4 long and very strange years have passed. I have seen people come and go. I have seen elysiun get built, then stripped, then built again with a new name. New users, old users, and some I like to call friends. We chat in IRC untill we pass out, or its time to go to work. We are the community that has sprung up around this little program. Some I love. Some I dont like.
I hope my visits here have helped you. I hope I have made a diffrence in some things. I also hope my recommendations dont fall on closed ears, because I have one.
I am an American. I love our RIGHT to free speech. I also know it must be used with caution. Free as it is, its not permission to say what ever is on your mind at any moment. Some people here latey seem to think they have a right to pull down and down right insult others. I am not trying to be a hero or anything. Just human.
My question to you mods. Is the bashing and attacking of new users here OK?
I know some will try to make an argument of…Ohhh I am just showing tough love…or I am trying to help by telling them their work is crap.
I like it here. I like the atmosphere that was here when I started using blender. People actually told you what you needed to know even if you diddnt ask. They diddnt point out your mistakes and tell you to come back when you had more practice. I dont understand where or why this attitude comes from. What are we doing here? What are YOU doing here? Is it to make others feel bad. Do you get a rush from making front of others? Are you really that good of an artist to judge the level of someone else? NO ONE HERE IS A PRO! get that through your head. The sooner the better. Blender is what it is. A seconed rate FREE program. That image wont change soon, so dont argue that fact. However, this does not mean we dont have something great. We do, all of us. The community. With out eachother, blender is nothing. We have enough people outside bashing all of us, why do we bash each other. I think its time we all look at why it is we are here and refocus ourselves to making this community stronger by showing kindness to one another, and giving support to each other. It really confuses me how someone can label someone they never met. Just by a thred or two they may have posted? Behind these Avatars and Screen Names are real people, with real feelings. Alot of them no older than 15 or 16. We decide where it goes from here, together.
I am Enrique Gonzales, 28 years old. Full time Graphic Designer. I am happy to help anyone who asks.
yep IanC. your the only one.
Enriqolonius i think your a sound guy, maybe you should ask/become a moderator so we can have our community back the way it was with everyone helping each other and not leaving them out.
Well put Enriq766, whoa hang on, Enriqolonius. I agree that recently BlenderArtists has been crumbling away a bit, and I wanna do every bit I can to make sure it doesn’t collapse on us. This forum used to be brilliant, but now, for some reason, it’s getting a little out of hand. May have been because Timothy left, I don’t know. But I really do want to see it back to the way it should be.
As far as I can recall, people got ‘flamed’ (damn I hate that word) for asking stupid questions in the wrong forum. I don’t mean ignorant questions, that’s fine. I mean asking a question blatantly in the wrong place having not read the stickies. I know I did.
But is there all that much going on? Yes, in OT and News, but neither are the place for questions about how to do this or that.
I don’t remember seeing any in the support forums, though I don’t go there as often as I should. People still go out of their way to help, especially now that blender is so well documented that a huge amount of questions have either been asked before or are answered in depth in docs.
I’m guessing this was sparked because of threads like the ‘pretty cube’ one. Were things all that different ‘back in the day’? I don’t remember them being so.
If someone posts a cube with raytracing they should be told. The hard way.
Looking at the finished project, it’s got so much better. It’s amazing to look at.
So of course many people wants that the standard keeps it that way.
So let’s keep it real. We don’t want to look at your ugly abstract of cubes and spheres. Keep it in the test forum.
About bashing some people. Look at their post count. Some have been here for some months and already passed the 1,500 post mark. That is very annoying.
How would I and Enriqolonius ask to become a moderator here. By Pm…Ton?
Im starting to rewrite the tutorials on this site and others that have been asked in the various other topic forums…
look here; http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=87442
Actually - some are professionals in computer graphics…
Also:
I have also seem the number of cubes in the finished projects forum go down and the quality of the work shown there go up… co-incidence?
I believe that at the moment the forum creates better blender users (= 3D artists). Isn’t that what it is here for (hint: the name). It is not called the ‘smiley, huggy, blender chat and back patting’ site.
Hey I realise that alot of people are pro’s. just looking in finnished work and the forum gallery shows this, but I am more of a helping guy and a lot of people put down other people for no good reason, so Im askng to become a moderator to show people in the right direction and stop people from flamming inecessively (sp?).
Well, at times, things do get out of hand. I agree. But that is what we are here for, (the mod/admin team). Granted, I seem to be the only one that does things around here at times, and I hear about it on IRC, believe me. With that being said, us mods do have lives outside of here as well and we can not get to every thread when we should to calm some of this stuff. That’s where the “Report this thread” button comes in handy. When you press that, we get a notification in our private forum where we can take care of it properly.
