Is there a way to follow the #geometry-nodes tag so I can get notifs when other posts are made related to it?
Because evidence has shown that a lot of people have the thread bookmarked and arenât likely to read a moderatorâs post (or even an updated thread title) thatâs asking folks to stay on topic.
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Ah, yea, well, makes sense.
Know that it is duly appreciated
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We need to take into account the semi-organic nature that is discussion on a message board though. Sometimes it seems the ship ends up being run so tight that it is actually not a matter of if you make a post that is flagged, but when.
The concern I have, is that the idea of holding certain threads to such a rigid and narrow definition of what is on topic will mean us as humans not being able to have a natural conversation, instead we will have to take a more robotic approach about our responses because we never know if a post is going to be flagged.
In other words, canât we at least be allowed some leeway in how discussions evolve (with intervention only if we fail to steer it back)? Now it might just be the thread was getting too many general Q&A questions, but I do believe that getting persnickety in terms of monitoring tangents and subtopics will only drive people away from the site.
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Semi-organic is fine. The posts I moved werenât that. They were people showing up and either asking a very pointed question about how to do something (unrelated to the main running conversation) or showing off the result of an experiment⌠also not organically part of the discussion.
Youâve been here long enough to know that we arenât super rigid with holding threads solidly to a topic. We donât want to⌠and really, we donât have the people or time to be that restrictive. However, when a thread becomes a general dumping ground with multiple threads that are difficult to tease apart, thatâs not organic discussion. Thatâs everyone talking at the same time. Thatâs difficult to read, difficult to search, and difficult to participate in. That thread was the example of a thread that could not be steered back on topic (and we tried⌠moderators and general forum members alike).
There is leeway. Always has been. I donât appreciate you painting it otherwise.
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This is exactly what happened
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I just came to post to the GN thread just to notice itâs locked. It was a great thread to follow since it was constantly living. Now the conversation is just dead. If there are some GN experts out here, they can no longer just focus on one thread to help the people, they need constantly scour different forum sections to see if thereâs any new GN related post.
The closure is all the more embarrassing given the fact that this forum doesnât have GN dedicated section, which would at least partially alleviate it. GN is a very different mechanism to modeling, so it doesnât make sense to just dump GN related question into regular modeling forum section.
The only logical reason for the closure of the megathread I saw was that the moderators complained they can not keep up with moderating it. So the moderators made their job easier, but killed probably the most exciting and lively place on this forum.
Whatâs up with this no megathread BS anyway? I mean moderation aside⌠If you look at Discord servers for example, Discord got popular exactly for the reason that the megathread concept work, as its really fun, and makes the place feel living, and active.
Discourse (not to be confused with Discord mentioned above) forum platform system took a step from legacy forum boards towards newer, more realtime chat-like system. Why would they do that, if the idea of a flowing conversation was a problem, instead of a solution?
People will always naturally converge towards whatâs more convenient for them. If individual, small threads were more convenient for the forum users in some cases, the megathreads would not naturally occur. The people whom megathreads are inconvenient to are mostly just the moderators.
Anyway, I remember one day browsing the GN megathread and seeing a cool post about a setup which would remove small floating pieces of the mesh, usually the result of remeshing. Before, I could simply ask in that thread, which post it was, and someone would likely soon link me to it. Right now, I need to pick an obscure forum section, probably modeling, as we donât even have GN forum section, create a whole new thread just because of this question, and hope for an unlikely chance that someone who frequented that thread will stumble upon that quickly fading away thread.
And donât even try to bring up tagsâŚ
If I may, I would say that the only reason there are âexciting and lively places on this forumâ is that the moderation team works so hard behind the scenes to keep things running. Itâs a lot of work keeping a massive community like this thriving and healthy.
The problem with megathreads, as itâs been explained to me, is that Blender Artists is meant to compile an archive of easily findable problems and solutions, so people from Google or wherever can quickly find the answer to their specific problem. Itâs much harder to sift through 7k posts compared to finding a quick and short answer to your problem.
