Sorting through and cataloging the Paper Cuts thread

On the first of July, after almost two years and 4000 entries, @pablovazquez closed the paper cuts thread.

In May of last year, he said “it will take a while to go through them” and I am just wondering if that has happened yet and if so, where can we see a list of action items that has generated?

If it hasn’t happened yet, could someone please point out the task for the cataloging of the thread, and if it has been assigned to anyone?

to be honest, I don’t think Pablo or someone else went through all of these posts yet. This task requires an additional moderator who sorts these proposals and coordinate everything so it can become an actual task on Phabricator. This papercut beast needs to be tamed somehow.

Some of the paper-cuts can be found in the User Interface workboard.

Not all 4000 though, as you can imagine going through all entries spread over 2 years is quite an ordeal and not very efficient. Since some of the paper-cuts are either already tackled or no longer valid because that area has changed.

The new way of organizing by thread is better because discussion is more contained and can either become a proposal on RightClickSelect, or a contributed patch by the community in d.b.o, or finally a design task in the UI workboard.

2 Likes

Thank you for replying, but here’s the heart of what I’m trying to get down to:

Are you then saying that much of the user feedback left there for the last 2 years was, effectively a waste, and will not be taken into account?

If only there was some public, well managed place to put these on. I can’t imagine much worse way to tackle this than the RightClickSelect. That website is, and always was a poorly managed dumpster fire.

It is laid out in visually very confusing way, with the voting system being so clumsy the good ideas get immediately buried under the high quantity of low quality ones. And worse yet, when sorting ideas by top, most of the first places are occupied by ideas that are already in development or implemented, because whoever manages the site doesn’t do their damn job of removing them.

As a cherry on top, the filter system has been implemented to solve that, but it has actually made things much worse, as it’s completely useless. For example there is simply no way to sort ideas by top but filter out those that are not done, in development or rejected. You can only filter one category at a time - inclusively. What kind of craziness is this?

No wonder bug tracker is getting polluted with feature requests and the feature threads here are blowing up to such a big proportions if the only alternative we have is so incredibly bad.

I really wish we’d get some proper UserVoice like feedback system so the good ideas don’t get flushed down the dump that the RightClickSelect is :frowning: It’s the place where Blender ideas go to die.

3 Likes

I said “Some” because not all the paper-cuts have been added to the workboard.

Are you then saying that much of the user feedback left there for the last 2 years was, effectively a waste, and will not be taken into account?

Of course not, but I hope you agree that not all 4000 entries are valid paper-cuts.

Paper-cuts are defined as small, easy-to-fix issues to make Blender more polished. Among those 4000 entries, there are:

  • Already addressed paper-cuts.
  • Comments/discussion about other paper-cuts.
  • Issues bigger than a paper-cut, e.g. drag & drop of tabs . Sounds like a small paper-cut, in reality it’s a complex feature that takes a lot of development time to make it work across Blender.

That being said, in those 4000 entries there are also really good examples! Some were tackled (I even fixed a few – typos and theme issues), but some just got lost in all the noise.

The paper-cuts thread was open in 2018 while 2.8 was being developed, many things have changed since then, and this platform (discourse) is terrible for long discussion threads as replies and new comments get mixed up.

I invite everyone that posted paper-cuts to revisit their comments in that thread and make it into new threads here so they get a second life and be better discussed with the community. Because it’s not only developers that probably missed them but also other community members that can help iron out those ideas.

6 Likes

Thank you for the clarification!

(Just to add a personal comment, with the Blender developer fund increasing by several orders of magnitude, I perhaps expected more of these kinds of user feedback documentation tasks, which I agree are great and tedious and currently still very spread out, to be allocated actual paid Blender staff time, through an organized centralized process, instead of community work which tends to seldom rise above the quality of that thread…)

1 Like