We are actively contacting some people about becoming mods. So that is already going on in the back ground. With some of the admins leaving us, (Timothy and Sten), due to personal reasons, we have to do this. So bare with us. We are reorganizing and recruiting all at the same time, which also takes time.
Personally, I have not seen some of the stuff that you say is going on Enrqolonius. However, since you have brought it up, I will be keeping my eyes open a little wider for it now.
in contrast to other (also 3d-related) forums, i don’t think, the speech is too hard. yes, i can understand, that if a question is asked five times and again-and-again in the wrong forum, that the moderators or other members go crazy, but it’s not too aggressive.
maybe we should calm these members down, who harm others.
Other than one or two career trolls who seem to go out of their way to attract negative attention, I can’t say that I’m seeing this dark side of the forums either Enriq’. Maybe some stuff gets said in Off Topic but that hardly reflects on the support parts of the forums.
I’ve been labelled mean and nasty in the past for daring to call someone a troll on his first post. The issue was discussed at length afterwards and I believe I called it accurately. It wasn’t done lightly. There have been other times where I’ve suggested that using the search function (or just a pair of eyes) would be a good way to find where the subsurf button had gone - but given that the question was being asked more than three times a day at that time, I felt it was worth mentioning. I had also asked that the old html documentation be removed (as this was a primary source of such out of date questions) but I had no control over whether that happened or not.
A virtual community such as Blenderartists is as delicate as any real community and as it grows it, unfortunately, takes on a similar appearance in various respects including vandalism and grafitti (trolls and spammers) and therefore needs a strong police force to keep control (mods and admins). BgDM (what does that stand for?) and Alltaken in particular do a good job here (and aren’t afraid to tell any of us to behave :rolleyes:). Plus, like any community, we have the always happy, sometimes naive members and we also have the always grumpy, cynical members. It’s just our small slice of reality. As Fligh once put it “the www is an environment; when you stumble around in it sometimes you stumble into a field of flowers and sometimes you stumble into a crocodile.”
Anyway, as far as I can tell, the support forums are full of support with most questions receiving useful answers within hours. Most answers are coming from the same people but it’s also great to see a lot of fairly new members finding the confidence to help out newer users too.
This is our home. I just think everyone should feel welcomed, and not afraid to post because of what someone might say. Images can change very fast.
AndyD, there is a diffrence between giving sound advice, and down right telling some one they are no good and to come back later when they get better. If people would put 1/2 the energy into making tutorials that they put into posting into these so called useless threds, they may actually make a diffrence.
Bgdm, i know you guys are stretched pretty thin. I will use that button more now if I do see this.
To start, yes, it often seems like the moderators aren’t here very much or aren’t in as much control as you would like. However the important thing to keep in mind is that we moderators are on average older, and therefore are, on average, busier than the average. When I was 17 and in highschool it was easy to troll the forums for an hour a day, then visit IRC and hang out for a bit. Unfortunately when job or college needs me, they come first.
I have noticed a decline in some aspects of the community. I think that comes as any community ages and it grows to the size that we don’t know everyone else. It can be frustrating.
We are going to work hard in the coming months to really get some good moderation done. Unfortunaly, for every member who shouts ‘tough love’ there is another who says ‘lets be welcoming!’ So it is hard to strike a bargain that everyone can be happy with.
We a planning on introducing at least one new moderator soon. Want to know how we pick mods? We watch the forums. People who are helpful and courteous and intelligent and know blender will be put at the top of the line. You want to be a mod? Go to the support forum and answer every thread that comes there with good information, or a link to good information. Stay out of off-topic discussions, for the most part. You may be able to think of people who do that. Those are the people who are really helpful in making our community grow and become better.
And, very importantly, while we are short on staff, please use the report post button as much as possible. Make sure to add a good description We still have the final say as to what happens, but we find it is very helpful.
I am fairly new here, but I have always found this to be a very helpful forum. I think the veterans here have a ton of patience and I don’t think things have become less friendly as much as Blender has become much more popular. This leads to more newbies and the same old questions. I asked a few questions, and then I discovered the BSOD/Introduction to Character Animation series http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/BSoD/Introduction_to_Character_Animation , which I think should be a standard reference for beginners. I think this series of tutorials is a prime example of how much dedication the veterans on this board have to the Blender community.
With that being said, us mods do have lives outside of here as well and we can not get to every thread when we should to calm some of this stuff. That’s where the “Report this thread” button comes in handy. When you press that, we get a notification in our private forum where we can take care of it properly.