of the "how to ask" page?

Help us help you
Especially if your question involves troubleshooting odd behavior, the fastest and simplest way of finding the answer is often by providing a blendfile and/or screenshots for others to examine.

I'm sure there are more such snippets which could be added, but I can't think of any atm..

While we are changing the scope defined in the help center, we can include contests so they will be permitted on the main site?

@X-27 I didn't intend for this post to be about changing the scope itself, only fixing up the (lack of) wording and definition.

@X-27 There will be no contests on the main site, not now, not ever. Not in the manner you are thinking of at least. We will work something out eventually.

Will give this a day or two before we revamp this and go about setting some concrete offtopic reasons. Was hoping people would chip in but seeing the little input, I think the handful of us who read meta can come up with something sensible. Good initiative.

I'd also like to suggest that this help center page, be amended to include directions as to how to upload a ~.blend file to the Blend exchange, site (or others).

I also suggest to move http://blender.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask up on second or third place in the list, so that it is visible without clicking on "view more".  I also believe that infos about imgur (for people who post the first time and cannot upload images) and of course blend-exchange could help. The "Be specific" is rather unspecific ;-) and doesn't explain much about what information is helpful (screenshots which actually show the problems by highlighting the areas of interest)


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When should a question be closed as a bug report?
When should a question be closed as a bug report?

Should we only close questions which would actually make valid report on the bug tracker? (and if so, how do we determine if a report would be valid?)
Should we close any questions which are definitely bugs, but may have been fixed or archived as TODO (not a valid report for the bug tracker)?
Or should we close questions which appear to be written as bug reports, but without enough detail to tell if it's a bug in blender or another issue?

We have had a wide variety of questions closed as bug reports, but may not actually be valid bugs that should be reported on the tracker. Such as:

Refresh an F-curve with Python after changing Extrapolation Mode
Boolean modifier messes up material assignment
https://blender.stackexchange.com/q/7415/599
https://blender.stackexchange.com/q/7092/599
https://blender.stackexchange.com/q/7288/599

There's also a few cases where questions which were about issues caused by a bug were closed even though the bug was fixed in a later version (and therefore would not be valid on the tracker), such as this one:
https://blender.stackexchange.com/q/7075/599
And some cases where it's not obvious whether or not the behavior is a bug, for instance in this question:
Black edges artifacts in renders on edges of geometry?
When should a question be closed as a bug report?

I think we should only close question as a bug report when there is a high chance that the problem is actually a bug. The users that close it as a bug report should confirm that it is indeed a bug and not a feature or that way it normally would work.
I am not sure how we could close a question for bug report if the bug has been fixed, this would require the person asking the question to use an outdated version of blender. If the question was indeed a bug and is now fixed I think we it does not really matter because now one is going to have the same problem again, hence it will most likely not be accessed again.
Even if a question is written like a bug report it should not just be reported just because it  was written in the same format. Only potential bugs should be reported.
A lot of the questions that are referenced could be closed with the reason that they are Hardware questions. This is a more appropriate close reason for questions that are about some sort of technical difficulties.

It depends on how you define "outdated". Most people probably don't use the development versions, so you could end up with a bug which is "fixed", yet still in the current stable version until the next release (up to three months).

I don't think that bug-reporting is inside the scope of this site.

No doubt about that :) The issue is how to handle these without spamming the bug tracker..

There are a few different issues here.
Software behaves in a way the user doesn't expect. so they ask why this is.
In some cases its a known/accepted limitation - but sometimes its an error in the code, for many users its hard to know which is which.
Propose:

Errors in Blender - Request the user posts to blenders bug tracker (close question).
User error (explain what they are doing wrong, or close question - depending on the case).
Known limitations - answer AND/OR - point to documentation.

Any bugs in Blender which have been fixed are still bugs and still don't belong in stackexchange, so they should be closed (with a note the bug is fixed).

In case of user error, wouldn't it be better to answer and explain what the user is doing wrong?

@gandalf3, good point. yes - It depends... if they completely misunderstand whats going on... its unlikely to be helpful to others. but if its a common misunderstanding - it could be worth keeping. Updated answer.

Some bugs will inevitably be posted when people don't understand why blender is doing something.  The questions that are clearly bug reports could be pointed to the bug tracker if it's been narrowed down to the point it's reportable, or blender artists if it's more vague.  In either case a link in the comments would be helpful to anyone with the same issue who finds the question in the future.  This would also fix the problem with users using older versions; close it, then add a link to the bug report or release notes showing it was fixed.


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Are questions about finding specific addons/other resources on topic?
There was a question asked recently, asking for help finding a certain addon.
Imo these types of questions might be more on the forum/discussion side of things to fit cleanly in a Q&A format, but it's arguable.
Are these "help me find this" questions on-topic?

Related: Are questions about external tutorial/resources on topic?

Maybe chat would be useful for that.

I would say yes, it seems like blender.stackexchange.com is here to answer questions relating to Blender. Is wondering about a certain addon or looking for a tutorial about something in Blender not related to Blender? I don't think so, I think that the forum should be here to help spur Blender users on, by answering any questions that they have. As long as they do relate to Blender.

I use several StackExchange communities, coming back to them when the rest of the infosphere lets me down, due to two recurring attributes: 1) tagged searching and 2) permanence.   The free-form nature of forums is a valuable tool, sometimes, but in the Blender world I find a couple of problems crop up repeatedly that I don't see nearly as often in the StackExchange approach: First, Blender advances rapidly and the appropriateness of the answers discussed in forums ages rapidly. So having a question about how to do something in Blender 2.70 that uses terminology carried over from 2.4 may or may not be helpful.  Second, and this touches on your mention of external tutorials, I have found so many tutorial links that are dead links that I almost never follow such links anymore unless the URL starts with youtube ;-)
I enjoy reading related question/answers as pointed to by the StackExchange engine because learning can be unexpected and sometimes I find a question I can help answer.  But, I suspect, most people are trying to get to the answer as directly as potential answerers want a question to be specific.  Tagged searching has really helped with that.  I was surprised when I first posed a question on blender.stackexchange and tried to tag it with the version number I was using, only to be told such a tag didn't exist and I couldn't create it.  Arguments exist both ways, to be sure.  Having used the search feature at a very popular Blender forum site, I've been frustrated that a search term would match in a long-developed discussion, but with no clue as to where in the discussion the topic came up.  I learn a lot in reading 27 pages of a discussion but after a while the frustration at not having found the search term rises above the serendipitous rewards.
I wonder if there isn't a middle ground, somewhere between targeted questions and rambling forums?
(I do notice that your title is the same as your last sentence (question).  I'm probably not answering that very well!  I'm just trying to provide a perspective as a discussion point.)


