The support category often gets used for non-support topics

Support Blender Artists Website Support
1

What the title says. Often, people post in one of support’s subcategories to show off something (often tooling) without any request for help or advice. While many of the projects are cool, they clutter up the unanswered questions feed with topics that aren’t questions, making it harder to identify who could do with attention.

Now, this is laregly down to forum users not reading what category they are meant to be posting in. However, it does make the forum harder to use for everyone, so here follow some ignorant suggetions:

  1. Add some sort of banner when you try to post in the support category, to remind everyone that it’s only for people seeking technical help.
  2. Make a separate category/collection of categories for blender tooling (i.e. mainly node groups) that goes beyond just scripts/code. This gives an obvious place for what (in my experience) is the most common mistake: see a good subcategory for your not-directly-artistic project, than assume that “Support” means providing it and not requesting it.

Apologies in advance for asking for extra work from the mods…

2

There’s some irony that this is in the wrong category, moving to Blender Artists Website Support :wink:

3

I agree a pop-up for a users first few posts might be useful, but it would soon get annoying for regular users.

I think another issue with categories, is that it can be confusing what goes where, for example I sometimes find their is a bit of an overlap between modelling and basics and interface.

4

Yes… and there are also tags… and user “crying for help” but not telling which version of blender or OS they use… Ever heard of addon XYZ is not working in Blender Y when this version just came out ?? And the original site is even telling: “Not for Blender Y yet.” ??

And a lot of questions which could be solved when some simply user Blender → Help → Manual… or simple typing this question into any search engine (even before AI ). …if there actual i sa proper question…

Yes this makes it “hard to follow”… but that’s always the case when people meet… anywhere…

I even think the most hardest probelm for mankind is: missing context. People are argueing about anythign and nobody knows in what special area they are working (evenif as a hobby), how long, with what knowledge and experience… but still everyone knows it better. Sometimes even ignoreing that laws are different in other regions…

So there are mutliple hints how to use this forum software (some users think this is also developed by BA) and still some people just can’t even ask a simple question sometimes only asking “What’s wrong here?” and showing you… something what simple is recognizable… (i’m not joking here).

But still: users ignore all this and if “the mods” would delete all the “unusable things” then this would be no fun… (nobody want to censor all this expect some things and also some user think it is done too much… because the whole world is acting against them… yes we had some dramas here…)

Actually some users do threaten “the team” and some are banned because of, believe it or not, death threats… :unamused:

So… in the end everbody has to filter by oneself what one wants “to listen to” by first listen for a while… and select one of the Watching, Tracking, Normal, Muted options and the end of any topic and even use the Ignore or even Muted options for some users in the Preferences Users area… maybe only using a time range or forever.

P.S.: There are some discussion about some categories changes for a while… but this also is not “easy” and properly some users will complain about some changes… like every time when something is changed in blender (ever heard of the discussion how to bring back the 2.79 GUI design into blender 3 ?? Not some theme… this do exist…) Or how it does not “follow” the industry standard and never will be used in the Industry…

Well… this got little long… but you may forgive me this . because i’m here for a while now and have read this forum even before i registered… and have seen (or read) things… . :roll_eyes: :crazy_face: :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:
…and had a by far too string coffe too :coffee: :wink:

5

Maybe an option to hide stuff (either manually or after n tries) could work.

Agreed, another example could be an animation that is a finished project. However:

Not to say that it shouldn’t be done just for these reasons, but it obviously would need careful consideration and would need to align with what vision staff have in mind.

Good grief it’s genuinely scary, as well as infuriating, how common this is.

While some level of manual intervention will always be required, I do think it’s worth at least investigating if we can make a particular issue less prevalent/less problematic.

No problem! I’ve been here a lot less than you, and I’ve still seen stuff that completely justifies your rant.

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Unfortunately, I’m not surprised, but I also feel it’s important to explicitly call out this behaviour as vile and completely unacceptable, beyond just counterproductive.

6

It’s a bit tangential, but we do, anyone who sends death threats is instantly perma-banned and added to the public list of Suspension Reports

7

Ohhh i’m not ranting… just “stating facts” :wink:

Shikata ga nai.

:person_shrugging:

8

My observation is that unfortunately you can add as many notifications as you want, but people just don’t read. So the best course of action is to just flag such topics as off topic and we’ll move them into the right category for you.