Blenderstorm is gone (or effectively so) – Yes?. But is there still a community need/desire for such a site?
If so, what did the old site lack in features that would be useful? The thought behind that question is integration into other sites like this forum, the wiki, etc.
Thoughts?
I think there would be a need, but after 2.5 is “completed” when requesting new features isn’t just piling on top of an already large stack of work.
I think the old site’s system work fairly well, it may have just needed a visual face lift and some more activity.
In terms of integrating into sites, I think it’d be better to keep it separate to help in containing some of the fanboy-ism (though that’ll follow there inevitably, an extra click can cut down on a lot of unnecessary traffic ;)), even though there wasn’t a tremendous amount on there beforehand if I recall correctly.
The biggest downfall I saw for the original site was the impossibly slow response times (database related methinks).
If it was a matter of little interest in the site then it would probably be a waste of time but somehow I’m not sure it was interest that was lacking. I could be wrong though. Which is part of the reason for this thread.
Thanks for the input forTe.
I suppose it wasn’t lack of interest as much as it was that maybe it wasn’t advertised well/accurately enough and there wasn’t enough active and constructive participation. I think in some ways it came off more as a “drop your feature request off here and hope it gets added” site, which may have been the purpose, but it lead in many cases to orphaned ideas or the non-constructive posts of “oh yeah, that’d be cool!!!11!!”
I wrote this in another thread.
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=163914
What I would like to see for the community is a central place, for artist and developers, to post feature request in an orderly manner. A master list of request that everyone can see and when a feature is coded, it’ll be moved to a different section. The way we have it now is someone will post a request and people will forget about it. later on someone else will ask for the same feature than someone will accuse them of posting the same request over and over. Here’s a thread that started off with the best intentions.
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=116303
As of 08/10/09, that thread is 62 pages and 1,233 post. How many developers will want to read all that?
I think the request should be put in their own sections.
UI
MODELING
UV MAPPING
MATERIALS/TEXTURES
ANIMATION
RENDERING
I’ve always liked the wiki page for Plumiferos wishlist. Almost everything on their list was coded.:yes:
It was easy to see what needed to be done and what still needed coding. The developer can go straight to this list and figure out their next move.
A certain amount of fanboy-ish content is inevitable of course. Blender does had it’s share (no offense intended against anyone). End user participation is only part of the equation. Unless it attracts developers and encourages real discussion on solutions/implementation to/of whatever ideas are presented a site like that would just be relegated to the odd “Wouldn’t it be cool if we had XYZ – now vote!”. The later is probably easy to achieve while the former less so.
That was part of what I didn’t like about the original idea site. Too many categories for things to get lost in. I like the idea of a short category list. I also think that requests/ideas regardless of category should be staged in different areas. Especially when and if something is picked up by a developer for coding. Here is where developer participation is critical (and often hard to come by). As a once (and sometimes still) developer myself I know how much I disliked having one more bloody system to go to and manage/document something, when all I wanted to do was build/code the objective.
Thanks for the links. Will check them out.
Maybe instead of outright categories, use del.icio.us style tags? That way things can be in multiple categories, you can search by name, user, tags, date, popularity, etc, you can see all the requests with certain tags (select multiple tags to narrow it down) and so on. When people go to put in their tags, have it suggest already made tags in a dropdown or something in order of popularity as they’re typing them so they’re more likely to pick one with a consistent spelling. On the main page you could list popular ones, recent ones, random ones, or whatever.
Using tags would be more flexible than categories IMO. For example, what if I didn’t like the interface for a modeling script and maybe didn’t think the script itself worked very good? Would I file suggestions under UI, Modeling, or Scripting (you didnt list a category for python…)? With tags I can put it in all 3.
Of course this opens up the problem of people spamming things on all tags but I think if you make it so people have to register an account and then the suggestion shows their username it would cut down on that. If so-and-so spams something on all tags… mark it as spam, delete it automatically after n number of days and no one would take them seriously next time (maybe put a red dot next to their name or something to show they’re been reported and flagged recently)
Exactly my opinion as well.
what I would like to see for the community is a central place, for artist and developers, to post feature request in an orderly manner. A master list of request that everyone can see and when a feature is coded, it’ll be moved to a different section. The way we have it now is someone will post a request and people will forget about it. later on someone else will ask for the same feature than someone will accuse them of posting the same request over and over.
FourMadMen, You could contact Ton, and ask if he would be willing to endorse a official Blender Foundation Idea/request repository like Blender storm.
p.s. Blender storm is not the best of names 'specially when you consider it’s ‘initials’:eek: 
Has anyone tried getsatisfaction?
I used it to report a bug on miro a while ago, seems like a nice, low-maintenance
system. Check out the page regarding miro:
http://www.getsatisfaction.com/participatoryculturefoundation
Ah a new idea topic.
My idea: gui change to 3dsMax gui.
I’d likely just create it from scratch given no availability of such software under MySQL (and oddity to say the least).
Rolling something out for October/2.5-release is not a bad idea. Perhaps give me time to see what I might work up and to see further if there is sufficient user and developer interest to warrant the effort.
So whatever plan I’ve got cooking is not yet a full blown “Go” but neither is it dead on the table.