Hi all, I feel bad about asking this, but https://developer.blender.org really seems like a completely closed loop in terms of interacting with it in any form. My account can Watch, but otherwise can not even contact users or join discussion. Poking around suggests to Join projects you must join the Moderators (https://developer.blender.org/project/members/1/) in order to join other projects, and to join Moderators you must be an “Administrator” that doesn’t have a project of its own to join.
This design seems really hostile. I would like to join in, but I would like someone to fix this arrangement even more. Thanks!
developer.blender.org is not a social platform and not meant to be, so there are no direct messages between users or discussion groups that are being hidden from you, it is used to track bugs and used for code review, all of which is done completely in the open, bugs here and code reviews here
Watching a group merely means you’ll be notified if there any codereview or bug attached to it, you should already be able leave comments on existing bugs/codereviews, and report new bugs here ticket or post code for code-review here without extra privileges.
However do realize that this it is a bug tracker, it is not end user support (ie how do i do X in blender, what do you guys think of Y, I have I great idea etc are all not appropriate on the tracker and will be closed near instantly by the moderators) if you are looking for a community like that, a place like blenderartists is probably what you want.
Joining a project means being able to commit code directly, and generally being part of the team that makes decisions about the project. So formally joining the project on developer.blender.org only happens when contributors are more experienced in Blender development, but they can already be part of the project before that by participating in discussions and contributing code.
Okay… part of the problem, is the project pages don’t have actions pertaining to the projects. I found (eventually) that clicking “Maniphest” and from that page “Show all projects” and finding said project, begins to get you to a place where you can interact with a project. I guess I should expect software as un-user-friendly as Blender to have an equally backward/non-obvious website design
P.S. I thought I had a problem to share, that has since evaporated… however I’ve long wanted to try to improve Blender’s relationship with COLLADA (and have tried before in years past) and that is why I wanted to join the membership if possible. Thank you. Unfortunately COLLADA is not so simple.
When you say ‘interact’ with a project what does that mean?
Normal UI design is if you are on a thing’s homepage you can interact with said thing. E.g. on a project page there should be buttons for submitting bugs, etc. exhaustively for every single interaction that is relevant to a given project.
Probably this website needs more relevant links to how-to documents in more places, and someone should consider that users drop into websites anywhere, and any page oriented to a particular subject (a project) is a de facto front door.
Never mind It’s inconvenient to navigate three pages to submit a bug to a project. Points for being different… just like Blender