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How specific should our tags be?
Many of our tags are aimed at covering broad, general categories, rather than  using more, specific tags of limited scope.
For example, we have

modifiers instead of array-modifier, mirror-modifier subsurf-modifier, etc.
file-format instead of obj, fbx, collada, etc.

Is this good or bad?
Would it be more useful to have smaller, more specific tags (e.g. knife-tool)? Or is there current strategy better? And if so, why?
If smaller tags are more useful, how specific should they be?

As an example on another SE site, GD has many specific tags referring to a kind of tool or file format.
I couldn't find a good way to search for "specific tags", but if you poke around you'll see tags like jpg and pen-tool.

With regards to your point about GD's tags, those tags aren't as vague as ours and are actually needed IMO, for example, the pen tool is a major part of an image app as opposed to the knife tool for us which can fall under modeling and knowing what image format you are exporting to is also good when looking at filesize or quality etc as opposed to having exr or obj for us which is basically useless.

http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/17705/parenting-to-an-array-end-cap, just interesting timing for that new tag (modifier-array) to pop up.

i think its more friendly to new users if the tags are general.

Related http://meta.blender.stackexchange.com/questions/286/how-should-we-deal-with-tags-about-other-software/289#289


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Should we downvote questions which are overly simple?
Sometimes questions which seem overly simple are downvoted, such as How do I select an object in the 3D viewport? and How to retrieve the objects of a group.
While answers to these questions can most likely be found very easily if the OP knew where to look, or knew what keywords to put in a search engine, I don't really see why these questions are "bad".
After all, search results for these kinds of questions often come from sites like this one.
Are these questions "bad"? If so, why?

I reviewed both questions and couldn't find anything bad. I remember that I was also confused during the first hours with Blender on how the 3D cursor works.
Answers like that are useful for beginners especially when they are listed at the first place of a google search.
The 2nd one requires basic python knowledge plus Blender API which can't be taken for granted.
IMO Whether or not a question appears as easy depends on experience, we all had no experience when we started. I also noticed that some of the 'easy' ones get the most views (few hundreds at the first day, while other very specific questions have very little views).

"Simple" questions are not bad at all. From a blender user's perspective having a question here makes it easy to find the answer quickly, high google ranking and such. Everybody needs to learn at some point, and this site is and can be a good start.
From a site user's perspective, simple questions are great. They get answered quickly, which helps the unanswered numbers. In some cases they get upvoted a lot. They drive more blender users to this site.
To the point of "laziness" there is no doubt that in some cases the answer can be found else where. However I still find the blender API rather confusing, a new user can't be excepted to know how to dig through the API. Or they do not know the correct term to find the answer.
I see no down side to "simple" questions.

As long as such questions are not duplicates, I think it's to everyone's benefit to have them answered here, because once they are, we probably won't have to answer them ever again (they are likely to be the top search result).

Agree in general that simple questions are OK,
But with Python API questions, there is potential for a lot of duplication.
The API has 1000's of members, and we have 1500+ operators.
If we accept questions like:
"How do I change the stamp color"

The answer is almost the same as...
"How do I change the stamp font size"

In these cases we can assume the person asking the question is a software developer (even if they are just starting out and learning scripting) and that they could at least check API docs.
I think we should encourage asking questions which are more generalized.
For example: How do I change stamp settings such as font size and color

Instead of down-voting we could see them as redundant / overly specific questions and close them as duplicates.

There used to be such generalized questions "asked" on tex.se as community wiki by site moderators or high rep users for further reference. New users or beginners were linked to those questions rather than being downvoted.

@cjorssen, agree - added note


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Should we expand our scope to allow simple howtos?
Should we expand the scope of this site to allow some simple "how to" questions?
This question was a recent example of the kind of question that could be allowed.
To give another example of this on stackexchange, GD seems to allow these sorts of questions, they even have a tag.
I've noticed that a lot of questions which get asked now tend to be duplicates, as most of the comment problem questions like "what are these dark spots on my model" have been answered already.
Allowing these kinds of questions would potentially:

Increase the number of "possible questions", giving the site purpose even after most problem questions have been answered.

Likely attract more answers per question, as there would most likely be many possible ways of answered such a question. This would help our answer ratio.

We already have some questions of a similar scope which have attracted many answers, such as How would I go about creating a spiralled dome?.

If we do decide to expand our scope, some further questions:

Should we do this retroactively? (reopening and answering closed questions, such as the one mentioned at the beginning of this post?)

Should we have a tag for this kind of question (GD style)?

What should the new scope be?
How do we go about defining the fine line of what is still off-topic? E.g. if simple howtos are okay, but full blown tutorials are not, how do we differentiate between a howto and a tutorial?

I believe it's a good idea to do so, because we tend to not have many new questions anyway; And those we do have, most times, have only one answer.

Yes, this would make the site more valuable and could attract more users. Finally our poor answer ratio would be improved.

As someone who has seen almost all the questions that get asked daily, I would think this is implicitly allowed and done even though we wanted to keep the site tutorial free. Also these questions can be easily answered as opposed to how do I model a car or more complicated things.

@iKlsR I've seen it as more mixed, for example the spiraled dome question and the zipper question seem pretty much the same scope to me.

So does this mean we should reopen the zipper question?

