While most of the reasons for retiring the platform are still valid, the need for a simple directory of users and organizations has remained strong over the past few years.
For this reason, a new, more essential version of the Blender Network has been brought back.
Key features compared to the previous version:
Simpler Profile: profiles feature just a few key properties: name, location, website, skills and work availability.
Simpler Management: User/Organization Profile is now managed via Blender ID
Simpler Maintenance: All profiles will be reviewed by volunteer moderators from the community.
It’s Free for everyone.
The website is now in early access, while the platform is tested. A full announcement will be made after addressing initial feedback from the community.
Volunteers to review the public profile queue are welcome!
Certain profile details, such as users’ websites, should be visible to other users but not to the public, in order to protect them from AI scrapers as much as possible. Fighting against such scraping is very difficult and can become costly in terms of server usage, IP rights, and other resources. At least option to hide it should be offered.
I’ve tried a variety of cities, but none of them work.
It seems like the city field is supposed to be a dropdown, based on the page scripts:
const cityDatalist = document.getElementById("city-datalist");
const cityInput = document.getElementById("id_city")
const cityPicker = document.getElementById("city-picker");
cityPicker.addEventListener("change", (e) => {
if (!cityPicker.value) {
cityInput.value = "";
return;
}
for (let option of cityDatalist.children) {
if (option.value == cityPicker.value) {
cityInput.value = option.getAttribute('data-value');
break;
}
}
});
const locationInput = document.getElementById("id_location")
const cache = {"": []};
const populateCityDatalist = async (countryCode) => {
if (!(countryCode in cache)) {
let response = await fetch(
`/network/settings/city-select/?country_code=${locationInput.value}`
)
let data = await response.json();
cache[countryCode] = data.cities;
}
let newOptions = [];
for (let item of cache[countryCode]) {
let option = document.createElement("option");
option.setAttribute('data-value', item.id);
option.setAttribute('value', item.name);
newOptions.push(option);
}
cityDatalist.replaceChildren(...newOptions)
};
But it’s not, it’s a text entry field. (having a predefined list of cities you can choose from is an odd choice to me, given that there’s 19,502 in the US alone. That’s a massive JSON payload)
Hey, the tags look a bit messy when a lot is checked, at least IMO😵💫
I know this one can be a bit controversial, but a banner/gif would be nice, if not some profile page?
Could be good to add nuance in Animation which could be many things like motion design :
Character animation , 2D animation , motion design is more clear.
There is probably more to add.
I think it’s not that difficult to find people doing blender however it’s quite difficult to find very specific profiles that’s why I think the more fine grained the tags are ( there could be generic ones as well) the better !
Any feedback on the outlined suggestions is welcome. I am inclined to start with a client-side validation as a first and simplest step.
From the high-level access logs stats I can tell that out of 80+ successful form submissions that we have in the db now approximately 25% percent of users encountered some validation error, and the “city” field is the likely culprit.
Why does it need this validation at all? If I want to type in a city that isn’t in a pre-defined list, why does that matter? This is a massively complicated system but I can’t understand what the point is.
We want to have uniform predictable quality over the whole dataset: we want to make all published data equally discoverable via the filters on the search page.
If we don’t restrict the input, we can’t have that without additional moderation effort:
a user entering “Springfield” or “Franklin” in the input doesn’t provide sufficient information (Franklin TX or Franklin ME?)
a user entering “LULZville” in bad faith creates additional load on moderation
a user entering “თბილისი” in good faith forces us to support internalization beyond the level we are ready for
Of course, there are downsides to introducing a predefined list of toponyms: users located outside of urban areas won’t be able to provide their location accurately enough, but in the context of this website it may still be acceptable. If you want to meet someone for business, it’s likely you’ll make an appointment in an urban area.
We can give up on the initial assumption and allow to enter arbitrary data, and even make the field optional: if we don’t care about the data quality why ask for the input at all?
It will decrease the overall dataset quality, and I don’t see any upsides to this simplifying, besides maybe the implementation complexity at first (but I see a lot of complexity down the road cleaning the dataset when we want to improve how the data is presented).
If I may offer a counter-point; this system makes the website highly vulnerable to bad actors. Since changing the country triggers a two way API call, every country change is both server load and API load.
I don’t know the details of what you’re paying for this API, but I know this Gecko system isn’t free, I assume it’s a fraction of a cent per API call. A bad actor with a small botnet could rack up hundreds of dollars of API fees with ease. With a slightly larger botnet, they could overwhelm the server with these two-way data calls and DDOS the site.
I’m not trying to be contrarian, I’m worried about what I see as a security vulnerability. (I could be wrong about it being a vulnerability, I’ll freely admit that)
There is no API involved, we use a local dataset.
Servers responsible for most of our websites have fixed monthly costs, and we monitor the resource utilization closely, making optimizations or scaling up when inevitable, meaning that a botnet may affect the performance/availability but not the costs.
As an American, normally one types “TX” or “ME” in a State field.
If you want to meet someone for business, it’s likely you’ll make an appointment in an urban area.
That makes sense, but I’ll note that the lack of direct contact point within the database is a far larger problem.
It was answered above that "Profiles have a mandatory “Website” field to get in touch" … and yeah, people are listing the twitter feed, or their instagram page, or their github page, their youtube channel or any number of other things.
I don’t say this to be hurtful or insulting, it’s just a direct statement - this method of “point of contact” is - well not useless, but incredibly strange on a website that is meant to be a directory listing of people and companies. Presumably for contacting.
As to moderating user submissions - there’s already issues here. I’ve seen at least one (more like 2-3, i think) from people who seems to have hardly anything to do with Blender, if at all. (This was particularly youtube channels.)
The reason that the previous blender network was sunset, as stated by Francesco, was because it grew too much and was not possible to maintain. So I’m guessing that not having a messaging system to contact people on the site is a feature, not a bug. That would make this project a lot more complicated and defeat the purpose of it being a simple way to search for people. Having a link to an external site to outsource the messaging part is a compromise. Perhaps a way to get an email on the site could also work, but I’m guessing that people would prefer to not add an email there to avoid getting spam etc.
Literally nothing on this listing’s website about Blender. As a reader, I cannot determine if a listing like this is actually a Blender user, or just someone that found the website, signed up, and is using the membership for unrelated self-promotion.
