Hey folks. A few of you already know about this (since it kind of got quietly announced on episode 41 of the Blender Podcast), but I’ve been working on a new Blender-related website for managing feature requests for Blender. This is a perennial topic that pops up here on our forums every few months and it’s a need that hasn’t really been served since the days of Blenderstorm.
So I’m proud (and a little bit frightened) to announce Right-Click Select, the Blender ideas site.
Draft a proposal for a new feature and submit it the the correct category
Upvote, downvote, and comment on various proposals based on viability, usefulness, and clarity in presentation
Now… a few caveats. The site is still young and I’m still trying to smooth out the rough spots on it. You should expect the site to break for you in exciting ways. Also note that although we do have Blender developers visiting the site, there should be no expectation that any feature listed on the site will actually get developed. Right-Click Select is a home for ideas. It’s meant to be a place where Blender developers and Blender users got to vet out ideas, gauge the community’s interest in them, and discuss their viability. If an idea from Right-Click Select does get developed, that part of the process will happen on developer.blender.org and starts as a design task. In the future, I’ll try to add a feature that gives us the ability to link to design tasks, but I haven’t added that yet.
So that’s pretty much it. The site is running. It hasn’t crashed on me [recently]. Please check it out. Comment on other peoples’ ideas. Make suggestions. Do the upvote/downvote thing. And if you run into any issues or snags with the site (or if you have suggestions for making it better), feel free to contact me. You can do it in this thread, send me a PM, ping me on IRC, or track me down on social media.
I also need to give a big thanks to Francesco Siddi and Pablo Vazquez. They wrote Dillo, the platform that I’ve based this site on (they also use it for blender.today). They were a big help in helping track down bugs (and general stupidity on my part) when putting together the site.
Speaking for myself: I’m a big fan of this initiative! If our user community manages to keep this site constructive and doesn’t totally abuse it, I’m happy to contribute in varying ways (and I’m sure the same goes for other devs).
I’ve owned the domain for nearly a decade and never did anything with it. I used what I had. Furthermore, it’s in good humor and (IMHO) it fits. Anyone who’s likely to start a flamewar about the name of the site probably isn’t in the site’s target audience.
I don’t think that developer.blender.org currently uses Blender ID. There was some discussion about integrating the two during the Blender Conference, but I don’t know what (if anything) ever came of that.
Little site development follow-up. I think some folks were having difficulty uploading files to the site. I’d borked something on my initial configuration. You should be able to upload images as part of your proposals now (for the thumbnails, at least).
There is a flagging system built into Dillo, but I think I’m going to need to pester Francesco or Pablo to get a better understanding of how it works. But I agree, being able to mark, flag, or otherwise tag a proposal as “needs work” or somesuch would be really valuable.
And I hear you on Py3… more importantly, I thank you for your optimism that this site will still be around in 2020. I’m hopeful that it will be , too.
Having run a website for Blender development before (and watch it crash & burn) - I’ll be keeping an eye on this one. I hope it succeeds, as I think something along these lines is needed. Let’s just say I’m hoping my cynicism doesn’t prove correct.
On the name - love it! It’s topical, clever, and should it ever become an actual feature on the site - I can always vote it down .
The buy-in from Blender Foundation developers already seems a good sign. Much as I hate to say it, most (not all) community driven projects tend not to get the needed traction. Getting Julian, Campbell, etc on board this early on provides hope
For those on the BlenderCloud - your login from that site works (tried it myself), so give it a whirl. Already gone through the features currently added to the site and voted up two that struck my area of interest. Give it a whirl people. At the very least, even if the most popular features never get worked on, it’ll be interesting to analyse the differences between Foundation & community priorities.
A nice and very needed development in the Blender development model. Hope it will be a official part of Blender Foundation, since this is essential down the line.
Looking forward to see how this develops and matures.
No Age 18+ only?
No submit your curriculum vitae before posting?
No a BI trusted-friend badge to be allowed to post?
No degree in theoretical physics required?
You need quality tools or intimidation tools?
Sometimes if you find something poor quality you can just ignore it or explain why it’s LQ.
No need to make people afraid of posting suggestions with flags.
You mods really can’t see a place without crowd control tools uh?
Let people live and post even the stupidiest idea ever. It will have the consideration it deserve automatically.
Off-topic:Ideasman42 and fweeb do you mind to open the Blender Podcast on air thread it seems like it auto-locked and may be update those missing list just in case someone wants to say hi
It’s not about crowd control, it’s about quality control. You’re talking to a developer, not just a moderator. Consider the following contrived (but not unlikely) example:
Topic: Make the game engine better
Text: I think the game engine should be better because many people want to make video games and if the game engine is better it will attract more people and more people are always good
I’m sure this could be a very popular proposal and many people would vote for it, but they shouldn’t. It would be a waste of votes, because this “proposal” is completely useless to actual developers (i.e. it is not actionable). Eventually, such useless-but-popular topics could dominate the list.
There needs to be a high-level way to signify that a proposal is either not actionable or needs significant improvement to be considered at all. It can’t be that developers could only post a comment that is drowned in “I want this!!!” and “+1 from me” utterances. A lot of users probably don’t even read the proposal text before voting, much less the comments.
Let people live and post even the stupidiest idea ever. It will have the consideration it deserve automatically.
It may be ignored by the developers, but if the users aren’t even aware of that and keep wasting their votes, that’s not a good thing. The only way this website can be useful is to help developer prioritize features that are actually possible. Users need to make informed decisions on which proposal to support. They can’t have it all.