Before we make we make a "go ahead" decision, shouldn't we also weigh the cons?

@RolandiXor By all means, write an answer listing the cons :)

@gandalf3 honestly I'd rather let others weigh in (not that I'm lazy, but I've been away for a little while).

Yes!
I think letting people ask about how to make/do simple things is a good idea for several reasons.
1. These kinds of questions can be incredibly valuable.  Take this question for example, even though I may never make a city (then again, I might want to sometime and I am sure there are lots of people who do) I have learned about a ton of features and addons from it, and evidently lots of other people found it helpful as well considering the 18 votes and 19 favorites it has received.  The spiral dome is another good example of a very helpful, super well received question.
2. That's what CG is about.  When we restrict how-tos we basically just get, as iKlsR said in the comments, a bunch of duplicates of the same few questions, and bug reports (which are off topic as well for good reason).  Plus, most questions really are how-tos anyhow.  What is the difference between asking how to make a zipper and how to create diffraction, or how to make a hologram (or, for that matter, any other question on the site).  The last two are just how-tos for materials as opposed to modeling.  So if we really don't want how-tos we should really be closing most questions.
3. It is beneficial to the site.  These kinds of questions get lots of good answers and, as stacker mentioned in the comments, our answers-per-question ratio is pretty pathetic.  The very fact that SE expects many answers per question signifies that they want more than straight questions with a single cut-and-dried answer.  These types of questions are also often asked by new users, so being too zealous with the close option just for asking how to get started on a project can scare people, not only away from the SE, but away from Blender as well.
A note on broadness.
Now, I think we definitely should make a distinction between “how to make a zipper” and “how to model, sculpt, rig, and material a dragon” (the second example is hypothetical).  I think a good deal of this should be left to the asker's discretion, say something like “one question at a time, nothing overly complex or super specific”.  Keep in mind, for more complex questions we don't necessarily need to provide a full step-by-step process, in many cases I think the asker would be happy with a few (well constructed) pointers.  This would definitely have to be debated and discussed further though.


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Should we downvote first posts?
I often see first posts (or posts from 1 rep users) downvoted.
Presumably 1 rep users are new, and haven't had time yet to learn the workings of the site. They also won't have certain privileges, such as the ability to comment or vote.
Not knowing how the SE platform works, such users might rightfully feel discouraged and leave after their first contribution gets downvoted within minutes.
I personally try to avoid downvoting first posts (I don't always succeed :P), even if it is an answer which should be a comment or a separate question, or a oneliner with just a few words and a link.
Instead I try to leave a comment letting them know how they can improve their post, or what they can do instead (e.g. post a new question).
However I sometimes feel like my efforts are in vain when the post in question gets downvoted anyway.
Should we make an exception to the usual downvote criteria for first posts which  aren't obvious spam?
If yes, should we try and direct them to where they need to go, or places such as the tour or help center?

Ignore reputation for a second and think about why voting exists, it's to separate quality content from poorly worded or vague questions, if after downvoting, the question isn't closed or fixed, you can always retract the vote.

@iKlsR In that case I agree, but I'm not sure the message to new users is as easily ignored. Basically what I'm asking is: Should we go out of our way to make new users feel welcome, even if they have yet to learn the ways of the site, or should we treat them like any other user and hope they don't take it unkindly?

Sure, leave helpful comments where possible and ultimately, it's up to you to decide if a post merits a vote or not. However, adopting a don't downvote posts from new users strategy is a bad idea and in the long run it's our site and stats that will suffer.

As a relatively new user, i could definitely see down-voting as discouraging; however i agree with iKsR that it shouldn't be a permanent policy, as situations vary case by case. You shouldn't restrict yourself by rules that can simply be a case by case situation.

We should be more careful when down voting first posts as questions. When a new user comes to the site with a question, no matter how simple, there should be some degree of welcoming.
Answers are a different proposition entirely. Any low quality answer can and should be down voted. For a new user add a comment explaining what is wrong with their answer; much like what happens with the "Low Quality Posts" review, there is a comment left as to what is wrong.
I personally down vote sparingly, only on posts that really are of no value. So adding a new user exception to when posts are down voted would not change much for me.

I mostly agree with David, but I though I'd add a few more points.
Downvotes are a vital part of the site. Even through they can seem unfriendly, they are important for separating low quality content from useful information.
So in general, I don't think new users should be given any special treatment other than a friendly welcome.
However, I think some consideration should be given where new users have no alternative to posting an answer. For example, I often see downvoted answers-which-should-be-comments posted by low rep users who don't have the privilege to comment yet.
I think this is one kind of post which doesn't really deserve downvotes, as the user has no other way to post a comment. Better to flag it so a mod can convert it if it's a useful comment, or delete it altogether.

Agreed, also just flag these and they will be dealt with accordingly.


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Should duplicates be closed to the oldest question or the "best" question?
If a "better" version of a old question, in which direction should they be closed?
Should the newer question be closed as a duplicate of the older question (and perhaps the older question should be edited)? Or
should the older question be closed as a duplicate of the newer question?
For example, these two questions:
Using alpha channel of generated images for cycles
uv image editor alpha?
Which should be closed as a duplicate of which?

I would say the first should be kept. It just seems to have more info and have it better explained. I think that if there are duplicates then the better one should be left open.

Wasn't something like this raised on a previous post?

@iKlsR I thought it was, but couldn't find it.

@gandalf3 I understand where you're coming from but the duplicate is a copy of the first and also to prevent confusion regardless of quality, newer questions should be marked as duplicates of older ones. I can vaguely remember a similar meta post, will link if I can find it.

Related: Should I flag a question as duplicate if it has received better answers?

