This is a dedicated place for Blender module teams to reach out to contributors - development questions are welcome.
For feature requests, please use rightclickselect.com. For questions about how to use Blender, ask on one of the community forums.
I removed this as a banner and instead set it as a global notice. This way this can not be dismissed, making it more clear for now that feature requests are not to be posted here.
(Admin > Settings > global_notice):
This is a dedicated place for Blender <a href="https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Modules">module teams</a> to reach out to contributors - development questions are welcome.<br /> For feature requests, please use <a href="https://rightclickselect.com">rightclickselect.com</a>. For questions about how to use Blender, ask on one of the <a href="https://www.blender.org/community/">community forums</a>.
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Hello @dfelinto, suggestion to make it even shorter and clearer:
Devtalk is a dedicated forum for development of Blender. If you need help using Blender, please go to one of the community forums. For feature requests, please use instead rightclickselect.com.
Reasonings:
- The shorter the better. More people will read it.
- “Blender module teams” may not register to many people outside Blender development. If people don’t understand it, they may just ignore it, or even stop reading right there because of the cognitive burden. Development is a thing which is understood by much larger audience.
- “Development questions welcome” might be misunderstood as “we welcome any question if it’s positive in some way, even if it’s not related to programming of Blender”.
- “… place for Blender module teams to reach out to contributors” can imply that only one-way questions are preferred (devs ask stuff from contributors, vice versa is not wanted?).
BR,
Tuomo
I am also a bit confused by the wording. It is saying this is a place for one specific group of people “to reach out to” a different group of people. The first group is given a description - “module teams” - that is fairly obscure. Most people don’t work in “modules”.
But of course you can follow that link to see who those people are, which settles the first group. But then who are “contributors”? Everyone on the Modules page sound like “contributors” to me. So these are people who contribute to Blender but are not on the Module list? Do you mean “potential contributors” or just everyone else?
The communication is spelled out to be one way, from module teams to this other group. But is it not a two-way communication? Can contributors who are not on the Modules list start threads?
I was leaning towards
“This is a dedicated place for new and current Blender developers to collaborate. For Bug reports please use the Bug tracker. For feature requests, ideas and suggestions, please use rightclickselect.com. For questions on using Blender, scripting or writing addons, please use one of the community forums.”
- fixes the ambiguity of module teams
- Mentions core development, so people know it’s not python/addon development.
- State the purpose for the site is for developers to collaborate
- Uses mostly non confrontational language, “for X goto Y, for A use B instead” as @tkeskita suggest feels somewhat bossy/unwelcoming.
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After some additional reflection I’m still unsure about “development questions are welcome” seems rather ambiguous, what are we going for there anyhow?
New developers can ask questions regarding things they are unsure of/stuck with?
or
end-users can ask “hey what is going on with [insert favorite feature here] development?”
Thats exactly the the point, overall I find LazyDodos formulation the best yet. But with the given formulation I find albeit the sensitivity of its wording it still delivers a strange message by itself.
To me this is the ONLY public forum where core developers could be explicitly TRIED to be contacted for what any commercial software calls support.
You now have a place for feature requests. (rightclickselect)
You have a place for bugs ( developer.blender.org)
You now have a place for internal core development discussions ( devtalk)
You now have a place for the community discussing among themselves. (eg blenderartists or stackexchange)
But where does eg. a professional addon developer debate API related problems that are neither feature requests nor bugs? A professional software should generally also take responsibility for what it offers. You have a community and a part drives their business with your software. I heard Ton say at blender conference that the community is the most important thing for blender, so to me whatever lies as a consequence behind this step should also be in line with that.
Beside that I think this forum not just needs a better intro message, but also a restructuring at its toplevel headers. Things like “Core Development” “Addon Development” “Get In Contact” should be there to guide people. If you dont want users to post in core blender development subforums, dont hide their areas.
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The original intent for devtalk (which afaik still stands) was devtalk being an onboarding site for new external developers so they have a place to ask questions regarding our c/c++ codebase, not as much an internal only discussion site. Things may not look like that anymore with all the additional forums that have spawned up, but onboarding external devs was the original intent.
Ok. thanks for the clarification, I didnt know that, the new formulation should really be clearer about that. And to me there shouldn’t be a big differentiation between supporters in form of addondevelopers and cpp developers. Sure do both not belong into the same topic, but as both are supporting blenders codebase I find this forum suiting quite well, but I tried to say that already in the last post.