Tags are functionally no different from categories- they have the same notification settings, you can see Latest vs Top, the only difference is a slight visual one
Thatâs all just my opinion, I donât mean that in any kind of official capacity
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How does megathread contribute to that? You canât possibly observe all the new posts in all the threads in realtime anyway, so you mostly rely on community flagging the posts if something goes wrong. If thereâs something going wrong in a megathread, users will let you know through the flag button.
Well, yeah, but for many it can be a lot more daunting to start a whole new thread instead of just dropping into a middle of a flowing conversation. Thatâs exactly why Discord servers are superseding forums in popularity. So by forcing people to create new thread for every small question they have, you may end up with the effect of actually discouraging them from contributing. Itâs a simple factor of having a lot more people in the same âroomâ versus having people to have to constantly walk around the giant building in mostly empty rooms hoping to stumble upon someone they can talk to.
The main point of dedicated section is that you can have some sort of true homepage, in this case https://blenderartists.org/ with a static, non changing list of set topics you can expect to be there for you to be accessible through single click, always in the same place. As opposed to hoping that the tag you are interested in may, or may not randomly appear under one of the posts in the right side scrolling section of recent posts, and if there isnât one currently, you have to start typing, itâs no longer one click away.
By this âtags are the solutionâ logic, you could just straight up nuke the whole Game Engine section, because itâs arguably a lot smaller and less popular part of Blender compared to GN. If the now deprecated game engine deserves the whole main section, then by which logic donât Geometry Nodes deserve at least a subsection in Support section?
All in all, why not just create a new âGeometry Nodes Developmentâ thread with a disclaimer itâs strictly for GN development news, then rename the old thread to âGeometry Nodes Chatâ or something, and keep it open, so that people can talk about everything GN related (including the development). Why canât we just have this one Discord room like experience in here? If people didnât like that experience, or did not find it useful, why did it end up the most alive thread on this entire forum? If something gets heated, the flag button will let you know.
First and foremost, a forum is not a chat. Discord and real-time chats have their place, but itâs a fallacy to think that they should operate the same way. Trying to find anything that was said in a Discord/Slack/Mattermost/RocketChat instance is fraught with hardship. Forums are different and they should be.
What would be really nice is a page where forum members could create their own customized landing page with a mix of categories and tags. Weâre not there yet, but Iâm sure itâs possible. In the meantime, bookmarking a tag that youâre following works quite well.
Thatâs the plan. Weâve been planning on re-integrating the Game Engine categories with the rest of the forum for quite some time now. Weâre overdue for pulling the trigger on that.
A couple points⌠First weâve done exactly what you suggested, with the exception of keeping the older thread open. Second, as already mentioned, this is not the place for a Discord-like experience. Use Discord for that. Third, while the thread was indeed popular, it wasnât the most popular thread. You can confirm by digging around in the top threads. And fourth, we made this move precisely because of feedback we got from multiple forum members who were having difficulty following all the different pieces of discussion in that thread and finding the information that they need.
Look. We actually have quite a few megathreads floating around the forum, each about interesting and different topics. Most of those threads actually stay on topic quite well⌠and the participants in those threads actually do a pretty good job of helping to ensure that. The Geometry Nodes thread didnât have that⌠partially because it was born as the feature itself was released and folks were still figuring things out. Weâre at a point now where the feature has been around for a while. Folks are still figuring things out and experimenting and discussing future development, but the feature (and the userbase) has matured enough to start posting actual support questions in the correct categories.
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Whatever the âTopâ metric is, it doesnât make any sense, if the top thread, in the last year, according to it, has just 147 replies, compared to 3000+ GN thread. When sorted by replies in the past year, the current truly most contributed to thread is about Zbrush, which has still 5-6 times less replies than the GN thread.
https://blenderartists.org/top?order=posts&period=yearly
There is currently no correct category for GN. And as I said above, tags are not categories.