Ultimately, you should always point users the "best" possible information you have. The wiki nature of Stack Exchange exists so you can constantly improve your content. Ideally, you would have caught the duplicate post before it split the conversation, but if a better (duplicate) question went on long enough to attract demonstrably better answers, you should make that THE canonical source of that information.
But remember that you have a lot more tools are your disposal that simply closing one question or the other. If both threads contain great information, you can also consider merging the answers. And if the new question was simply clearer, consider editing the original to incorporate the qualities of whatever you found more intriguing in the second post.
Recall also that  we changed the [closed as duplicate] description to say, "this question already has an answer elsewhere…" rather than focusing on the question itself. Closing a question as duplicate provides another entry point help folks searching for that information, but we're here to help people find the best possible answer rather than worrying about who asked the question first. You should always look at the entire thread to decide which should be the canonical source of that information. Sure, if the quality of both questions happens to be a dead heat, you should stick to the original thread… but generally speaking, you should always point them to the best possible information you have.
Essentially, you should never favor the lesser-quality thread because it was "posted first."

thank you dropping by and shedding some light on this. Out of curiosity, what would you do in the specific case mentioned in the question?

@David (I'm not familiar enough with the subject to say for certain but...) On the surface, it appears the 2nd post from yesterday should simply be closed. The answer(s) provided don't add meaningfully to the information already provided in the original thread, and the author is confusing the issue by 'answering' with "Wait, nevermind..." I updated my post above to clarify the actual remedies you can use in these situations. Hope that helps.


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Should questions mostly aimed at the devs be on topic?
For example:

Why the blender browser plugin is not updated?
Why blender is not saving used Images

These questions ask things about the design choices and decisions involved in making blender to which probably only the developers can give a complete answer.
I know that this probably is out of our current scope:

The Blender Stack Exchange site is for people who use Blender to create 3D graphics, animations, or games.

But we do have some developers who are pretty active on the site, in particular ideasman42♦ and brecht. Not to mention the many community developers who develop blender in their free time.
Since in the past these kinds of questions seem to be asked in places like the mailing list and IRC, it's hard to find existing answers.
If these questions were allowed on SE, they could stick around and not be buried in some long lost mailing list thread.
Should we expand our scope to allow more development oriented questions?
What do the developer users think of this?

I see no problem allowing question like those. If it turns out that these types of questions don't get much activity, then we can at a later time come back and look at our position.

@David As far as activity goes, here's another one. I agree, and this seems to go with the whole "open development" thing. There are probably lots of questions in this category that can be answered by anyone after a look at the tracker or code, without needing to be a official blender foundation developer.

Stack Exchange works really well for technical support, as long as you're not trying to outsource your entire customer support channel to Stack Exchange. Customer support includes things like feature requests and bug reporting (for Blender), or up-and-coming product release discussions. That doesn't belong here.
But if the internal team is here to answer your deeper-workings or development-centric questions that help you get your work done, then yes… I think that would be a good addition to this site.


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Can we have a service for uploading blendfiles?
Can we have a service for uploading .blend files on the Ask Question page?
This would be useful for many cases, in particular for new users.
Many questions simply need a .blend to describe the problem/question (see Policy for linking to blend files), so we are constantly sending people to external sites such as Pasteall.org.
For example:

blender 2.69: Texture is not shown correctly
Cycles viewport render different than f12 render?
How is this blendfile hiding textures?
What is the invisible unselectable entity on a supposedly empty layer?

is an unofficial solution

Built just for this site
Stores files on google drive
Files don't get deleted
Open source

see more

Accepted to put on top :) But in case an SE people happen to read this, an integrated system would be nice imo ;)

An average image posted in a question or answer has roughly 500kb. Sometimes a few images are required to explain an issue or answer to illustrate the steps of a solution. The size of a single .blend file can be easily exceeded by posting multiple images.
Having that said,
I think we should ask on SO-meta or the community manager whether another different file type (.blend) could be accepted for upload. On the sites mathematics or physics the special needs for rendering math expressions were introduced quite early,
The major problem is that the our sites quality will be diminished when the randomly hosted files to which we link will timeout.

This would be a very nice addition to the site. Particularly if we could set it on the Ask Questions page so users can attach a small sample file if their problem is too wordy/hard to explain.
There are many pros to this. The main ones being that we get centralized location for users of the site to upload their test files and we reduce the cases of link-rot.
This site is supposed to be a collection of self-contained answers. Having users come to a question weeks or months later and finding dead links would be rather bad/inconvenient at the very least. It would also be nice to not keep asking users to attach files to their posts or recommending file sharing services.
Obviously, there will be many wrinkles to iron out, such as accepting arbitrary files, attribution etc. We already have a strict policy in place for blend files and our moderators and avid users will no doubt watch these very closely.

A good (partial) solution to this would be to write a userscript (For Greasemonkey, Chrome/ium, Safari, etc).
However, we would still need to get the word out (and users would need to install it) otherwise it would be useless.

I think part of the idea behind this is to make it obvious for new users. IMHO this would probably end up only being used by long term users, because for single use uploading to pasteall will probably be easier than downloading some addon that will probably only be used once or twice by the average user.

Perhaps we could just integrate pasteall.org somewhere?

This could be a solution (indeed, that was my original question) However a drawback to this is that pasteall only keeps files for a limited period of time, potentially breaking older posts. (See this)

Ah, true. That does kinda rule pasteall out.

@gandalf3 hmm.. an idea would be that maybe something could be worked out between pasteall and SE. That's what they did with imgur for images.

https://bitbucket.org allows public and private repositories.  This also is great for distributed team blender work.  It only stores the diff of blend files and you can have a ignore file for the files that you don't want to put up. Here is a great video on this subject http://cgcookie.com/blender/2013/08/20/using-mercurial-version-control-with-blender-projects/

Interesting, however the diff features probably won't be much use in this application, since most files will only be uploaded once.

There are multiple problems with this kind of service:

The Blend files must have appropriate attribution, and could be used to base work of by someone else.
Some Blend files are huge, and there's the issue with baked caches that are also massive in size (a simple smoke cache can take around 600 MB).
Those Blends must be available forever, taking that space away from the hosting server for its lifetime.
The server infrastructure must be reliable enough that a catastrophic failure won't erase old Blends.

