We have just moved Blender Artists to a brand new server. The previous machine had a failing disk, so this migration was necessary to keep the community safe and running for the years to come. Along with the new hardware, we have also upgraded to the latest version of our forum software.
What this means for you
Everything you know is still here: all your topics, posts, messages, and uploads have been carried over. You can log in and use the site exactly as before.
A few things to be aware of in the coming days
The site may feel a little slower than usual at first. This is expected and temporary. Caches need to warm up and some background work is still running. Performance will improve over the next few days as everything settles in.
Some older images may not show up right away. During the move, the thumbnail versions of images need to be regenerated. We are doing this in the background, newest uploads first and working back through the archive. So recent topics will look correct first, and older content will catch up over the coming days. The original images are all safe; it is only the resized previews that are being rebuilt.
New uploads work normally. Anything you post or upload from now on will display correctly straight away.
A few features are still being finished
A small number of things are still being reconnected after the upgrade, and we are working through them. If something looks off, it is very likely already on our list.
Found a problem? Let us know
If you run into anything broken or unexpected, please post it in the website support category so we can track and fix it:
IDK if this falls into feature request category, but topic thumbnails where the first post is just a (hotlinked?) video only produces the “chat bubbles” image. It would be nice if the thumbnails for video posts were the video thumbnail as well.
Is that something that is in consideration as an upgrade?
No. Posts should never just have videos anyway, the vast majority of users never play those videos. If you want to show off something you’ve made, you should add still images to your post alongside the video
This should already happen, at least for YouTube videos and I think mp4 too (but maybe only if they contain a ‘poster’ image’). But I agree with Joseph that it’s always better to ‘dress up’ your post with some background info and images.
Thanks Ronny! Yeah that was a surprising amount of work including consolidating years or crappy scrips, migrating them to the new Discourse frameworks, writing a new image optimizer etc
Hey Bart Great News! . the UI definitively feels refreshed and i kinda will miss the old one, but i can quickly adapt hehe … and yeah i have no clue what’s the new easter egg …
I personally agree that users should add still images (and useful words to read), but this is getting back to the same arguments about the forum I have always presented, even back 20 years. The forum should go out of its way to help users present cleanly. (Granted, it has significantly improved over the years… such as the dark theme I advocated for and was emphatically shot down.) But the reality remains:
Users will never take the time or effort to present stuff nicely. The vast majority are not professional artists. They have no idea and no inclination to even consider the idea that some minimal effort can be put into presentation with the forum software. They are simply excited to share something they have managed to do with Blender. Often enough that is just a picture.
And, fairly, even a trip through Google Translate for some nice words is beyond what some users think necessary. The art should stand by itself!
I personally tend not to click on animation posts for the very simple reason that there is no thumbnail. I cannot say that all users react the same as I do, but I only tend to click on posts with a thumbnail showcasing artwork that I think I might want to look at.
No pic, no clicky.
Especially for something like a video that promises to take more of my time to look at than an image — and yet I am expected to go into that situation half-blinded. Between the time it takes to open and close a tab (or however you do it) and the number of times I have clicked into a video post to discover I am not really interested in the video I can say it outweighs the rarer reward of finding a really good video that I am glad I watched.
Basic psychology runs our lives, whether we like it or not. Simple & stupid stuff matters, man.
I am not saying the absence of thumbnails is the sole reason for low “play” counts, but I am saying that it may very well contribute to it — all for something that the forum software should easily be able to handle.
reaction does not count as a like.
. the UI definitively feels refreshed and i kinda will miss the old one, but i can quickly adapt hehe 
… and yeah i have no clue what’s the new easter egg 
…