This forum had no proper space for GN discussion. As a partial consequence of that, a megathread emerged. You forcefully stopped that discussion while still refusing to create a proper space for GN related discussion.
I am not personally involved in the GN discussion, but as a user, I would prefer a forum section for GN over tags. I have been using discourse forums for years, but never knew you could follow tags. To me tags are more like section markers to organise everything within a (sub-)category.
So Iâd prefer a GN category with tags for help/ news/ development, etc.
As stated before multiple times, categories are not well suited for specific features. Features change or get removed (as we can see with the game engine). Furthermore, geometry nodes (and future node-based features) can be used for multiple steps in the creative process (not just modeling, but also rigging and animation, for example). This is where tags are the most useful.
The space for GN discussion is here: https://blenderartists.org/tag/geometry-nodes along with Latest, Top, notifications, tracking, and everything else you would get with a category
This debate is absolutely pointless if you canât understand the difference in usability between tags and sections.
Anyway, if someone were to create a âGeometry Nodes Chatâ thread in the Blender and CG Discussions, would that be a problem?
Thereâs an absolute difference and Iâve already explained it. My explanation may not jive with the way you think things should be, but thereâs a very specific reason why we have categories organized the way that we do and it really is best for the longevity of the forum.
Not necessarily a problem, but what would such a thread add that isnât already covered with the development discussion thread. We have large development discussion threads for sculpting, grease pencil, Mac support, and a litany of other specific things. They donât seem to need separate chat threads. I think things are fine in their current state. Youâre welcome to talk about geometry nodes and their development in the current open thread. But if youâre looking for support or sharing an experiment, we have places for that on the forum.
As Iâve said, the feature has matured to the point where folks can post about it in multiple parts of the forum. We should embrace that.
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Space to discuss everything GN related, not just development news. Pretty much the same thing as the old megathread, just without a different name, that doesnât imply itâs restricted just to discussion about the development.
No one is forcing anyone to go look into that thread. If some forum users here have issue with long threads, no one is forcing them to go visit them, they can just ignore them. If people really liked the idea of separate thread in separate categories, then thatâs the behavior which would naturally emerge, you would not have enforce it.
If the forum is supposed to be library of answers to all Blender related questions, then I still think it should be up to the users who generate that content to decide whether they believe itâs truly worth it to place the content they want to contribute into a flow of large thread or into a brand new topic. They have a choice, itâs up to them. No one forced them to post into megathreads previously. They had both choices.
You canât compare as crappy of an experience as browsing this:
https://blenderartists.org/tag/geometry-nodes
where you just see rows of semi-random titles to a feed like experience, similar to for example twitter:
which contains images, videos and links with embedded image previews you can just scroll throughâŚ
âŚwithout having to spawn 30 tabs in your browser and then click all of them through. The megathreads offered that experience, and thatâs why people gravitate towards them, to see whatâs new. And thatâs what in turn created so much engagement.
Forbidding megathreads is like saying âWe know that this forum system has features which encourage flowing discussion, but you are using it wrong. We donât want you to use it that way, because we own the forum. Use the forum the way we want!â
And itâs very similar with tags vs section. The tags have been around forever, and people are still requesting GN section. At this point, you should start asking yourself whether you arenât the one whoâs ideas are distorted, if you have to constantly keep telling everyone to use the forum the ârightâ way, yet many of them keep repeatedly naturally returning to the old usage patters and requests.
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Iâm starting to repeat myself, so Iâll probably take a break from this thread after this.
The old GN thread was not a flowing, organic discussion. It was a bunch of different threads overlapping one another. If youâre suggesting that we have a new thread that does that, then no. Such a thread will not be welcome.
Megathreads are not forbidden. We have quite a few of them. They manage to actually be a consistent flowing conversation. Iâm sure that what we have for geometry nodes now can do the same.
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Is there any way to follow a tag but filter out some categories?