These points stated, there are multiple ways to implement this service:

Use Blendswap.com, not exactly a simple exchange service, but this could help ease out the burden. However, taxing their servers could degrade their service seriously.
Use a hosting infrastructure like Google App Engine. Cheap, reliable and has nice availability. Problem is, the solution must be implemented from scratch.
Torrenting. Seriously, this is a nice way to share these kind of files. A seedbox is unexpensive, and has almost every need for this kind of service.

So there are the alternatives i've found until now.

The same rules that imgur has in place can be applied as it relates to attribution and file sizes would of course be limited. I hardly doubt anyone would want to download a > 10MB file anyways. BlendSwap requires an account to download and I also highly doubt anyone would want to torrent blend files. Currently, the best solution atm is to use pasteall. A built in solution would be nice.

@iKlsR Perhaps we can have a link to pasteall for the time being, then look deeper into getting a dedicated service when we graduate?


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Are "theme identification" questions on-topic?
Are questions asking for a specific theme or type of theme on-topic?
For example, this question: What is this grey theme seen on the gooseberry website?
GD.SE has font-identification questions which are similar, but they probably get more font identification questions than we ever will get in theme-identification questions..
Should these kinds of questions be on-topic?

I would consider this off topic.
Font's are an essential part of graphic design, where as themes are pretty much tweaking application for your own personal preference.
You can always ask on other sites (non SE), and probably get an answer.


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Can we rename 'builds' to 'versions'?
A while ago I suggested a versions tag. The idea seemed to be agreed with, but it was decided to merge it with the existing builds tag.
I agree that the tags overlap to the point of being the same thing and should be one tag, however I think versions would be a better name, simply because builds seems like less widely used terminology when referring to pre-compiled distributed software, and questions about actually building blender are considered off-topic here.
Should this be changed?
And if so, how can it be changed? Will we need a moderator to do some magic?

You have my vote.

@DantheMan Since it seems no one objects, do you know how to do the actual renaming? Do you have some mod power or do we have to create a new tag and then synonymize it?

I'm definitely in full support of this tag change.
How will we define Versions? What will the tag be used for?

How about "Use this tag for questions involving specific versions of blender"?

Make it sound legal "Past and present".

The tag has been renamed.

I've edited the tag wiki now, hopefully everyone agrees with it.

I support this move. The only issue would be if there are "official" builds (like say, a feature branch) that we allow questions for (do we?) - as these might not be best tagged with version.


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Are questions about external render engines on topic?
Are questions specifically about external render engines (engines not bundled with official blender) allowed?
For example, What's going wrong with my Luxrender Prism?

I don't see any reason not to allow these, but I suggest that it be limited to render engines with blender integration (i.e. usable directly from blender's UI).
Using external render engines seems like a fairly common thing among blender users, and I think it definitely fits under our current scope:

The Blender Stack Exchange site is for people who use Blender to create 3D graphics, animations, or games.

I agree with this.

Could be interesting for all, but a new tag like luxrender would be nice.

I'm fine with questions about partially integrated tools.

@poor I was thinking about that.. I've posted another meta: http://meta.blender.stackexchange.com/questions/674/should-we-have-tags-for-external-render-engines-which-have-blender-integration?lq=1

You should mention that this is all right so long as it refers to using the renderer with Blender.

@AWildRolandiXor render engines with blender integration means using the renderer with blender  - For sure we could distinguish, if the render process happens directly in blender or needs a separate application, but I think this doesn't matter to specify this, as long blender is the main application, which is sending the job to the renderer.

@poor sorry about that - I missed that part when I read it the first time. :P


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Are questions about the blender foundation website/other services on topic?
Are questions about things like the blender store and blender cloud on topic?
E.g. https://blender.stackexchange.com/q/28333/599
It doesn't seem to fit in our scope:

The Blender Stack Exchange site is for people who use Blender to create 3D graphics, animations, or games.

Pretty sure  these are off topic.. But just to be sure

When I wrote my answer I did not even notice that I quoted the same thing that you did.

I think that they are definitely off topic.
This site is about the software blender. Not blender's site or services (even the official site).

Blender Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for people who use Blender to create 3D graphics, animations, or games.

We should not start to accept this type of question. Website support should always be directed to the site's contact or support.
As an example, a question about not being able to watch a CGcookie or Guru tutorial, would not even be considered as on topic.
I voted to close the linked question.

We accept documentation questions to an extent but regarding the site, that's a no.


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Should we rename the blender-internal tag?
I'm constantly seeing the blender-internal tag (somewhat understandably) misused for questions about the way blender handles things internally. E.g. like this.
Should we rename this tag to avoid confusion? Or would this only create more confusion?

Rename it to what?

Maybe blender-render? I really prefer to call it blender internal though, as it seems everyone else says BI or blender internal render.. Perhaps internal-render? idk

Can you list at least half a dozen questions that occurred within this or last month? If not, I don't see it as a huge deal for the most part. We do have a disclaimer on it that it's to be used for the engine only but I guess people don't read. blender-render or internal-render could work as well since that's what it's labelled.

@iKlsR I tried to find more examples but it's not the easiest thing to search for..

Same but it's better to stamp out minor quirks like this as it is a fairly popular tag.

@iKlsR now having a tag "blender-render" may lead to yet more miss use. Anything that gets rendered with blender, regardless of the render engine, could foreseeably be tagged "blender-render" (by the same type of people that missed used "blender-internal").

@David Let's watch it for a while and see. I was for blender-internal-render but I think that's too long.

@iKlsR agreed, on both points.

I agree it is misleading to an extent. blender-render is a good rename/synonym since that's what it is labelled inside Blender. I went ahead and merged these and also added internal-render as a synonym as well. This should no doubt prevent any future accidental use.


