This is precisely why we need a main Blender 2.8 development thread. You’ll find yourself doing this whenever an obscure or hard to categorise feature is included.
I feel at least one big thread wont hurt. We could duplicate the individual news items as stand alone threads to make it easier for people to follow. That is just my opinion though
And I’ve split this topic off from the H key feature thread.
I disagree. Splitting threads has been pretty manageable and worked quite well… especially with tagging. It’s not that much work… and doing this is part of what I’m supposed to do as a moderator anyway.
No it doesn’t when dozens of posts are added every day. Unless you’re constantly looking at the thread, which any sane person won’t be, you’ll easily miss the 1% of posts which are actually informative.
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Well, I don’t really care how y’all want to run the place, but I found everything easier to follow when it was one thread. With all the pedantic splitting/moving and fragmentation I quit bothering to even try to bookmark/track threads/posts.
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I liked that 2.8 megathread. All new developments in one read. Many new ideas and topics I wouldn’t necessarily look for specifically. Nice way to be up to date regarding new developments.
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Haha! So my comment about thread splitting has been split into it’s own thread. Brilliant!
You lot have been seriously over moderating since the forum change.
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Yea, I think he did that mostly as a joke.
edit: I guess he could have been concerned it would continue to veer off topic as well.
I really liked the mega thread.
I came for the news and stayed for the drama.
And there was always a little drama.
Now everything is so orderly and fragmented which makes it boring.
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What? This thread isn’t drama enough? 
In seriousness, this kind of boring is fine by me. There are plenty of other places on the web and in meatspace for drama. So BA doesn’t have to be one of them.
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Just to provide a counterexample, I personally like splitting threads more.
For example, I read the 2.8 megathread at first, but I really couldn’t care less about UI so eventually I stopped reading through 40 posts per day of pointless bickering over icons and menus that are temporary anyways just to find one interesting post.
With the split threads, I can simply not look at UI posts and only read interesting stuff.
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Since now we have a sufficient amount of separated threads regarding big topics, could we be allowed to have a mega-thread for general misc. news updates and discussions regarding 2.8? This would be a place for updates/discussions that don’t quite belong in any of the other threads, but also little links and info that don’t require whole threads dedicated to them.
It looks like a lot of users here would appreciate that, and those who don’t care simply can choose not to read.
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I’d rather not. Threads like that may start innocuous, but they tend to metastasize and balloon into something that’s hard to manage and follow. If you have something that doesn’t belong in another thread, post a new one. If it’s not a big deal, it’ll precipitate to the bottom of the list.
use the follow options. they’re needlesly moe complex than “watch unread/mark all read” as in a normal forum, but they work. and you can ignore the parts of discussion you don’t care about
I think I get what they are saying now. It is not just about whether or not users want to follow large threads. They have some level of responsibility to follow the threads themselves along with the smaller threads. Having to keep up with the 60 or more posts per day in each megathread along with the messages in the smaller threads probably makes the forum harder to moderate.
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I feel like there needs to be a better solution. There were several times I just opted not to, for instance, post development tasks from developer.blender.org that I found interesting just because I didn’t feel like creating a new thread. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one.
How about a news-focused thread with very limited discussions allowed, encouraging people to create new threads and linking to them if wanting to discuss about specific news items (and will be indicated as much in the title and OP). So a thread meant to be more of a central hub that’ll branch off to new threads, if that makes sense.
And if some users end up having back-and-forth discussions, you can obviously split them off, and I’d imagine this would be quite manageable. Could this be worth a try?
Again. I’d rather not.
I’m trying to understand why there’s a perception that it’s easier to make a thread than it is to reply to one. Effort-wise the only difference is that you have to include a topic title for a new thread. Is that really so troublesome?
I don’t think it’s perception but it’s objectively less effort to simply reply to a thread you’re following as opposed to creating a brand new thread.
To make a new post: Load Blenderartsts.org -> Click on notifications to access the thread -> Click “Reply” and post.
To make a new thread: Load Blenderartists.org -> Click on category -> Click “New Topic” -> Come up with a title -> Post.
It just takes more mental energy and clicks to create a new thread.
Could we try some semblance of my proposal, and if it gets unwieldy, then just shut it down?
If those 10 seconds really are too much effort, maybe the topic doesn’t warrant any post or thread…
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I don’t get the reluctance to attempting to create a new mega-thread that’s different in that
- it’s a news posting focused mega-thread,
- major discussion points have been made into separate threads,
- and at least a level of frenzy is likely to die down with Code Quest coming to a close.
I only see four real outcomes:
- It goes as intended and we regain a better experience for the users who would like a single thread to follow for development news items.
- It goes pretty okay except for in-depth discussions starting to happen from time to time. Then @Fweeb can just split them off to separate threads. And if this doesn’t happen too often, it should be pretty manageable.
- It doesn’t go well for some reason and behavior’s back to what it used to be. Then thread closed, case closed.
- People don’t find the thread nearly as interesting without the frequent, heated discussions and it dies on its own.
I understand the feeling of hesitation, but I don’t get not allowing the test, period, because of the hesitation. Also, having had lost the previous mega-thread, I’d like to think the community will try to better self-moderate themselves.
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