I can only guess on why that differentiation has been made and while the two may seem similar different mechanics may be at play here
[Disclaimer, below is pure speculation on my side, this is not the stance of the blender project as a whole or even fact. tl;dr; I’m totally guessing at stuff]
-
there is only limited resources available to answer questions, there is quite a disparity between the two groups we may have enough resources to answer the C/C++ based questions, if you look at python section on blender artists for instance there is no way we could keep up with that. The community already does a good job there, why try to syphon off questions from BA we don’t have time to reply to anyhow.
-
Unless people fork blender there is really no easy way to distribute C/C++ based modifications to blender, so developers are more likely to contribute back when they solve an issue. While on the python side, you help someone out with a python based question, and there the user has the option to either contribute back the addon they just made, publish the addon on their github, or perhaps sell it on gumroad. (both sides have the option with the user does nothing with the information they just learned so lets ignore that for now) the return on time invested appears to be better on the C/C++ side of things.
So for those reasons I assume that differentiation has been made, that being said, I do tend to be wrong, and usually not a little 
I totally understand the argument of limited resources and I also don’t want to derail this discussion, most of eg python related question can and should definitely be discussed elsewhere and fact is that in most cases the community is doing that already. Its just that these questions you brought leave a hole I tried to describe in my first reply.
I think I understand your standpoint but I find the return on time invested evaluation can be seen differenly. Blender is open source, addons in almost all cases have to be open source too and even developers with commercial plugins have an interest to support the base they are developing for. And the majority is free and quite a lot people are helpful and strengthen blenders position that way. I can’t really see a difference between a paid developer working at the cpp part of blender, an developer paid by an external company to work at blender and a developer earning money with a finally open source addon. Professional grade plugins take time. Thats hard to shift without any payment, development has, as any work, opportunity costs. That shall not downplay voluntary participation in any form. Thats a great achievement of blenders community. But in the end there is no real difference between blenders core cpp code and plugins, in that it strengthen blenders value. More people get attracted, funds rise, blenders opensource code-mass grews, blender gets more versatile, and so on, this is all dependent. It also increases the pool of people who could get interested in cpp code contribution. And addons are an important part of a dcc because its simply impossible that any addon could be part of the core instead. Addons offer variability that blender could not combine in itself and still be managable.
I think you get my point.
So next to the cpp centric idea, a good decision regarding your question above for me would be one that does not try to expand this forum usage to cases that are already well handled outside. But is one offers “support” for those non cpp cases who cannot be handled elsewhere equally well. So strictly cutting off addon/python questions or even user questions is not the way to go. It should instead be clearly communicated that for the time reasons you gave there is just subset of cases/questions that can be accepted/anwererd here for AddonDevopment and also Usage questions, and that will be most likely those where its obvious or makes sense that a dev should/ just can comment on that well.
Adding the bug report link would help reduce posts from users about crashes and other issues, and stimulate bug report submissions.
Typo: " please use one of the community forums"
[edit…]
I like this language much better than what is currently in the blue box, the prose fragments sandwiching the hyphen do not connect and give me whiplash. My $0.02 USD.
Hola!
@dfelinto and I were having a discussion on the use of the site banner in our studio chat that we decided to continue here.
My concern with this approach is that I use the site banner to announce upgrades and other important messages to the users. Now, this obvious stand out alert, is being repurposed for a general 24x7x365 message that users are going to mentally train to ignore, and potentially miss upgrade notifications and similar urgent messages. Basically, we are using the alarm system to play the radio station.
My original thought was to advise to use pinned topics, but I see now that this approach has failed to help keep things on topic, in the context of the purpose of this site.
I did a quick check for other settings, and found there is also a “site description” and “short site description”. While we already have “site description” site, it unfortunately is only meta html tags (see the HTML source).
It would be nice to not have to dual purpose these messages, or at least break them apart into general and urgent message, but perhaps there is a way we can get that text placed into the banner instead?
How about a full width header image with the introduction text on it, linking to a page with all links needed. Its not going to change often.
I don’t feel that an image is a good choice here.
Its not that uncommon, I meant somehow like this:
I like that it is customizable, although I am not an HTML person. Perhaps @pablovazquez would be better to discuss such matters.
The main reason I don’t feel that images work well here is that there are multiple links, and you would be either forced to have a single URL anchor associated with an image, or have multiple images.
That said, being able to have full control over the HTML/CSS without uploading or modifying anything on the server probably makes all of the image chat moot?
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