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Can haz "render of the week"?
We've requested a photo.SE style render contest before, but it never received much attention from SE. In light of the site redesigns taking place, now seems like a good time to revisit the idea (again).
For reference, the "photo of the week" on photo.SE operates on a single meta post where entries are submitted as answers:

This contest follows a new perpetual format with continuously-rolling voting. Submit and vote on photos whenever you like. Every Monday (give or take; it's done by hand when site moderators have a spare moment), the top-voted image will be selected as the winner, and:

moved to the Winners' Hall of Fame

featured on the main site header for the next week

Then, the contest will continue with the remaining photos in the thread.

Some additional ideas discussed for our contest in the previous meta posts include:

Themes/prompts (Seems like photo.SE had something like this, at least at one point?).
A minimum reputation requirement.
Timed contests, rather than continuously rolling.

I'm not sure if any of these are feasible for SE to implement, but now would be the time to discuss them and other ideas further.

This would be cool. From time to time there are answers with pretty appealing images worthy of recognition

While this could be great, we've tried to do contests in the past (when we had a lot more "avid" users). When the third contest came around, there were hardly any entries.

@X-27 That's one reason to go for a low-profile "rolling exhibit", exactly has photo.SE has; that way entries accumulate over time and never get reset to 0. Plus (as you observantly pointed out earlier) having the results on the main site can only help draw more entries.

When I saw the title I never would of guessed that you were the author.

I've always been against a "image header" contest. I still think it would not work.
This is a Q and A site, period. Adding an art contest deviates from our core mission, which is to be the best possible place to ask and get answers for blender.
Blender artists is a much better place for art contests. It is a forum, it has a whole contest section already, and there is a large active membership there to participate in the contests.
On BSE not so much. You we have lots of users, but that will not translate in to entries for the contest. Our core active users is rather small number of active users (by active users I mean the ones doing the work of the site, answering flagging, voting, editing etc.) Those are the only ones who would enter a contest, and of those we do not know how many would want to enter (I know at the moment I would not).
So with the precarious state BSE is in, I would much rather focus on keeping the site in the best shape we can (and dealing with the deluge of low quality questions), instead of pealing off some of our active users' precious time on the site and having them make pretty pictures for the site.
Essentially if you are going to spend time for BSE I would rather not you spend it making the "render of the week", we have lots of unanswered questions.

A few years ago we had a decent sized community here. (NID/VRM, GCF, Scala, tardis, iKlsR, Gwenn, Gandaf, you, Myself, and probbaly a few others I'm forgetting. Now? GCF is still around, you and gandalf are still are active, I stop in occasionally, but Duarte is really the only active user around now that wasn't them. We still have (and might have more) avid users now, but a much, much smaller community.  Contests are a community event, and we just don't have that many people left :/

I think having a contest/gallery display on the front page would only help to build "community" and interest in the site. We're doing this for fun anyway; I really doubt the existence of a contest would impact normal participation negatively (quite the opposite). That said, our active users actually seem to be on a generally upwards trend. The particular people who hang out in the renderfarm may not be as active recently, but we are by far not the only active users. Who knows who may poke their nose into meta after seeing a pretty picture on the main site and become more involved from there?

Note that with a scheme like photo.se there aren't any deadlines, so no incentive to drop everything and focus solely on making a render. For contests with deadlines and prizes, you're right, there are plenty of better options. As I see it, this would be less of a contest and more of a gallery of the best stuff people here have made, put to good use by spicing up the main page a little (think blendernation headers).

Not just a render showcase, but a BSE-related render showcase
Candidate renders should ideally have originated from a Blender session started to research or to record a screencast for an answer.
The original BSE post should be linked.
It's ok if the original subject of the question is no more evident in the artwork, but the authors are encouraged to explain the link between post and artwork.
Something like:

In this question OP asked how to make equally-spaced random instances of objects from a collection along a curve blah blah blah. I made a minimal scene as an example for my answer (find it here), then I thought it could be made into a nice render by adding some blah blah blah.
Here's the final thing, hope you like it:
(pic)


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Can we change the close message of the "bug report" close reason?

This question appears to be off-topic because it is a bug report and not an actual question. These should be reported to Blender's tracker instead.

Emphasis mine
We usually close questions which were asked buggy behavior as bug reports, regardless of whether or not the question was not phrased as a bug report, or even of the OP seemed to realize there was a bug (related: When should a question be closed as a bug report?).
TL;DR: We get "actual questions" which should still be closed as bug reports, as they pertain to a bug (though often the OP isn't aware of this).
To reflect this, can we change the close reason to something like the following?

This question appears to be off-topic because it is a result of a bug in blender. Bugs should be reported to the tracker. Also see this guide on how to write a useful bug report.

Not completely happy with this phrasing, perhaps someone will have a better idea...

The phrasing seems fine to me but with the meta post that came after this. It will have to be put on hold for now.

The new wording as of September 30, 2015 for the bug report close reason reads:

This question appears to be about an issue caused by a bug in Blender. These should be reported to the official bug tracker.

You can read more about the change here: Cleaning up our custom close reasons.


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What to do with questions which have been answered in comments?
I occasionally see questions which have been answered in the comments, but the poster has not responded to requests to post an answer, or only has a partial answer.
For example:

Problem rendering a video (Cycles / Node Editor / VSE)
Indirect lighting casting "shadows" where it should not

Is it okay to post their answer (with credit and CW) as was done here?

I would try to notify the user first to give them the opportunity to answer the post and get the reputation. If they don't respond in a few days then answer it.  Hehe. What now?

@VinceScalia huh?

I was just messing around because the answer was in a comment. Joke on nature of question.

I would try to notify the user first to give them the opportunity to answer the post and get the reputation. If they don't respond in a few days then answer it.

I agree with this.

How do we notify a user? I don't know of any way to PM a user on StackExchange.

@Mentalist @ ping them in the commets. You can also look in chat

Perhaps somewhere inbetween the existing answers.

If the post is older and hasn't seen activity in a while (e.g. a day or two), then leave a comment to see if the user still wants to write their own answer before answering yourself.
If the post is new or has activity, then go ahead and answer :)

The user already had the opportunity to answer the question when he posted the comment, but decided for some reason not to do so. I don't get the point of 'locking' a question by posting a comment.
When the comment was too short or incomplete as an answer, it would motivate other users to write a better answer. This would help to improve the answer rate currently (1.4 of 2.5 required to leave beta). Therefore I would vote

I don't think those stats are strict requirements per se, more like guidelines to let us know how we are doing. It's not necessarily true that users who comment have an opportunity to answer. I sometimes don't have time to do an in-depth answer right away, and instead leave a short comment trying to point the OP in the right direction, intending to come back later and write a proper answer. Sometimes another user writes an answer more or less using the same techniques I was going to use before I come back and I feel kinda cheated, though it's not really their fault (they might not have even

read my comment). They also probably helped the OP by providing an answer sooner. Maybe this is just silly and we all ought to answer anyway, and similar answers are okay (to the point of being nearly identical in terms of techniques used)?

@gandalf3 your answers are mostly outstanding, even if someone else answers first by extending on a comment, you add more references and background information so that your answer is voted to the top. http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/19198/where-are-my-screencast-keys e.g. had no hint that you're intending to provide an answer (like: will answer later). I thought that at least a link should be provided.

I literally had 0 time when that question popped up, but I decided to hastily type out a quick comment before going. I honestly thought someone else would answer by the time I was back, and I would also feel very strange trying to "reserve" an answer.. It doesn't seem fair or polite to other users either..

I'm perhaps biased by the behaviour on stackoverflow, a well asked beginner question is likely to get up to 5 answers in a few minutes, after that it is burned and gets no more attention. Therefore I don't agree with the 'few days' in the accepted post. (IMHO one hour should be enough).

Things don't move quite so quickly here as on SO. We have fewer users and they are not around all of the time. That said, multiple days does seem a bit extreme, I have been waiting 24 hours in such cases. BTW, I think this only really applies to duplicate answers. In case you are thinking of your recent answer on the screencast keys question, I think that's perfectly fine.


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Are we now stuck with the gif, post, and thread tags?
Recently this question was migrated from the main site.
The OP created the gif, post, and thread tags when originally posting the question, which were then removed by the migration process.
The tags still exist, and are in the prompt:

Since there is no way to edit the original post on the main site and remove the tags, are we now stuck with the gif, post, and thread tags?

I've deleted the original question from the main site (something that the community and moderators could also have done).
The post would have gotten deleted automatically anyway, but this just speeds things along.
Since there are no existing posts with these tags on the site (as can be seen on their respective tag pages), the daily automated cleanup job will remove these tags.

Thanks! I tried to find the original post, but always ended up on meta.. How does one go about finding originals of migrated posts (to cast delete votes etc.)?

The migration target will have a notification box with a link to the original - "migrated from <site> <date time>". Where <site> is a link to the original. See this screenshot.

@gandalf3 I was thinking about this same thing, read about it and was prepared to wait the 30 days for the system to delete the question. Thank you both.

Another option is simply to retag the original with some tags that you do want to keep on the sites... @gandalf3


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What do we do with questions which don't have enough info?
Sometimes there are questions which don't quite have enough information to be certain what the full situation is.
For example:

Dynamic Paint Brush Erase doesn't work in Render Output
Cycles: No transparency in 3D View in material viewport shading mode

In these questions, it's pretty clear what the OP is asking, but the full story needed to precisely solve the issue is not as obvious (to me, at least..). By "full story", I mean knowing if specific settings are enabled/disabled, the state of various caches, what kind of hardware is used, etc. All the variables likely to affect the features the OP is using.
When the OP doesn't respond to requests for clarification, what do we do with these?
Should we close them? If so, what should the close reason say?

Put it on hold as "unclear what you're asking" and leave a comment requesting more information. If no information is added after 5 days, the question is closed.


text:
Duplicate answers
What is the etiquette on blender.stackexchange for answers on the same question saying essentially the same thing?
From meta.stackexchange:

We don't see that getting several answers to a question as a problem.
  Even if the answers are saying essentially the same thing, using
  different words - this means that there is a better chance of people
  understanding at least one of the answers.

The way I see it, this is lame reputation stealing.

How so? People can upvote as many answers on a question as they want -
  you are not limited to upvoting on one answer.

This suggests that duplicate answers are okay. But.
What if the second answer explains it differently, but in a less clear/detailed way? Should it still be kept around?
There have been cases where multiple users write almost the exact same answer within a couple of seconds of each other. If the answers are really similar, should the second be deleted?
I've noticed that for the most part users have deleted their duplicate answers, or they were deleted by the community. However, on SO this kind of duplication seems more commonplace.
Could this be why our answer ratio is doing so poorly?
On the other hand, if duplicate answers are a bad thing, is it good to have redundant and potentially lower quality answers lying around for the sake of a statistic?
Here are some examples (you'll need to have enough rep to view deleted posts):

https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/14271/599
https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/14159/599
https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/14243/599

It's a bit hard to find example answers, as most are deleted..

Somewhat offtopic - "Duplicate answers" Could also refer to two different questions with the same answer. For example, "What is this view? Screenshot of wireframe mode" and "How do I delete all selected vertices in a model" would have the same answer, but be completely different questions.

@Joehot200 Well, I'm not sure about that particular example, but these are covered in this post.

Whether or not you find an already existing answer for a question on stackexchange strongly depends on which keywords (or tags) you use to search.
More answers on a questions improve the visibility of a solutions due to different wording. This is also encouraged by the Answer Ratio 'performance indicator' which is currently 1.5 and should be at least 2.5
The best answer is usually voted to the top. IMHO we shouldn't delete dups this would worsen the answer ratio and searchability. Once the answer ratio is above 3 we could consider this again

A note on this: if someone else has already posted a correct/good enough answer, instead of posting your own better one, Improve theirs.

I would say only do this if your ideas are very much aligned with their answer and relatively little improvement is needed. They may not take kindly to having their answer hijacked.

@gandalf3 A note on the note on this: Ask them if they'd like the improvement in the comments. Be-aware that posting a nearly duplicate but slightly better answer after the effect is equally if not more annoying then someone improving your answer. Besides, someone can always roll back edits.


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Are questions about external tutorial/resources on topic?
Are questions asking for other resources on topic?
For instance:

https://blender.stackexchange.com/q/6950/599
non-video blender resources?
Resource for Blender addons?
Any good free materials libraries online?

I would vote for having one community wiki question on each topic, and close duplicates.
Like:

Beginner's Reference (on meta)
Any good free materials libraries online?.

This is even on SO stil on-topic see e.g. the-definitive-c-book-guide-and-list

How specific should each topic be? Would "non-video tutorials" be to specific?

@gandalf3 I think the topics shouldn't overlap. I'm not sure about "non-video", could we add a column to each of the links in beginner's reference to indicate that it covers only video tutorials?

I think if the question has potential benefit a majority of blender users. It should be allowed to ask even though it might not fit the format. An example of such a question would be https://stackoverflow.com/questions/81584/what-ide-to-use-for-python this question has many userfull answers and is beneficial to a large group of users even though it is it is not considered a good, on-topic question for this site
I think the question needs to be general so that many people can contribute.

Any good free materials libraries online? there are really only a few - bad for the main site
Useful resource for blender tutorials? there are plenty of sites, youtube channels, blogs, etc. - good


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Should hat farming be allowed?
We have already had some instances of hat farming, such as:

This deleted post
This conversation in chat

So far it's pretty harmless, sometimes even constructive (many suggested edits), but how far should this be allowed to go?

What is hat farming?

@ideasman42 Creating questions, starring chats, etc. entirely for the purpose of getting hats.

this is some of the saddest stuff I have seen in a while.

Obviously not. I see nothing wrong with obtaining the simpler ones or those available through chat as stars can easily be cancelled and trivial stuff is always starred anyways but I would strongly discourage anyone from hat farming on the main site and disrupting the normal flow of things. We've seen one such instance already so let this be a warning to anyone thinking of doing this.
As such the normal site rules still apply, so anyone caught abusing their site privileges to close/delete questions, push trivial edits or farm reputation will be in violation of this.

How about going back and finding posts in need of legitimate editing to fix more substantial things (formatting, really bad grammar, adding relevant tags, etc.)? Would this be called "disrupting the flow of the site", or would this be constructive?

@Keavon Of course not, definitely constructive. I mean mostly people who have the privilege to edit and use this to make one line changes etc. These edited questions are pushed back to the front page and can hide newer posts that need the attention.

In the FAQ it says

All normal site rules still apply. If you get suspended, you're disqualified from hats for the duration of your suspension. If you're caught sockpuppeting for hats, you will be suspended, just as you would be normally.

So questions like "Dont look at this" that are just for getting hats should not be
ok but hat collecting like that link to the chat are fine as they don't greatly affect anyone.
And as you said increased edits are a good thing.

Oh, oops. Sorry. Didn't know that was a rule. I agree that my creating then deletion of that post wasn't constructive, but I share the opinion that many of the hat activities is beneficial to the community such as improving questions through edits. I'll make sure my future hat farming is purely beneficial to the site.


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Are licensing questions off-topic?
There have been a couple questions asked about licensing, with mixed responses (some were  closed, others were answered).
Examples:

Blender use as world editor, level editor..etc, License problem?
Must I add a license block to all files in a multi file addon?
Can I use images rendered with blender for commercial use?

Are these off-topic or not?
If not, should we resurrect the license tag?

This meta post details why having people give legal advice online is a really really bad idea.http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/25363/is-there-a-stack-exchange-site-for-law-questions-if-not-why-not

Yes, they are, due to the legal risk they can pose to both the Stack Exchange Network,and the community members. There is a reason why legal consultants get paid as much as they do, they cant afford to make errors.

There's now a law.stackexchange and an opensource.stackexchange which appear to deal with these kinds of questions. Perhaps we can send them there


text:
Should we allow general workflow questions that don't directly relate to blender?
Should questions about general 3D workflow that don't specifically relate to blender be allowed?
For example questions where the OP does not use blender:
e.g. How to fix a 6 point vertex

Related, General 3D Graphics.

I don't see any problem with accepting these questions as long as they don't ask about features specific to other softwares.

General CG questions are allowed as long as they aren't overly broad.

...or comparing different programs.

I don't have a problem with workflow questions either, but how do we distinguish them from tutorial requests?

@Matt I would think the same way we normally do. E.g. there is a difference between "How to make an airplane", and "How to add lowpoly windows to an airplane"

Ah, I hadn't seen that post. Thanks.


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Snapping Tag and general tag organization
There was a tag discussion held in chat a while back to discuss which tags were too specific or too general and should be removed.
The decision was to remove the following tags:
clipping
snapping
charset
parametric-modeling
projection
modules
deformation
license
data-vis
cell-fracture
.stl
dimensioning
And synonimize the following tags:
coordinate-system → coordinates (still not synonimized)
library → blendfile
unwrapping → uv
manual → wiki
bsurfaces → addon (removed)

Since then there has been some discussion on whether or not snapping should recreated as there are now roughly 24 questions which could use this tag.
The original reason for dropping the snapping tag was because it fit inside the scope of modeling, however since the site has since grown and there are more questions specifically about snapping it has been argued that perhaps a snapping tag would be in order.
So now the questions about snapping are

Should it be revived
If the answer to the above question is "yes", then the next question is whether or not old questions should be (re)tagged with snapping.

I think tags should be created based on the popularity. Although some tags fall in the category of other tags, e.g. snapping → modeling, array → modifiers, there should still be a separate tag for them if these tags are popular. These kind of tags are likely to have a lot of associated questions. Having a specific separate tag would be good practice because if there are too few tags and too many questions which fall into the same general tag it would be harder for people to find the questions in the future.

I think snapping should be revived. Although it is part of modeling is has a lot of questions that could be associated with it.
And if we revive snapping we should also add the tag to the questions that fall into that category.

What about the second question?

@gandalf3 added